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The move comes 12 months after Rogers, who promoted the category under the Australian Racing Group banner, parked the class indefinitely amid frustration over Supercars’ driver eligibility rules.
GRM has now announced its intention to sell its remaining 15 chassis and comprehensive spare parts inventory. The cars feature an Onroak-Ligier chassis mated to a 5.2-litre Ford V8 engine.
“GRM is open to the sale of individual and multiple S5000 chassis to both Australian-based and international parties,” read a statement.
“The significant number of available S5000 chassis and supporting infrastructure offers the potential for interested parties to repurpose S5000 as the basis for a new open-wheel racing championship anywhere in the world.”
News of the S5000 fire sale follows GRM’s decision to hand back the category management rights for the TCR Australia Series, citing a desire to focus on its operations as a race team.
“The decision to sell its fleet of S5000 racecars comes as GRM focuses its competition and engineering operations on running multiple cars in the Trico Trans Am Series, and the ongoing development and competition program of the Peugeot 308 P51 racecar in the TCR Australia Series,” GRM explained.
“Additionally, GRM continues to remain active in providing a range of engineering and manufacturing services to various customers throughout the Australian motorsport industry.”
GRM took the reins of the S5000 category project in 2018 following a troubled birth, investing an estimated $6million to build a full fleet of cars ahead of an inaugural race event at Sandown the following September.
A spectacular beginning headlined by star driver Rubens Barrichello soon gave way to the COVID-19 pandemic, which kyboshed the 2020 season midway through the opening round at Albert Park.
Three complete S5000 Australian Drivers’ Championships were subsequently run; Joey Mawson winning the 2021 and ’22 titles before Aaron Cameron triumphed in ’23.
Dwindling fields, however, made the category unviable – a situation Rogers and ARG blamed on Supercars’ driver eligibility rules forcing young drivers into Super2.
S5000 also faced headwinds created by ARG’s controversial broadcast deal with Stan Sport which limited the visibility of its categories.
Chris Lambden, who founded the S5000 concept and served as the category’s development manager until 2023, remains hopeful the cars will return to Australian race tracks.
“Over the last six months I’ve been quietly working on a project that might see the relaunch of the cars in a somewhat different and hopefully spectacular way,” he told Speedcafe.
“If there’s a change of ownership of the cars, I’ll be very happy to talk to whoever it might be.”
Lambden’s plan is understood to involve an Australian summer series aimed at international drivers in a similar vein to New Zealand’s popular Toyota Formula Regional Oceania Championship that kicks off this weekend at Taupo.
“From the start, I and others were interested in [S5000] being part of something that ran over summer, rather than the middle of winter in Australia, at a time when there were drivers in the northern hemisphere to potentially get involved,” he said.
“I still believe that freed from the pile-on that occurred through being part of ARG, the category has the potential it showed over the first few rounds when it first ran.”
