The ragbag of GT cars that took to the Circuit Paul Ricard for a couple of hastily-organised races in August 1993 hardly captured the world’s imagination. Autosport made no mention of it in its pages, and for good reason. The grid lacked quantity and quality, and there were no star-name drivers. No one could have predicted that it would be the start of something big. So big that its legacy stretches all the way to the present day.
The event ended up acting as a pilot for what the motorsport world generally refers to as the BPR series. GT racing was reborn with the BPR Organisation’s run of non-championship GT races in ’94, which then morphed into the Global Endurance GT Series for ’95. International sportscar racing in Europe, the Le Mans 24 Hours included, was hauled out of the mire in double-quick time.
The driving force behind the race at Ricard 30 years ago was Stephane Ratel, the ‘R’ of the BPR whose eponymous SRO Organisation today runs 15 series around the world and puts on 50-plus race weekends annually.
“A very important little race,” is how Ratel describes the Ricard event today. “I don’t think the BPR would have started without it. Everything I do today can be traced back to that weekend at Le Castellet. It was the beginning of everything.”
Ratel had taken his first steps in motorsport with the organisation of the one-make Venturi Trophy from 1992 and inevitably had his drivers asking if they could take their cars to Le Mans, which the following year would open its doors to GT machinery as Group C went through its final death throes. His response was to commission Venturi, a manufacturer of which he was nominally competitions boss, to build the 500LM GT1 car so they could live out their dreams. Post-Le Mans, they then wanted somewhere else to race their latest acquisitions.
“These guys had their Trophy cars, but they enjoyed driving their 500LMs more,” recalls Ratel. “They were asking me, ‘what are we going to do with them now?’. Then I had a kind of eureka moment walking down the stairs from my office in Paris.”
Source: Autosport