Great races. Well done Ratel. On the other hand, they really should take a new look on the balancing part. The (Matech) Ford is too far ahead, the Nissan too far behind. And I don’t see the Lamborghini’s fighting for victorys this year if the balancing part is not reconsidered.

I watched the race on GT1world.com and I must say congratulations to SRO for a really spectator-friendly concept. Exciting races with a lot of fights and overtaking and with great driver performances, especially from Grosjean and Zuber coming from F1 and GP2 right to the top of GT1. Agree with Thomas that the “balance of performance” seems to be not 100% perfect, but I guess that will vary from circuit to circuit – at least I hope so especially for Karl Wendlinger and the other Nissan guys…

Guys, don’t worry. Last season the FIA GT-bureau revised the “balancing part” after the first race… Indeed, even now already, it was a great show with a lot of overtaking. PS : Natacha, get well soon ( what a crash !!!! ).

Indeed well done to Mr Ratel. For putting it all together. The best thing is it’s accessible anywhere from the online broadcast. Not just live, but you can always re-watch the entire thing, or most of it after the live broadcast.

As far as balancing, SRO had Danny Watts, Anthony Davidson, christophe bouchut and Heinz-Harald Frentzen drive all the cars so they could use the lap times to establish the performance balancing.

Maybe all those drivers were excited to be driving the Nissan and drove it very hard. That would make the Nissan look very fast to the FIA and they would slap a choking restrictor on it.

Or maybe the Nissan was just faster on a clear track. Being a pretty big car compared to the others it just might not be that good at making it’s way in traffic.

Too bad they didn’t take any Saleen teams. It’s ironic that the rules only allow for 6 manufacturers. When clearly that would leave someone out.

If Nissan and Ford never got involved that would include all the GT1 names but since those 2 are now in, they should tweak the rules to allow 7 manufacturers.

Now that leaves Atlas FX and Larbre competition playing by themselves in the LMS.

Yeah im sure they will allow Saleen to join next year.
Im trying to think of more manufactors who would join GT1 but can’t think of any.

By the way im gonna try making a music video/tribute to the first GT1 Cup race. Im gonna use a hypercam as a test to see if it turns out good and if i get good feedback ill end up doing more high quality videos and doing it with all the races.

I guess if they allowed teams to enter Ferrari 550/575′s that could be a extra 4 cars… gotta remember each manufactor has to have 4 cars mainly 2 cars per team.

Actually i just looked up and jeez i totally didn’t noticed they stopped making 550′s and 575′s i guess they have a new Ferrari 599 out and damn that car looks sexy. I would DEFINATLY want to see that in GT1.

No wonder why we haven’t seen Ferrari as often in GT1 anymore. I wonder if the new 599 is too expensive for teams to turn into a race car… it shouldn’t be.

550 and 575 are dinosaurs in GT1 now. No one is making parts for them.

And ferrari isn’t allowing the 599 to be raced under its name. And they won’t because they have the Maserati MC12 cleaning up the competition pretty good. Ferrari owns maserati.

Even when privateers build a car they still have to get permission from the manufacturer to use the car’s name since those are trademarked.

Haha i wouldn’t call them total ‘dinosaurs’ there was a 550 in a Le Man race just last year, but have yet to see one this year.

Yeah but seeing how they let Maserati keep its name i would think they allow other teams use their cars if they wanted to.

Hell imagine if you owned Ferrari, and someone wanted to race the 599 in Le Man series or some other form of GT1.. seeing you have no plans of your own to race that car, why not let others?

550 and 575 are dinosaurs in GT1 now. No one is making parts for them.

And ferrari isn’t allowing the 599 to be raced under its name. And they won’t because they have the Maserati MC12 cleaning up the competition pretty good. Ferrari owns maserati.

Even when privateers build a car they still have to get permission from the manufacturer to use the car’s name since those are trademarked.

The Vitaphone team is not a privateer team. It’s a full factory backed unit, under the guise of a privateer team. Andrea Bertolini and Michael Schumacher did the shake down tests during its conception.

But with the connects Ferrari has in the FIA…you know how that goes.

The initial plan was to take on Corvette in the ALMS. So their budget could be close to something the GT1 compuware Corvettes had. BIG.

If they allow a ferrari in GT1 they would risk racing themselves. You don’t want to promote one brand at the cost of another. Brand Cannibalism

It too early to make “adjustments” per se. Don’t jump to conclusions.

1)Matech spent all of last year with this car and made updates over the off-season

2) Those with “grandfathered” cars had no idea what changes would be made until after last season, which meant NO TESTING with the changes.

3) Only previous GP2 drivers had experience on that track and look who was quickest – Zuber and Grojean, both ex-GP2 drivers.

4) The Ford was a touch quicker on the straights and maybe the MC12 was padded down a bit too much. But looking at lap times Zuber was very fast in the padded down Corvette.

5) The Nissans might not have matched up well on this track, again too early to make knee jerk adjustments.

6) Please stop with the “Ford GT” is out of production, do you know how many Ford GT40 are being built from kits? Besides modernization and being designed for wider range of people, the Ford GT is the modern version of the original race car. Nobody is making the 575 anymore or the 550, it was already not among the quickest cars anymore despite the pace shown and how much “balance” adjusting do you wanna do to make your favorite car competitive with newer hardware?

Otherwise the championship is off to great start and I’m glad I can actually watch it on American TV LIVE without waiting for the off season (which I don’t, can you say TORRENTS?) for Speed to show it months after it happen, stupid.

Without going on a Speed rant, they should really consider calling it the “NASCAR” Channel and just put the rest of us out of our misery so we can demand Versus or another channel pick up the slack…

Oh and it was obvious if you watched last season that development of the Matech/Marc VDS Ford GT’s where ahead of the Nissans since Gigawave did a limited schedule and the car was finally competitive at Zolder only to have brake problems.

As I said its too early to make “adjustments” you shouldn’t make any moves until the Le Mans break IMHO, more than half the season is left to run at that point.