Era Targeting Future ELMS Expansion With Ferrari GT3 Effort

Era Motorsport is targeting a future expansion into the European Le Mans Series with its Ferrari GT3 program, according to team owner Kyle Tilley.

The team, best known for its exploits in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship LMP2 class, will make its GT3 debut at this weekend’s Michelin 24H Dubai with its Ferrari 296 GT3.

The Middle Eastern enduro will form the opening race for a season-long Michelin 24H Series campaign built around Bronze-rated driver Dwight Merriman.

Merriman formed a key part of Era’s WeatherTech Championship effort for several years, winning the Rolex 24 at Daytona twice, but has instead pivoted across to a European effort for the 2025 campaign.

“Honestly, we knew at Daytona last year that 2024 was going to be Dwight’s last year in the LMP2,” Tilley told Sportscar365.

“So for me, it was a case that we knew it was going to be a European program. We didn’t know if it was going to be GT3 or LMP2 for Dwight.

“We suggested GT3 because to say the cars are easy to drive is not accurate, but they’re perhaps a bit more user-friendly than the LMP2.

“And with the time that he was able to devote to testing and training and things like that, the GT3 was much more of a better fit.

“We looked at ELMS, but I said to him, ‘No, maybe we should consider Creventic,’ just purely from the amount of seat time.”

Instead, a move into ELMS is on the table for the future according to Tilley, who explained that the GT3 program will be operated out of a UK base that previously served as the headquarters for Era’s historic racing division, with which the Brit himself frequently competes.

“There’s a fair bit of crossover [the between GT3 and LMP2 squads], particularly the engineering,” he said.

“But in terms of mechanics, they are different programs. Obviously we have our workshop in Indianapolis and we also have a workshop in the UK that we’ve had since 2021.

“Until now, that’s all been histories but that is where the Ferrari program will be based from. So there is a fair bit of crossover.

“There’s so much that you need to run a GT3 car or an LMP2 car that you need two of everything on two opposite sides of the world.”

When asked if Era could ever expand into GT racing the U.S., Tilley replied:

“It’s something that I’ve kicked around actually,” he said. “I love GT3 or GT racing in general and I think it’s fantastic.

“I grew up watching like the the Falken Porsche, and the Ferrari 430 and the Corvettes basically for a better description all fight each other for a race distance.

“Just that racing was really what got me hooked on sports car racing as a driver before it was a team aspiration. I never really wanted to do anything open wheel, it was always sports car racing.

“And yes, for me I would love to get a GT program running in the States so it really depends what customers want to do.

“If we have a customer that wanted to do it we would definitely do it.”