The GT World Challenge Europe and its predecessors have long operated a tiered driver classification system borrowed from the FIA's official driver rating categories: Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze. Professional drivers chase the outright title; subsidiary cups are carved out for mid-tier and amateur competitors to ensure they have meaningful championship targets of their own within the same race events.
The Am Cup was introduced in 2016 alongside the restructuring of the Blancpain GT Series, which unified its sprint and endurance strands under a common umbrella championship. It targeted the most amateur end of the driver pool, reflecting the series' appeal to wealthy gentleman competitors who invest in GT3 programmes as owner-drivers.
Claudio Sdanewitsch was crowned the inaugural Am Cup champion in 2016, the first season the category ran. The cup awarded points at both Sprint Cup and Endurance Cup rounds, allowing amateur drivers to accumulate a championship tally across the full season irrespective of which format they targeted.
In 2018, the final year of the Am Cup, Adrian Amstutz and Leo Machitski won the title. That season the series also launched the Silver Cup for younger silver-rated drivers, signalling a broader restructuring of the subsidiary championship landscape. After 2018 the Am Cup was discontinued; in subsequent seasons, amateur competition in the series was channelled through evolved class structures, culminating by 2023 in the introduction of the Bronze Cup and the winding down of the Pro-Am Cup, leaving the championship with Gold, Silver, and Bronze Cups below the outright Pro class.
The Am Cup admitted cars crewed predominantly by Bronze-rated drivers according to the FIA classification system. At Sprint Cup rounds, the maximum permitted driver line-up was a Platinum-rated driver paired with a Bronze-rated driver — a pairing designed to allow teams to field a professional alongside an amateur while still qualifying for the gentlemen's award. Endurance Cup rounds permitted additional Silver-rated drivers in the mix.
Cars competing for the Am Cup ran within the broader GT3 field rather than a separate race, meaning gentleman drivers competed wheel-to-wheel with professional outright contenders, with their own championship points tracked separately within the same race.
The Am Cup represented an important transitional phase in SRO's philosophy of accommodating amateur participation in a top-level GT3 environment. Its three-season lifespan coincided with the Blancpain GT Series' rapid growth into one of the world's largest GT3 championships by grid size. The tiered class system it was part of — rewarding different grades of driver within a shared field — became a defining structural feature of GT3 racing globally, influencing how other SRO-run series and the broader GT3 ecosystem handle amateur participation. The category's successor philosophies live on in the Bronze Cup, which from 2023 also grants its winner an invitation to compete in the LMGT3 class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.