Customer Service

When it left LMP1 it didn’t mean the end of sportscar racing for Audi and its customer racing programme has thrived. The arrival of the R8 LMS GT4 should mean even more sales success.

There is an old saying among manufacturers involved in motor racing; a factory programme spends money, customer racing makes it. With the end of the R18 Le Mans programme, Audi was left with DTM and now Formula E, and its customer racing programme, which has expanded rapidly in the past two years.

The rise of the TCR series around the world, for low-cost touring cars, has made the racing department more aligned with a production car environment, and it now delivers five cars a week to customers. GT3 is less intense, but no less profitable. And now Audi has entered the GT4 market, and can expect to see a further jump in the number of racecars it delivers with the Audi R8 LMS GT4 going on sale in October.

GT4, like TCR, is heavily focussed on customer racing and takes on the original philosophy of GT3 back in 2005. The premise for the original GT3 was to take cup class cars, from Maserati Trofeo and Porsche Carrera Cup, and introduce them into multi-class racing, all balanced by the SRO’s then newly-introduced balance of performance system. It was the first series that was built primarily on the BoP, and the manufacturers flocked to it with more than 50 cars on the grid for the first race in 2006.

Cost effective

Since then, GT3 has become more professional, the cars more expensive to buy and now, such is the competition, they have also become more expensive to run. With the latest evolution of cars, the aero has become a dominant factor that has put the racecar more into the realm of the professional driver than the customer, opening up an opportunity for GT4.

GT4 has actually been in existence for almost 10 years. The low-cost formula has proven to be popular among series that are looking for cars to run, teams that want cost effective racing, and for the gentleman drivers who want to compete for a title, and enjoy their racing.