In order to promote it’s new for 1995 Dodge Viper GTS Coupé and compete in the plethora of GT Championships across the globe in the late 1990’s Chrysler sanctioned the construction of GTS-R race variant to be overseen and maintained by the French Race and Engineering team Oreca.
The bare chassis for the Oreca built GTS-R’s were fabricated by the British company Reynard who had a long established reputation for building open wheelers from Formula Ford all the way up to Indycars. There reputation was enhanced by the fact that every time they entered a new formula they won first time out.
The 8 litre / 488 cui V10 motors were lightly modified to improve output and reliability, in all 5 prototypes and a further 52 Chrylser Viper GTS-R’s were built between 1996 and 2005.
In the USA the cars were run as Dodge Vipers while in Europe where the Dodge brand did not have any official market presence the cars were run as Chrysler Vipers, with the exception being at the 2007 Nurburgring 24 Hour race where ’99,’01 and ’02 winners Zakspeed entered their Viper, which finished second, as a Dodge to mark the arrival of the Dodge brand in Europe.
Today’s featured car chassis #C30, seen at Silverstone in the hands of Classic car dealer Florent Moulin, appears to have been built in for the 2000 season and raced by Viper Team Oreca in the US, as a Dodge and Europe, as a Chrysler, by Jean-Philippe Belloc, Anthony Beltoise, Ni Amorim, Tommy Archer, David Donohue, Marc Duez, Patrick Huisman and Boris Derichebourg.
#C30’s best result was in the 2000 Grand Prix of Sanoma where Tommy Archer and David Donohue recorded a class win and 8th overall in the Dodge branded racer.
