Remember GT racing in the 90’s? If you don’t, you should. The mid to late 90’s was arguably one of the best era’s of sports car racing that led to the creation of some the best sports cars ever created, even to this day. This was the period of limited production sports cars that had enough speed to go head to head with sports prototypes and in many cases win. These wins included Le Mans in 1995 and 1998 highlighting how quick and reliable these cars were. Here is a little history into these amazing GT cars.
In 1994 the BPR Global GT Series started and drew the attention of Ferrari with their F40 and McLaren with their F1 GTR. Porsche owned the lower GT2 segment of the series and felt comfortable owning that series, for the moment. When McLaren won Le Mans in 1995 Porsche felt the pressure to reassert themselves and set their engineers to the task of building a BPR Global GT series winner – the future GT1.
In 1997 the FIA decided to take over the series and rewrite the rules and rebrand the series GT1. The new rules brought in Mercedes with their CLK GTR, Toyota with their GT1, Nissan with their R390 and numerous smaller manufactures like Panoz with their GT1 batmobile and Lotus with their underfunded Elise. Ferrari and McLaren’s continued in the series but moved to being run by privateers .
The cars that highlighted this period were the Ferrari F40, McLaren F1 GTR, Porsche GT1, Mercedes CLK GTR and the Toyota GT1. Not all of these raced together at the same time but all represented and amazing stage of the period.
Revoslot has set out to create the most iconic cars of this period with the Ferrari F40, Toyota GT1 and the Porsche GT1. They also have the Mercedes CLK coming out in June and the McLaren F1 coming out by October. These five cars give the club an amazing selection of makes, models and liveries to run a series in 2022.
We have experience with running Revoslot cars as we have run two series within the past two years. The only real issue we’ve encountered is the durability of the rear tires. As of right now we are aware of two ways to deal with the quick wearing rear tires – one is replacing the rear axle and drive line with a 3/32 axle and the other is to replace the wheels with ones designed for the 3mm axle and a wider range of tires.
Replacing the rear axle also involves replacing the rear axle bushings, the axle, the wheels and the crown gear. The cost of this upgrade is around $40. The other option is to replace the rear wheels. Slot Car Corner has produced some CBD LMP wheels for 3mm axles that will allow the use of Slot It F30 tires, NSR Supergrips or even Paul Gage urethane tires. The cost for a pair of wheels is $13. At the moment CBD only produces an LMP version but I have talked with Slot Car Corner about producing a blank wheel that would accept the Revoslot wheel inserts. Let’s hope they will support us by producing these.
I believe these cars would make a great 2022 series and would support getting a couple of cars for the club to try out. Please reach out to me if you have any questions.