Full archive


The GTE category existed from 2016 as successor of GT2 and lasted until the end of 2023. Gulf Racing has always been present with their beautiful blue and orange Porsches.


Hervé Poulain is an amateur racing driver, art collector and auctioneer from France. It was his idea to have famous artists paint brand new racing cars and race these at Le Mans. He and BMW started a complete new kind of racing cars.


Tom Walkinshaw was quite successful as a racing driver before he started TWR. With TWR, he built, prepared and raced many Jaguars and took victories in Spa, Le Mans and Daytona.


Erich Zakowski was famous for his well prepared Fords. In 1977 his Escorts challenged to keep up with the BMW 320’s and the turbocharged 2002 from Schnitzer, so for the 1978 season he developed a revolutionary car.


The success story of the 1973 Porsche Carrera RSR begins by winning the 24 hour race on its debut. Many successes followed and also some very interesting technical and aerodynamical evolutions.


Penske Racing (nowadays Team Penske) founded in 1966 still operates at the highest levels in endurance racing both in IMSA and FIA WEC, Indy cars and NASCAR. Sunoco was the team’s first sponsor.


Coca Cola sponsored a number of teams and drivers. In this collection I focus on the American team from Bob Akin and a few other Porsches.


Prodrive had been very successful with turning the Ferrari 550 in to a winning racing car in GT1. Their next project was to do the same with the Aston Martin DBR9 which lay-out was quite similar; V12 engine in the front, rear wheel drive.


Toyota was reasonably successful in the last part of the Group C era. The 3-liter TS010 and turbo-charged 94C-V both finished on the podium at Le Mans, without winning however. When the set of regulations changed towards GT1, Toyota saw new possibilities.


The Porsche 956 was the ideal car for the group C regulations. When Porsche first brought it to Le Mans in 1982, they scored a convincing 1-2-3 finish. Many Porsche can be found in this collection but also the Zakspeed Ford C100.


Group C gave constructors a lot of freedom to achieve the best result. Multiple concepts were successful, but Mazda did something completely different and mounted a 4-chamber normally aspirated rotary engine.


Schnitzer has been a racing team since 1967 and mainly raced BMW’s. The team often represented the BMW factory as official works team, but before that, they developed a range of turbocharged cars on their own.


The new group 5 regulations were a perfect fit for Porsche. The 911 turbo was the perfect car for this series and the Germans already had a lot of experience with the RSR turbo and 934.


This blog begins with the factory Corvettes racing in Le Mans in 2003. I show the factory cars and privateer Corvette models that are in my collection.


The Ferrari 333 SP was Ferrari’s car for the new World Sport Cars category, the successor of the IMSA GTP. The WSC cars were open-top, flat-bottomed sports-prototypes with production based engines.


Audi had been very successful in international rallying and several touring car championships. But the German luxury brand wanted more and set their target on Le Mans. Well, that turned out quite good, especially with Joest as partner.


Audi dominated sports car racing from 2000 to 2005 with their R8 (and nephew Bentley Speed 8). In 2006 Audi did something completely different and again shocked sports car racing: They threw a very big diesel engine in.


A limited number of customer teams that were often supported by local Audi distributors, received a one year old Audi R8. When Joest stopped racing the R8 at Le Mans and the American Le Mans Series, these teams took over.


Just as many other manufacturers, Nissan wanted to play a part in Motorsport history. In this blog I will give an overview of the many cars that Nissan raced in Group C and IMSA GTP and that I have a 1/43 scale model car.


Rebellion. An up-market watch maker, but also a serious racing team that would fight the big brands such as Audi, Porsche and Toyota.


This one is about the JWA racing team that raced the GT40’s and Mirage M1 in Gulf livery after Ford quit because the regulations changed and the big V8’s that Ford was using, were banned.

























Jacques Swaters was a racing driver when he started Ecurie Francorchamps. Swaters is distributor for Ferrari in Belgium, so he only races these Italian cars.


Porsche had won Le Mans 1998 with the GT1/98, their last car based on the legacy 962 technology. The flat-6 engine is still being used in the 911 models, but the prototypes got new engines and some even hybrid technology.


The Spykers that raced at Le Mans competed against Porsche 911, Ferrari 360 and TVR Tuscans, all cars of which the street version were 50% cheaper. Not very good for your image, I guess.


The Viper has been developed and raced by the French Oreca team and this works team would make the Viper with its huge V10 engine, the leading GT before it was surpassed by the Corvette.


Yves Courage began to build his own cars. The first were group C cars that were called Cougar, later he would change this to his surname Courage.
with YouTube video


Ferrari is famous for its V12-engines. The modern V8 and V6 turbo versions are more powerful but don’t bring the emotion that a high-revving 12 cylinder does.


JWA is most famous because of the Gulf liveried Porsche 917, which was the star in Steve McQueen’s movie “Le Mans”.


Joest Racing has been very successful since the early 80’s, they won Le Mans already 8 times. In this blog you will find mainly Porsche 956 and 962’s.


Ferrari achieved great success with their V8 powered cars starting with the famous F40. More recent the cars in the GT2/GTE/GT3 won many races and championships.


GPX Racing paint their cars in the same famous liveries as historic Porsches that raced Targa Florio and Le Mans!


To preserve weight and stay below the maximum allowed, all white paint was removed. The cars became the nick name “Silberpfeilen” or Silver Arrows. 


