The FIA GT1 World Championship logo
|
|
Category | Grand tourer |
---|---|
Country | International |
Inaugural season | 2010 |
Folded | 2012 |
Drivers | Appr. 40 |
Teams | 9 |
Tyre suppliers | Michelin, Pirelli |
Last Drivers' champion |
Marc Basseng Markus Winkelhock |
Last Teams' champion | All-Inkl.com Münnich Motorsport |
Official website | www.gt1world.com |
The FIA GT1 World Championship was a world championship sports car racing series developed by the SRO Group and regulated by the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), held from 2010 to 2012. It featured multiple grand tourer race cars based on production road cars and conforming with the GT1 (2010–2011) and GT3 (2012) regulations competing in one-hour races on multiple continents. All cars were performance balanced with weight and restrictor adjustments to artificially equalise their performance. Championships were awarded each season for drivers and teams.
The FIA GT1 World Championship started in 2010 as a successor to the FIA GT Championship which had featured the GT1 category as well as a GT2 category. In 2012 the series originally planned to move away from exclusive use of GT1 cars by allowing 2009-spec GT2 from the former FIA GT Championship as well as current performance balanced GT3 specification cars to compete alongside the series' current GT1 cars. However, as there were no interested GT2 teams and only a handful of former GT1 runners were willing to participate, the SRO decided that the 2012 season would be contested with GT3-spec cars only (yet retaining GT1 in the series' title). The series folded after the 2012 season due to the high costs, shrinking car counts and issues with the calendar, and morphed into the FIA GT Series for 2013.
The FIA GT1 World Championship held races in ten countries, with each event consisting of two races over a weekend. Qualifying involved a knock-out system similar to Formula One, in which three sessions were held and following each session, the slowest cars were eliminated and their grid positions set. The first race of each weekend was a qualifying race, the results of which determined the starting grid for a second race awarding full championship points. Each car was required to change tires and drivers at least once during each race. The points system for the series was identical to that adopted by the FIA in 2010 with the top ten finishers in the second race earning points; only the top three finishers in the qualifying race earned points.