Entering the 2026 season as the only new team on the grid, and with five rookie drivers, the cards appeared stacked against Garage 59 in the FIA World Endurance Championship’s LMGT3 category.
However, with two races complete, the team’s standout start to the FIA WEC campaign means that it heads to its first 24 Hours of Le Mans, with its own name above the garage door (the team previously fielded a car under the ‘Inception Racing’ banner in 2022), as amongst the class favourites.
Its #10 McLaren LMGT3 Evo of Antares Au, Thomas Fleming and Marvin Kirchhöfer was on course for a sensational win on debut at Imola before a heartbreaking, final hour alternator failure, with this result followed by a charge from 15th on the grid to win at Spa-Francorchamps.
In both races, 23-year-old Fleming played a key role, establishing himself not only amongst this year’s leading Silver-graded drivers, but also among the top Gold and Platinum professionals with a pair of breakthrough performances, which also included pole at Imola.
The Briton has been on a rapid rise up the GT ladder in recent years, having only made his car racing debut in 2023, when he competed in Ferrari Challenge Europe, winning the Trofeo Pirelli category at Finali Mondiali.
This then saw Tom Fleming step up to the GT World Challenge Europe Sprint Cup with AF Corse, only for an accident at Misano, which saw him pick up a back injury, derail his season.
2025, therefore, was somewhat of a relaunch year, with Fleming splitting his attention in several directions, competing in the European Le Mans Series in a GR Racing-run Ferrari 296 LMGT3, GT World Challenge Europe with Garage 59, and the Michelin Le Mans Cup aboard Nielsen Racing’s ADESS AD25 LMP3.
“It’s been an amazing journey over the last couple of years,” Fleming tells DSC.
“2024 being a bit of a hurdle with a back injury for myself, so I’m sort of entering my third proper year. To be competing in WEC, wearing the McLaren badge, and also doing GT World Challenge Endurance and Sprint is something I can only ever imagine doing a few years ago when I started Ferrari Challenge.”
For this season, the Briton has consolidated his programme, running exclusively with Garage 59 across GT World Challenge Europe and the FIA World Endurance Championship.
“There were quite a few opportunities elsewhere,” Fleming says. “But for me, with the great rapport that I’d built up until that point with McLaren through GT World Challenge, it made the most sense career-wise to completely go in with them.
“It was during the Bahrain weekend where they finally offered the drive for the World Endurance Championship, and as soon as that came through, I already knew I was doing the Endurance and Sprint Cup for GT World Challenge.
“Only working with Garage 59 and McLaren this year makes things a lot easier because you’re not transitioning, like what I did last year, which was a Ferrari, LMP3, McLaren, so it makes my life a little bit easier, but it has its own exciting opportunities in the same way. They’re such a hard-working, knuckles down group of people, who I love to be around. They make you want to be better.”
Although he is now only piloting Garage 59 McLarens, this 18-round programme still offers Fleming plenty of variety.
The different race lengths, and multi-class versus GT3-only dynamics, are obvious examples, but another aspect is Fleming’s role within each team. LMGT3 is strictly a Pro/Am formula, whilst in GT World Challenge Fleming races alongside fellow McLaren GT3 junior Louis Prette, and McLaren factory driver Benjamin Goethe.
“The job is still the same, just you’ve got different things to maximise and optimise,” he explains. “Whether it’s the relationship with the Am driver in the car, or working with your engineer.
“For me nothing’s really changed. The objective is still the same, maximising every weekend. I don’t really tend to think, ‘this is going to be a big deal’, because at the end of the day your job as an athlete doesn’t change. You have to maximise everything that you can do, and so long as you’re doing that, then you’re in a good spot.”
This attitude of maximising everything he can is clearly shown through Fleming’s response to Imola, where, despite losing victory, morale remained high in the Garage 59 camp.
“For me, there was no disappointment,” he says.
“Garage 59, it was their first time racing in the championship, it was the first time any of us in the #10 car had been competing at that level, and we did everything just perfectly,
“We did a good job through the Free Practice sessions, an amazing job in qualifying, and just an unbelievable job in the race as well. It’s not like we weren’t under any pressure, we weren’t in a league of our own, because we had the Corvette and the BMW close behind so it didn’t come easy for us.
“But we persevered and did everything right to put the car in a winning position 30 minutes from the end. It’s a shame that there was a technical failure on the car, but after the initial shock of having the chances of winning slipped away, I think everyone left with their head held really high, because there was a lot of pressure on that weekend, a lot to get used to, and whilst there were opportunities to learn and improve, you couldn’t have asked for a better weekend. It really cemented that Garage 59 belongs in a world-class championship like this.”
Last month’s 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps then offered Garage 59 a very different lesson: the reassurance that they have the ability to turn race meetings around in LMGT3, and not just perform well when they are strong from the off.
The team was undoubtedly struggling during Thursday’s Free Practice sessions at the Belgian venue and placed neither car in Hyperpole, but once into the rhythm of the six-hour race the #10 McLaren had the pace to contend, and was one of only a handful of cars to stay penalty-free.
“The beginning of the weekend at Spa wasn’t looking anywhere near as hopeful as what it was in Imola, but we continued to just prevail and keep pushing as hard as we could to find as much speed as we could over the weekend,” Fleming continues.
“We’ve only got a very limited amount coming during the practice sessions. Unfortunately, Antares wasn’t quite able to get into the Hyperpole session, so we started in 15th spot, and then it was almost like a game of Pac-Man, where you’re just chasing and chasing.
“I think, as a team on the driver line-up side of things, we did a really good job of maximising the car and staying out of trouble, which is always a massive part of these races.
“And then on the engineering side of things, they gave us a really good car for the race, and also put the perfect strategy together, putting pressure on the #21 [Vista AF Corse Ferrari] which resulted in an unsafe release from them. I was over the moon at the time, to be honest, but now that’s in the rear-view mirror. We’ve got the biggest race of the year ahead of us.”
And it’s clear, no matter how much Fleming is focused on his job as an athlete, that the prospect of the 24 hours of Le Mans is one event which brings out the fan inside of him.
“Le Mans’ just going to be amazing, right?” he exclaims.
“It’s the biggest race in the world, the crowd’s electric, the whole week is something out of this world and I love the passion for it. I love the circuit, I love the history, and I like the exclusiveness, so I look forward to having my name in the history books, hopefully with a good impact.”
The Briton defines a lead lap finish as a reasonable goal for Garage 59, which in theory would put the team in contention for a top-five result, and alongside its Le Mans aspirations, also place it well for the rest of the FIA WEC season, with this a double-points event. They’ll have to start the journey from 16th on the LMGT3 grid today.
“Historically, looking at what classifies as a good result, if you stay on the lead lap you’re in a shot of the top five, so I think that’s definitely the goal for us,” he states.
“We’ve had a very strong start to this year, not got as many points as we probably would have liked to have, considering how much speed we’ve had, but the focus is to finish on the lead lap, because the points are worth quite a lot.”
Images © DPPI, Garage 59 and Andrew Lofthouse
