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"           Formula 1 is a fickle mistress. Love her as we may, she has spurned our advances. There hasn&amp;#039;t been a U.S. team in F1 since the &amp;#039;70s. And when&amp;#039;s the last time you saw a Yank on a Grand Prix podium? (That would be 1993, when Michael Andretti finished 3rd at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza in his final race for McLaren.) GT racing, on the other hand, is America&amp;#039;s sweetheart. All over Europe and the Middle East, U.S. cars are taking names and kicking tail in a variety of GT-based series.   In this year&amp;#039;s FIA GT3 European Championship, arguably the best of the foreign series, a Callaway Corvette won the season opener at Silverstone, beating , , BMW Alpina, , , and . And then in next two rounds, at Brno in the Czech Republic, Callaway Corvettes won both events, even sweeping the top three spots in the wet Saturday race. Meanwhile, in the Automobile Club de l&amp;#039;Ouestbacked Le Mans Series, Ford GT coupes powered by Roush-Yates engines finished 1-2-3 in the Spa 1000 Kilometers, just weeks after one of the Fords had won the opening round of the FIA GT1 World Championship in Abu Dhabi, where a Corvette finished 2nd.   Of the various series, FIA GT3 and the ADAC GT Masters, a German series backed by that country&amp;#039;s auto club, are the handiwork of the Stephane Ratel Organization. Because they share similar rules, there&amp;#039;s often a crossover of entries. Case in point: The Callaway Corvettes race in both contests. Based on the current Z06 road car, the are raceprepped in the Callaway facility in Leingarten, Germany, where craftsmen gut the interior, install the requisite rollcage (bolted in place because the cage is steel and the chassis is aluminum), fuel cell, safety equipment, air jacks and other gear, and then substitute the company&amp;#039;s unique carbon-fiber bodywork for the production Corvette&amp;#039;s. AP Racing brakes replace the stock discs, while meaty Michelin tires mounted on OZ center-lock wheels take the place of the original units.   Changes to the road car&amp;#039;s LS7 V-8 engine are modest and stress reliability over horsepower (at 520 bhp, the Callaway has plenty and has already been restricted for the sake of parity). Transmissions, on the other hand, are &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; in rules book jargon, so instead of the stock gearbox, the Callaway sports a Hewland sequential-shift 6-speed, which bolts to the production GM rear differential. By the way, if swapping transaxles seems like a stretch of the rules in a productioncar- based series, consider the dispensation given to Audi, whose purpose-built R8 LMS coupes have been converted to rear-wheel drive because awd isn&amp;#039;t allowed in GT3. The American connection in European GT racing is not just limited to hardware since two of the Audis are driven by Americans Zak Brown, Michael Guasch and Mark Patterson.   Despite the Callaway&amp;#039;s Chevy underpinnings, the car is no longer considered a Chevrolet by the sanctioning bodies and is homologated (approved for racing) as a Callaway Corvette Z06.R. &amp;quot;We wave the flag for Corvette in the FIA GT3 championship,&amp;quot; says company founder Reeves Callaway. In fact, in FIA GT1 and in the Le Mans Series, the half dozen or so Corvette C5-Rs and C6.Rs are hand-me-down factory cars fielded by privateers.   With GM and other manufacturers out of the picture, GT1 will likely be reconfigured in 2011. The no-holds-barred category, which stretched the meaning of &amp;quot;production-based,&amp;quot; was dominated by certain factory teams. This discouraged privateers and reduced the number of entries. To keep this from happening in GT3, the rules don&amp;#039;t allow factory teams and strive for car equality. Each car, of note, must be evaluated by an FIA-appointed test driver in a so-called &amp;quot;Balance of Performance&amp;quot; testing session conducted at Circuit Paul Ricard, an extensively instrumented racetrack in France. If necessary, the cars are handicapped either by adding ballast or by fitting an air restrictor to the engine, or both. Additionally, 44 lb. of ballast is tacked on to a winning car before its next race to keep it from dominating the series.   The series also strives for parity among drivers with a slew of rules that spells out who is allowed to race in GT3, where each team must enter two cars with two drivers sharing the same car. There are four driver categories: platinum (essentially pros, including Indy, Le Mans, F1 winners and &amp;quot;works&amp;quot; drivers under age 55), gold (winning semi-pros or platinum drivers over 55), silver (advanced amateurs under 30 with winning records or extensive single-seater experience) and bronze (amateurs). Platinum drivers are not allowed at all, but all of the other drivers are mixed and matched\u2014gold with bronze; silver with silver or bronze; bronze with gold, silver or bronze\u2014to further level the playing field.   But level or not, GT racing is the one European playing field where American cars have come to play\u2014and win! "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/motorsports/news/a16162/american-cars-rule-in-european-gt-racing/>