As a part of the first FIA GT1 World Championship race, there was also held a double header of the European Championship for GT3 cars during the Brno race weekend. Traditionally, the first race was run on Saturday, the second one on Sunday. The Saturday's race was held right after the terrible Lamborghini accident, so the grid photos still shows how the track was dirty and the pit wall was corourful - not only from the Lamborghini but there was also similar accident with much less damage during the morning's Porsche Carrera Cup event.
The first race was started behind the safety car as the track was still very wet after the heavy rain, which preceeded this race. In fact some cars were on slicks but soon they realized it is too wet to take an advantage of this. All this situation made the race rather untransparent very early so it was difficult to trace the car positions much earlier than the mandatory pit stop series even started. That all confusion was multiplied by really large number of stop-and-go or run-through penalisations that a common spectator could only understand that there are three Corvettes at the front but the rest was completely mixed up.
Our general feeling was that the rules are too restrictive and very hard to follow in all details. In fact many of the penalties were applied as a result of previous tyre change pit stops which caused a lot of pit stop violations. Then there were another violations during the mandatory driver change pit stops. One man on a grand stand even commented: it is like if they draw lots to call the cars in to make the race more unpredictable and chaotic.
On the other hand the second race looked more like a single class sprint, which it in fact was. It was a nice weather, no tyre changes, no safety cars and fortunatelly only occasional penalties made the race much friendlier to watch and follow. This time it was again about Corvettes at the top but they were well supported by the quicker of the two Lamborghinis and a lone BMW Alpina B6, which provided a nice battle. In the finish it was Corvette-Lamborghini-Corvette-BMW Alpina
Audis which should have been among the favourites under standard circumstances did not feature here at Brno. They were by far the most numerous car type in the field but two of them were eliminated already on Friday in a huge accident on the second straight following the finish line. By the way the pattern which championship creator Ratel was pushing at the beginning - strictly 6 cars of each type represented by two teams - was fortunately scrapped into the history, at least based on looking at the entry list: There were no less than eight Audis, following by Porsches with six cars. No other make reached those 'mandatory' numbers and only Corvettes were closed to them with five cars. Then we had here two Aston Martins, Ferraris, Lamborghinis and new BMW Z4s.
The rest car types were represented only by a single entry: a very fast BMW Alpina B6, a new version of Ford Mustang and also a Ford GT. In fact there were two Fords GT in the pits, numbers 14 and 15, but the latter was never entered or used in the meeting. It was here just a spare car. It became also a common practice in the early days of GT3 championship that the teams with required cars entered took with them more cars than they actually were to race only to satisfy the rules. Something not uncommon in the late days of Group C racing when the team were forced to enter all their cars in all races.Some of the notable GT3 cars from the past disappeared completely this year. For example there was no Morgan, no Ascari or no Dodge Viper.
In our unofficial overall results based on completed laps and race time in both race counted together, all four Corvette that saw the finish line both days were placed among top six separated only by the Lamborghini in third and one of Aston Martins on fifth position. For more detailed results please check our results or photo gallery pages.
