The British GT Championship looks set for another exciting addition to the grid, with Richmond Racing unveiling the Ginetta G20 GTR it will campaign in the GT3 category in 2006.
The car, which is based on the Ginetta G20 and will be driven by Nick Marsh and Richard Hollebon, was launched last week at Castle Combe and
Crash.net took the chance to speak to Marsh and find out more...
Crash.net:
Nick, I wonder if you can bring us up to speed on what your plans are at the moment and where your programme currently stands.
Nick Marsh:
We've launched the brand new GT challenger from Ginetta. They haven't been in GT racing for something like 30 years but they have been very successful in building up the Ginetta G20 programme, which over the last three years has built up to around 40 odd cars running around UK circuits in a competitive programme supporting the F3 and GT racing.
Richmond Racing and Ginetta got together at the beginning of this year to commission a new GT car - the G20 GTR - so we have been building that over many late hours and long days and it was finally finished and launched at Castle Combe last Thursday.
Crash.net:
So was the plan always to make the step up to GT racing with a Ginetta?
Nick Marsh:
Yeah it has. We did look at a variety of other cars during the back end of last year but Richmond Racing has a long track record of success with Ginetta and, while we did look at cars from Porsche and TVR, we felt it would be an exciting opportunity to help design and build a new GT car with a marque that hasn't been in the series for a long time. It has a lot of heritage as Ginetta has been around since the late 50s so it seemed like an exiting opportunity to come together and make it happen.
The car is a Ginetta, it's a three litre V6 running with about 810 kilos of weight overall so it has a very good power to weight ratio. We think the car will at about 260 horsepower, something of that nature, and we are expecting performance - dependent on gearing - of about 160-170mph and 0-60 in around 3-3.7 seconds.
We are currently putting together our test programme, the rest of 2005 will be a very hard test year. I think it's unlikely that we will run any races with the car this year and instead just try to hone it. We ran a few laps on Thursday and to be honest it was quick straight out of the box. There are always going to be teething problems with a new car in terms of trying to get the small components just right but we think we are pretty there to be honest.
Crash.net:
So were those laps on Thursday the first time the car had actually run on track?
Nick Marsh:
It was, yes. We did three or four laps and before that the car hadn't rolled more than 50 yards! The engine had been running on both a rolling road and a test bed for in excess of seven hours in a single stretch before that so we are pretty happy with the engine. We are very happy with the chassis, which is built on the Ginetta G20 chassis and then developed, so we think it is a very impressive package.
Crash.net:
