The Viper had a distinguished history in GT endurance racing during the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the Chrysler Viper GTS-R — developed in partnership with Oreca and Reynard Motorsport — won championship titles in the ALMS, FIA GT Championship, and scored class victories at Le Mans. After that generation of the race car was retired, factory involvement ceased. When Chrysler relaunched the Viper as a fifth-generation car under the SRT brand, it paired the new model with a return to factory-backed endurance racing in the LM GTE class.
The LM GTE category applies a common technical framework to allow differently engineered road-car-derived GT machinery to compete against each other under balance-of-performance regulations. For the Viper, this meant complying with specific weight, aerodynamic, and power targets set by the sanctioning body, while retaining a relationship to the V10-engined road car. At the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2013, balance-of-performance regulations imposed an unusually low rev limit of 4,700 rpm on the Viper, directing the team to exploit the large V10's low-end torque rather than its upper-rpm power.
The GTS-R made its ALMS debut at the 2012 Mid-Ohio Sports Car Challenge, running two cars: #91 driven by Kuno Wittmer and Dominik Farnbacher, and #93 driven by Marc Goossens and Tommy Kendall. The 2012 ALMS campaign featured a full driver roster including Dominik Farnbacher, Marc Goossens, Ryan Hunter-Reay, Tommy Kendall, Jonathan Bomarito, and Kuno Wittmer. The two cars finished third in the GT class championship at the end of the 2012 ALMS season.
At the 2013 24 Hours of Le Mans, the GTS-R entered the GTE Pro class for the first time, finishing eighth in class and 24th overall — a respectable result on the car's Le Mans debut under the demanding low-rev balance-of-performance restriction.
When the ALMS was absorbed into the newly formed Tudor United SportsCar Championship for 2014, the Viper moved into the GTLM class — the series' equivalent of GTE. At the 2014 24 Hours of Daytona, the two entries finished 3rd and 6th in class. Mid-season results at Watkins Glen and Mosport delivered podium positions, and the #93 car won the GTLM class at Indianapolis Motor Speedway during the Brickyard Grand Prix in July 2014.
Both cars were repainted at Watkins Glen in the red and white livery that had been associated with Oreca's Viper campaigns in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a tribute to the car's earlier factory racing heritage.
SRT announced in March 2014 that it would withdraw the Vipers from that year's 24 Hours of Le Mans. The factory program concluded at Petit Le Mans, where SRT Motorsports secured the team championship and Kuno Wittmer won the drivers' championship. At the close of the 2014 season, Chrysler ended the factory SRT Motorsports GTE operation, while privateer competition continued through the Viper GT3-R platform offered to customer teams.