A very sucessful revival of prototype endurance racing began in 1982. In Europe, a new formula called 'Group C' was created completely from scratch. It's goal was to lure back manufacturers, even performance, and provide good racing by using fuel consumption to homologate cars. As usual, Porsche led the way and designed the 956, which would dominate for much of the decade. The schedule included LeMans and the traditional European Events from the "golden" age of the late 1960's. The title of the series was changed to the World Endurance Championship (WEC). The German DRM series accepted these rule changes, and many Group C cars competed in DRM sanctioned sprint events during the year. Namely, the Norisring street event was extremely popular.
...More about the Porsche 956
The only issue is that they couldn't convince the IMSA people to adopt this specification. In America they did a similar exercise by creating the 'Grand Touring Prototype' (GTP) class. The result was that there was very little interaction between the two series, and Sebring and Daytona became IMSA-Only events.
GT cars. Hello. Anyone?
Some GT cars did run with the Group C prototypes. Starting in 1983 they were classified as 'Group B', after a decade of Group B being a class named for prototypes. The requirement for group B was that 200 "homologation specials" had to be produced. While this never took off for GT cars, there were some pretty wild rally cars made to this spec.
Ferrari intended to provide customer cars with their 288GTO, and actually met the homologation minimum. But by then everyone already had Porsche 956's prototypes.
1982 World Endurance Championship | |||||
Place |
Car |
Car # Class |
Model |
Ref. # |
Image |
| Monza | |||||
| 5 | Lancia Beta Montecarlo Mario Casoni  Joe Castellano  Mark Thatcher  | 81 Gr. 5 | Best | 9349 |  |
| 8 | Ferrari 512 BB LM Giovanni Del Buono Odoardo Govoni | 98 IMSA | Brumm | R416 |  |
| Silverstone | |||||
| 17 | Ferrari 512 BB LM Steve Earle Richard Jones Simon Phillips | 80 GTX | Best | best_9469_cropped |  |
| Fuji | |||||
| 6 | Mazda RX-7 Takashi Yorino  Masanori Sekiya Tom Walkinshaw | 14 GTX | Bizarre | BZ375 |  |
| DNF | Ferrari 512 BB LM Preston Henn Bonnie Henn | 12 GTX | Best | 9324 |  |
| Kyalami (Non-Championship) | |||||
| 6 | Porsche 908/4 Alain De Cadenet Jean-Michel Martin  Giorgio Pianta | 6 Group 6 | Best | 9360 |  |
| DRM Norisring | |||||
| 1 | Porsche 956 'Racing' Jochen Mass  | 10 C | Ebbro | 43888 |  |
In 1983 there was a sub-championship that combined the European Rounds of the WEC, plus non-WEC races at Brands Hatch, Imola, and Mugello. This was called the European Sportscar Championship, which had been the name of the old FIA Group 6 series.
Joest and Zakspeed were the main players in the DRM series, and Joest even ran the trusty-old 936 chassis that they had been running since 1979.
Norisring Summer Sprints...
There was a well-attended downtown race weekend in Nuremburg, and the day consisted of several short sprints. The main event was a 200 mile non-championship race. I had assumed that this was part of the DRM championship, but I could not find the Keke Rosberg "Boss" car listed in the results. There were actually two races that day, one in the morning for the usual DRM teams, and then an afternoon finale for all entries. Stefan Bellof won this in a works Rothmans 956, and gained a huge following...
