South Africa’s newest Motorsport Series has unveiled its Prototype GTC V8 car to customers and the media. Called the Global Touring Car Africa Series, the continent’s newest motorsport series in nearly twenty years has unveiled its purpose-built Global Touring Car at the Zwartkops Raceway.
Created by the founders of the series to address the basic principles of GTC, it is an affordable, serious racing car and series. The Ford GTC design combines a strong tubular space frame chassis fitted with an advanced yet cost effective 380 kW V8 engine and a fast changing 6-speed transaxle sequential gearbox. The cars will also have an additional ‘push to pass’ feature that will add another 30 kW to the performance in qualifying and race conditions.
The GTC Prototype was designed and built in Australia by Paul Ceprnich of Pace Innovations, considered one of the world’s leading touring car design and production companies, having designed the 2013 cars for the Australian V8 Supercar series amongst others. The GTC is in fact based loosely on the concept of the Australian V8 Supercar series but in a more compact format.
The GTC V8 car has been specifically designed to accommodate numerous types of body designs by using the actual car body panels of individual motor manufacturers to meet the shape of any medium sized saloon car style. The benefit of this is that the common frame and running gear is maintained ensuring costs are kept to a minimum and performance between cars is maximised, but teams, drivers and motor manufacturers can decide on the body shell they would like to run.
It is intended that the cars will be built in South Africa, creating a small industry as the series is set to expand globally. GTC has received a lot of interest in the car, with at least six different teams involved in S.A. motorsport having already put their names down for two cars each. The GTC management had planned to start the inaugural GTC Africa 2014 season with 12 cars, but the demand looks like it has outstripped this and plans are underway to increase build capacity to satisfy that demand.
‘We are very excited that our GTC V8 car has been so well received. It has taken longer to finish and deliver to South Africa than anticipated, but we think the extra time and effort put into the build of the car has been worth the wait. GTC Africa is gaining momentum and we will have some further exciting announcements relating to the series to make when we launch the series next year. 2014 is going to be an exciting year for circuit racing in South Africa,’ concluded Gary Formato of GTC Africa.
