With dwindling interest in South African motorsport during the past few years, particularly in circuit racing, the new Global Touring Car (GTC) Africa Series hopes to revive the enthusiasm of sponsors and spectators. It’s not all theory though, because the series revealed its new GTC V8 prototype at Zwartkops Raceway on Wednesday November 27.
Built by Paul Cepmich of Australian firm Pace Innovations, one of the world’s leading touring car design and production companies, the GTC prototype boasts a tubular space frame, a 373 kW, 5,0-litre naturally aspirated, V8 engine, and a six-speed sequential transmission – as well as a “push to pass” system that will send a few additional horses to the rear wheels when overtaking opportunities arise.
Designed to accommodate different bodystyles, the GTC prototype (seen in the images above sporting a Ford Focus sedan shell) can be fitted with the body panels of any medium-sized saloon. Crucially, this will help keep the costs of the series down because the teams will all be using the same basic machine. But they will be able to choose which body to use.
“When looking at the current situation in South African motorsport, we quickly realised that we’re not running any top-line globally relevant circuit racing series. This is why we have so few South African’s competing internationally and also one of the reasons why our sport has not had the public support it should have in the past ten to fifteen years,” says GTC’s Gary Formato, himself a decorated circuit racer and South African champion.
“The GTC concept, is a global franchise where we have packaged our GTC car together with all the rules, regulations, and promoters so that interested parties in emerging motorsport markets can very easily own and run a globally relevant but affordable touring car series. This is a unique concept and one we hope gains acceptance internationally when we formally launch GTC globally at the end of 2013. But fundamentally this is a South African idea. So we wanted to launch the first GTC franchise in SA and also build the global supply of GTC cars in SA too, says GTC executive director Mark Woolley.
With the series due to start in the second half of 2014, six teams have already placed their orders for two cars each and the strong demand has meant that GTC has had to increase build capacity to meet the orders.
