Rocking all over the world

For anyone wanting to race in GT4, the range of choices available is pretty daunting and that’s just deciding on the car. You can choose anything from a Toyota GT86 or Nissan 370Z all the way to something rather exotic like a McLaren 570S, and because of the Balance of Performance rules you should be competitive in any. BMW, Audi and Mercedes naturally have their own GT4 cars, as do Lotus, Porsche and Aston Martin. There are plenty of others from which to choose and more are joining all the time.

And you can race them literally all over the world, with IMSA in the USA, Blancpain in Asia and in the Australian GT Trophy in, er, Australia. In addition there are both the Northern and Southern European Cup series and, for long-distance lovers, the 24H series hosts twice around the clock events in Europe, the Middle East and America. You can do a season of VLN racing on the old Nürburgring if that takes your fancy, or stay at home and do British GT instead.

As for costs and for those wanting factory-developed cars, about £80,000 buys a Ginetta G55 (which races under a waiver because it has no road-going derivative), costs escalating up to about £175,000 before tax for an AMG GT4. Costs for a season vary immensely. If you ran a limited domestic programme in a car you owned yourself, you could probably have a very good season for £100,000, so long as no one binned it. At the other end of the scale, if you’d like to rent an AMG GT4 for a season of racing in Europe, Mercedes reckons you should set aside about £250,000 for a comprehensive package including insurance.