Here’s part one of a four-part trot through the current and immediate future marketplace for the FIA WEC Hypercar and IMSA GTP classes.
It includes, listed alphabetically, all manufacturers and major partner suppliers for the new top class cars, plus the teams currently and soon to be involved.
Action Express
See Cadillac
Acura
Started in IMSA GTP with two Oreca-chassis LMDh-rules cars in 2023 – one apiece from continuing supported Acura Customer/factory teams Wayne Taylor Racing and Meyer Shank Racing.
Wayne Taylor Racing partnered with Andretti Autosports before start of 2023 season.
This team has made clear its intention to double up to two cars in 2024 IMSA.
The team is also evaluating full-season FIA WEC under the Honda brand as part of its aspiration to take the cars to Le Mans 24 Hours (see Honda).
Customer cars though are some way off yet.
The car scored the first GTP win at the 2023 Rolex 24 at Daytona.
AF Corse
See Ferrari
Alfa Romeo
Alfa Romeo CEO Jean-Philippe Imparato has made it clear that the historic Italian brand, now part of the Stellantis group is considering a return to sportscar racing alongside an evaluation of how the brand might manage to continue in F1 after its partnership with Sauber is concluded at the end of 2023.
There are no other details available at present but the Stellantis group does have, via the Peugeot 9X8 programme, an LMH platform available that might have potential to kick-start an Alfa effort.
The plans for Glickenhaus to initially utilise a modified turbo V6 from Alfa Romeo deserve consideration here too. That plan had to be revised when the regulations were amended to accommodate the later cancelled Aston Martin Valkyrie.
The company plans to announce its future motorsport plans in the early summer.
Alpine
Renault’s sporting brand is set to be the first manufacturer to field two entirely different cars in HyperCar, both with the assistance of Philippe Sinault’s Signatech operation, after its two-season stopgap ex-LMP1 Rebellion, ‘grandfathered’ down in performance and re-badged as an Alpine A480.
The A480 scored a pair of overall wins in Hypercar in 2022 and took the championship chase down to the wire at the final round.
2024 sees the FIA WEC debut of its Oreca-based LMDh machine with a pair of cars set for World Championship competition. That car is set to test from July and could well be seen on display at Le Mans the previous month. DSC sources suggest that the first car is near complete.
Alpine has made clear its intention to market customer cars – the immediate opportunity in IMSA though seems to have disappeared with the Andretti organisation’s acquisition of Wayne Taylor Racing.
Andretti Autosports
See Alpine and Acura
Aston Martin
The VERY early adopter of the original Hypercar regulations with the Valkyrie then pulled out having forced the rules into a direction which supported its ‘road car’-based platform and left something of a mess for both Toyota and Glickenhaus. The GR010 platform was modified as a result of the revisions necessary to accommodate the Valkyrie and the 007 needed a replacement engine from its originally planned Alfa Romeo unit.
Aston Martin’s new owners did little to impress the rulemakers after referencing the potential Le Mans lap times of the AMR Pro version of the Valkyrie in all of the launch publicity. This came shortly after its racing pull-out, and a series of public statements from Lawrence Stroll sometime later that very directly indicated that Le Mans was still on the cards for the brand seem to have been based again of grabbing attention and column inches rather than in the real world of programme commitment.
The initial plan saw cars filled by a factory team with a then likely privateer car to be fielded by the now stalled R Motorsport outfit from Switzerland.
Audi
Early adopters of the LMDh regulations with an Audi rework of the Multimatic-Porsche that became the 963.
The programme progressed sufficiently to have a chassis delivered (above) and Nico Muller and Rene Rast announced as drivers, with WRT all but confirmed as the factory WEC team.
The initial plan was for parallel WEC and IMSA programmes, the IMSA aspect later reeled back before the brand’s new management determined that they would prefer to progress an engine programme for Formula One. The effort was first postponed then later cancelled.
Bentley
DSC is aware of at least three attempts to bring the British luxury brand into the hypercar market, all based around the LMDh ruleset and with at least one (and most likely two) of the projects focussing on a car based around the Multimatic ‘spine.
The first, entirely private, project fell foul of timing and supply chain woes, two further pushes more directly included the factory – neither progressed beyond the evaluation stages.
BMW
BMW’s M Hybrid V8 LMDh car with a Dallara-supplied ‘spine is competing in IMSA in 2023 with a pair of cars contesting the full IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship fielded by BMW Team RLL.
The Turbo V8 powered cars struggled at Daytona but were much closer to the pace at Sebring where the late race carnage gave the team a second place finish.
Team WRT will field a pair of factory cars in the FIA WEC in 2024 and DSC is aware of the potential for a third car in the world championship as early as next season too!
Bosch
Bosch supplies the Motor Generator Unit (MGU) for the single-source hybrid drive for LMDh cars.
Bugatti
There were vague rumours that Bugatti’s track-only Bolide might morph into an LMH Hypercar but absolutely nothing of real substance emerged from those reports.
ByKolles
See Vanwall
Cadillac
Cadillac’s Dallara-based V-Series LMDh was redubbed the V-Series.R after Daytona, IMSA keen to have their cars described as GTPs and WEC equally keen to maintain the Hypercar moniker.
Three cars are fielded this season – two full-season cars in IMSA, and a single car in WEC. In the USA, there is one car apiece for Cadillac Racing (Ganassi racing) and Action Express. In the WEC there a second Ganassi-run car running under the factory banner in the world championship.
There was a podium finish at Daytona for the #01 and a last-gasp win at the 12 Hours of Sebring for the Action Express car.
All three cars contested the Rolex 24 Hours and will do so again at Le Mans. If DSC’s sources are correct we could see all three at two more races this season too, with a likely pair for an additional race!
We’re unlikely though to see customer Cadillacs before 2025.
Dallara
The Italian motorsport engineering giant supplies the chassis ‘spines’ for the LMDh cars for both BMW and Cadillac and also built the chassis for the Ferrari 499P
De Tomaso
Sources close to the revived De Tomaso marque suggested last year that a racing hypercar derivative of its forthcoming P72 road car might be under consideration.
Interestingly, whilst other sources within the organisation denied the project was under consideration, focusing instead on an extreme track-only car, the positive response the stories received have, at the very least, persuaded the outfit to take a look at the scale of project that would be required to go racing.
The V12-powered car though is still listed here as ‘unlikely’.
Dodge
Another Stellantis brand and another to have been linked to a potential campaign with a car based on the platform of the Peugeot 9X8 for an IMSA programme.
That said, the early noises that suggested this as a real possibility have gone very quiet in recent months with absolutely no confirmation whatsoever of any sort of live programme.
Entop
‘Who?’ You may ask…
This Afghan design studio has produced the seemingly roadgoing Mada 9 ‘Black Swan’ supercar, promoted via a bewildering range of YouTube videos.
With imagery somewhat reminiscent of the Taliban regime there is something ‘strange’ about the whole affair, not least the fact that the car is apparently powered by a tuned Toyota Corolla engine.
At least two of Entop’s films feature the car with prominent ‘Le Mans 24’ branding on the side of the car, and one mentions an intention to work with Multimatic to prepare the car to race at La Sarthe.
DSC has established that neither the ACO nor Multimatic have had contact with or from the enterprise.
