GT World Challenge. 2026 season

Origin

GT World Challenge Europe descends from the BPR Global GT Series, launched at Paul Ricard on 6 March 1994 with a 38-car field by Jürgen Barth, Patrick Peter, and Stéphane Ratel — their initials forming the name — to fill the void left by the World Sportscar Championship's collapse two years earlier.¹² Ratel founded the Stéphane Ratel Organisation in London in 1995, and when the Porsche 911 GT1 — a competition car homologated for the road rather than derived from it — split the three partners at the end of 1996, he carried the series forward alone as promoter of the new FIA GT Championship from 1997, briefly in partnership with Bernie Ecclestone, drawing works entries from Mercedes-Benz, McLaren, and Porsche.¹³ Ratel's own view is that everything since — BPR, FIA GT, Blancpain GT, GT World Challenge — is one continuous championship dating from 1994.²

Turning points

The GT1 lesson

The FIA GT Championship's opening era demonstrated the failure mode that has shaped SRO policy ever since: purpose-built works GT1 cars escalated until Mercedes' CLK GTR programme had driven every rival out, and the class was abandoned after 1998 with the championship rebuilt on production-based GT2 machinery.³⁴ A second works-GT1 experiment, the FIA GT1 World Championship of 2010–2012, lasted three seasons.⁵ The durable answer was the GT3 category SRO devised in 2006 — performance-balanced customer cars sold by manufacturers to private teams, with costs controlled by a Balance of Performance rather than an engineering arms race — which became the global standard for GT racing.⁴³

The Blancpain era

In 2011 Ratel launched the Blancpain Endurance Series for GT3 cars, built around the Spa 24 Hours — the Ardennes classic first run in 1924 — as its centrepiece.⁵⁶ The sprint side, descended from the FIA GT Series, became the Blancpain Sprint Series in 2014, and from 2016 the two ran as the Endurance Cup and Sprint Cup of a unified Blancpain GT Series, with an overall title for crews contesting both.⁵⁶

The World Challenge rebrand

On 25 May 2018 SRO acquired the promotional rights to America's GT World Challenge, and adopted that name across its continental series — America, Asia, Europe — from 2019.⁶ With Blancpain's sponsorship ending, the European championship became GT World Challenge Europe in 2020, presented by AWS, with Fanatec as title partner from 2021 to 2024.⁶ The structure has been stable since: Sprint and Endurance Cups, an overall championship across both, and the Spa 24 Hours as the season's anchor — supported by SRO's parallel GT2, GT4, and national platforms.⁶⁴

Today's shape

Kelvin van der Linde and Charles Weerts took the 2025 overall and Sprint Cup titles in Team WRT's BMW M4 GT3 — the first overall champions for BMW — sealing it from 31st on the grid in the Barcelona finale, while the Endurance Cup went to Rutronik Racing's Patric Niederhauser, Sven Müller, and Alessio Picariello by a single point, a first endurance crown for Porsche.⁷ The 78th Spa 24 Hours produced Lamborghini's maiden win — Mirko Bortolotti, Jordan Pepper, and Luca Engstler for Grasser Racing — making it six different winning brands in six years.⁸ The 2026 season runs ten rounds: a 15-race Sprint Cup of paired one-hour races and a four-round Endurance Cup from the Paul Ricard 6 Hours to the Portimão finale, with the Spa 24 Hours on 24–28 June; the entry exceeds 40 cars from eight manufacturers.⁹ Valentino Rossi returned full-time after leaving the WEC, sharing BMW machinery with Dan Harper and Max Hesse, and Mercedes-AMG's Maro Engel and Lucas Auer lead the early drivers' standings for Winward Racing.¹⁰⁹

Footnotes

1. Wikipedia, "BPR Global GT Series," accessed 11 June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPR_Global_GT_Series. ↩ ↩²

2. GT World Challenge Europe, "BPR turns 30: assessing the global GT series' significance three decades on," accessed 11 June 2026, https://www.gt-world-challenge-europe.com/news/2746/bpr-turns-30-assessing-the-global-gt-series-significance-three-decades-on. ↩ ↩²

3. Stuttcars, "25 Years of GT Racing: Stéphane Ratel and SRO Motorsports," accessed 11 June 2026, https://www.stuttcars.com/25-years-of-gt-racing-stephane-ratel-and-sro-motorsports/. ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. GT Report, "Explainer: What are GT1, GT2, GT3 and GT4?," accessed 11 June 2026, https://www.gt-report.com/2025/05/11/explainer-what-are-gt1-gt2-gt3-and-gt4/. ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. GT World Challenge Europe, "The history behind Blancpain GT World Challenge Europe," accessed 11 June 2026, https://www.gt-world-challenge-europe.com/news/1535/the-history-behind-blancpain-gt-world-challenge-europe. ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. Wikipedia, "GT World Challenge Europe," accessed 11 June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GT_World_Challenge_Europe. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

7. BMW Group PressClub, "GT World Challenge Europe: Kelvin van der Linde and Charles Weerts crowned 2025 Champions," accessed 11 June 2026, https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/global/article/detail/T0453273EN/gt-world-challenge-europe:-kelvin-van-der-linde-and-charles-weerts-crowned-2025-champions?language=en; GT World Challenge Europe, "Champions 2025," accessed 11 June 2026, https://www.gt-world-challenge-europe.com/champions. ↩

8. CrowdStrike 24 Hours of Spa, "Lamborghini joins the immortals as Grasser Racing storms to sensational CrowdStrike 24 Hours of Spa victory," accessed 11 June 2026, https://www.crowdstrike24hoursofspa.com/news/3043/lamborghini-joins-the-immortals-as-grasser-racing-storms-to-sensational-crowdstrike-24-hours-of-spa-victory; Sportscar365, "Grasser Delivers Maiden 24H Spa Win for Lamborghini," accessed 11 June 2026, https://sportscar365.com/sro/world-challenge-europe/grasser-delivers-maiden-24h-spa-win-for-lamborghini/. ↩

9. Wikipedia, "2026 GT World Challenge Europe," accessed 11 June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_GT_World_Challenge_Europe. ↩ ↩²

10. AutoHebdo, "Valentino Rossi returns to the GT World Challenge after leaving the WEC," accessed 11 June 2026, https://www.autohebdof1.com/news/gt-tourism/gt-world-challenge/Valentino-Rossi-returns-to-the-GT-World-Challenge-after-leaving-the-WEC.html. ↩