GT2 Category to Debut in Barcelona Sports Club Round

The first multi-manufacturer race for the new GT2 category will take place within the Barcelona round of the Blancpain GT Sports Club later this year.

SRO Motorsports Group previously announced that the first race for the new platform would be a single-make contest for Porsche 911 GT2 RS Clubsport machinery held during the Total 24 Hours of Spa weekend in July.

A full debut has now been confirmed, with a GT2 class set to compete in the Blancpain GT Series Endurance Cup support series at Circuit de Catalunya on Sept. 28-29.

SRO founder and CEO Stephane Ratel told Sportscar365 that Barcelona will see the start of “different GT2s racing together”.

Ratel explained that Porsche put forward the idea of buying up the Spa support race slot to demonstrate its new car.

“As you see, we’ve made a lot of investments so we also need revenue,” Ratel told Sportscar365.

“The value of a support race slot at Spa is high. We wanted to do this thing with GT2. The first manufacturer we knew that would have cars ready was Porsche.

“When the time came to what we do the slot, either I was either taking the financial risk and saying, ‘OK we keep it for GT2 but we don’t know how many cars will get there.’

“Or we pass the burden to Porsche and say, ‘Would you underwrite it and pay for the track time?’ 

“The beginning of the conversation was that maybe they’d accept other cars but then they had so much success with their own, they decided to do it with only Porsches.

“We hope, in the context of Spa, we’ll have the Porsche demonstration race plus all the cars being presented from other manufacturers.”

Ratel has suggested that GT2 will continue to grow in the coming years, affirming that there will “absolutely” be five to six manufacturers competing within the first two full years of the category.

Porsche is so far the only manufacturer to have rolled out a car for the GT2 formula, which is currently aimed at amateur drivers.

The German manufacturer’s 700-horsepower 911 GT2 RS Clubsport turned its first public laps last month ahead of a customer program that is set to see 200 models produced.

John Dagys contributed to this report