When we speak about Hypercars, we must not forget that half of the contenders come from a slightly different concept of LMDh prototypes (Le Mans Daytona hybrid) that run as GTP in the USA.


Lancia had some other famous liveries before they partnered with Martini, such as Marlboro and Alitalia. These and other Lancia’s can be found in this topic.


In the 1990’s the Austrian energy drink was just starting to gain brand awareness. Dietrich Mateschitz chose the slogan “Red Bull gives you Wings” and began sponsoring motorsports.


Brumos originated from BRUndage MOtorS and was a Porsche dealer in Jacksonville, Florida. Peter Gregg bought the company and retained the name Brumos, he was entrepreneur and an excellent racing driver. 


Shell is one of the largest oil companies in the world and connected with motorsports for many years. In this topic I will show all the cars that have some kind of Shell livery and not just a small sticker.

Bastos and Belga are both Belgian tobacco brands (both part of British American Tobacco) and were very active in sponsoring motorsports, especially touring cars at Spa-Francorchamps.


Gitanes and Gauloises were part of the French state-owned tobacco company SEITA. It those years, Gitanes was often seen on French racing cars such as the Le Mans Matra-Simcas and the Ligier Formula 1 team. 


Marlboro is probably the most well known tobacco sponsor in motorsport for their long partnerships with McLaren F1 in the Lauda-Prost-Senna era and afterwards with Scuderia Ferrari and Michael Schumacher.


Ford has produced some very fine championship winning touring cars over the years. In this topic I will show more conventional Escorts, Capris and Sierras in my collection.


The green and yellow Porsches have won the Nürburgring 24-hour race many times. Nowadays Porsche AG has a 51% share in Manthey Tuning and Racing and the team prepares and races the Porsche works cars in Le Mans an FIA WEC.


The Nissan Skyline is famous for its result on the race tracks and very popular in the tuning scene. The Japanese brand also raced with turbo-charged Bluebirds and the Z/ZX series.


Racing engines and cars in the USA are often prepared by HPD which stands for Honda Performance Development, which are raced as Acura.


This collection contains the Group C cars from Toyota such as the screaming TS010 and many turbo cars. Also I have models of the IMSA Eagle-Toyota’s in this collection.


Numerous racing cars were lubricated by Castrol, but only a few of them actually raced in the famous red and green colors of the British oil brand.


Porsche is famous for their rear-engined 911, but they also produced some very fine front-engined cars with very good handling and balance.


The Porsche 936 was a kind of kit car that used body parts, suspension and brakes from the 917 Can-Am Spyders and the engine from the 911 RSR Turbo.


While Porsche developed the 936 as prototype for the 3-liter category, Reinhold Joest used Porsche 908 tube frames to build similar cars. The history of these cars run parallel with that of the Porsche 936.


The BMW M1 was the first super car of the German manufacturer. The intention was that 400 cars needed for homologation would be built at the Lamborghini factory. The entire process was delayed after Lamborghini struck financial troubles.


After twenty years of preparing GT’s, the Kremer brothers started racing prototypes; at first as another Porsche customer team but soon they started building their own cars based on Porsche components.


The Gordon Murray designed F1 GTR was the first road going car that McLaren built. It was immediately popular for racing in the BPR-series which would become the official FIA-GT Championship.


Don Panoz his cars were powered by American Ford V8 engines. This is also the case with Saleen, Steve Saleen was well known as Ford Mustang tuner. in 2000 he launched the S7, a mid-engined sports car that was successful in GT racing.


In the 70’s Audi started with some motorsport activities with their Audi 80, but the great breakthrough was the introduction of their all-wheel drive models “Quattro”.


Aston Martin is an English luxury brand that produces GT’s that are also used in motorsports. They also have a Formula One team and are currently (January 2025) developing the Valkyrie Hypercar for Le Mans and the World Championship.


In 1994 the Kremer K8 appeared at Le Mans in a slightly different color scheme. Since then, Gulf is back on the international race tracks. In this collection I present some fine Gulf liveried prototypes and even some formula 1.


In 1970 the Porsche supported works teams were the Gulf sponsored JWA team, Porsche Salzburg that took Porsche’s first Le Mans victory and Hans-Dieter Dechent’s Martini Racing International.


Nissan has been active in motorsports for many years, sometimes following the main stream such as in Group C, sometimes leading the way as they did with the Skyline. And in other moments they acted completely different, for instance with the DeltaWing and GT-R LM.


Eckhardt Schimpf was Jägermeister’s PR manager in the early 1970’s. He was a passionate racing driver and convinced the board to enter in motorsport sponsoring. Since then, the orange Jägermeister cars are familiar sight on racetracks all over Europa.


Alfa Romeo has always been involved in various motorsports with achievements giving the marque a sporty image. Alfa Romeo managed to held this image despite financial losses and different ownerships.


Mercedes quit all motorsports activities after the terrible accident at Le Mans in 1995. In the 1970’s AMG returned to the tracks with the impressive Red Pig.


The Kremer Brothers Erwin and Manfred were one of the first Porsche tuners. Kremer often changed existing Porsche models and built their own versions of it and would rename these with a ‘K’ in the type.


Advan is a brand from Yokohama for the sporty tires. The distinctive red and black can be found on cars in the Japanese touring car, GT and sportscar series, but also on some Japanese entries during the Le Mans 24-hour race.