2023 World Endurance Championship Preview

 

The class of 2023

Are you bored of seeing a Red Bull F1 car cruise around in front like it's 2011 yet? Good. There's something much more compelling and unpredictable to watch, and it's very nearly here. If you have never had any serious interest in endurance racing before, then now is the perfect time to start. Allow me to explain why...

Hypercar: New Era, Old Storylines

Previously, the top category in the FIA World Endurance Championship was called LMP1 and, for a time, it was excellent. During the mid-2010s, the cars built by manufacturer teams were more advanced and, at low-to-medium speeds, quicker than Formula 1 cars of the same period. They were all-wheel-drive, thousand-horsepower hybrids pushing the industry's understanding of energy storage and hybrid system integration, recovering enough energy under braking over the course of the Le Mans 24h to have powered a house for two days. Sadly, they also became as expensive as a middling Formula 1 car to create, develop and race. As the WEC gets a tiny fraction of the world's attention compared to F1, that caused Porsche and Audi to withdraw, leaving Toyota on its own with nobody comparable to race against... so they cruised around lapping everyone for a couple of seasons.

Clearly, a hard reset was needed, and after many years that has materialised as the Le Mans Hypercar (LMH) class. It introduces a cap on total power output (500kW, or 670hp), a defined 'performance window' for your aerodynamic package's downforce and drag to fit into, an easily achievable minimum weight of 1030kg, plus a Balance of Performance system to make ~sure it's definitely close. Oh, and your hybrid system (mandatory for manufacturer teams only) must power just the front axle, with an engine of your choice taking full charge of the rear wheels. Simple! But critically, also much cheaper. That factor alone has seen an influx of returning manufacturers...

2019 Daytona 24 Hours

...but actually, it's not that simple. Over in the USA, the IMSA Sportscar Championship was also having its ups and downs. General Motors and Honda/Acura, which coincidentally also have IndyCar engine programmes, were the last two standing after the likes of Nissan and Mazda had decided to stop investing in sports prototype racers. IMSA's Daytona Prototype International (DPI) class was due a rebirth at about the same time as FIA's LMP1. So, from ~2019 to 2021, the two governing bodies worked on a radical new collaboration, to give each series a technical ruleset so similar in performance that both types of car could compete in both championships. That makes this more affordable era twice as accessible! It was not easy, but it has happened. Replacing DPI is the Le Mans-Daytona hybrid (LMDh) class, known in North America as Grand Touring Prototype (GTP) as a historical reference.

On a technical level, IMSA GTP cars differ in layout; whereas an FIA LMH needs to be conceived from the ground up and there are few restrictions on hybrid system components, a GTP is based around one of four supplied 'spines' (tub chassis) from Dallara, Oreca, Multimatic or Ligier. The engine can be anything that helps you hit 670 horsepower*, but the hybrid system is a standardised unit supplied for all GTP cars, driving only the rear wheels alongside said engine. It can be calibrated by the teams, though. The reason for this format is that it works as a smooth evolution from the non-hybrid DPIs, which were also built around LMP2 safety cells for simplicity's sake.

*Regarding this power output limit: as LMH allows non-manufacturer teams to run non-hybrid cars, the activation of a hybrid car's electric motor must coincide with a commensurate reduction in the combustion engine's output, so that total system output never exceeds 500KW/670PS, or whichever exact number the BoP nudges you up or down to this month...

So, to enter this new expanded world of endurance racing, constructors can choose whether to prioritise design freedom and pure DNA, or to prioritise lower costs and reducing the manufacturing to-do list. LMH is purer, GTP is cheaper, both are covered by Balance of Performance to make it a fair fight regardless.

Cadillac, Porsche, Glickenhaus, Toyota, Peugeot, Ferrari, Vanwall

It's interesting to note who's made what decision along the way. GM/Cadillac and Acura have naturally gone the GTP route, with Cadillac entering both championships immediately and Acura only doing IMSA racing for now (hence it's not pictured above). Toyota has continued sticking around and brings an updated GR010 (LMH) to WEC only. Porsche is well capable of constructing an LMH from a clean sheet, having previously dominated LMP1, GT1, Group C, etc... but upon returning to prototypes has gone the cheaper GTP route instead, which feels a little cynical (Audi was going to re-skin the resulting '963' but axed that plan to enter F1 instead). BMW has done similarly but has chosen to only race in IMSA this year before expanding into WEC for 2024. Peugeot, whose 908 HDI diesel won Le Mans in 2009, has returned with by far and away the coolest car of the bunch, the 9X8 (LMH). Just look at it! It looks like a Mohican spaceship and has no rear wing!

But grabbing the headlines harder than any other entry is the monumental return of Ferrari, whose 499P (LMH) marks their first official top-category WEC entry in 50 years (although that's ignoring the semi-official 333 SP that raced IMSA in the 1990s). The livery and possibly some of the body shapes it boasts are modernised takes on the 312 PB that raced in 1973. The hybrid battery is from the Formula 1 car, the 2.9 V6 twin-turbo engine is from the 296 GT3 car and it's being run by AF Corse, who last year won the final edition of the GTE Pro World Championship with the last evolution of the 488 GTE.

Ferrari AF Corse 499P (LMH) and 488 GTE (GTE-Am)
Image from Michelin's FB page

The two-day Prologue pre-season test has revealed an approximation of an early pecking order, with all the usual caveats of not knowing people's run plan and such like when comparing testing times. What's interesting from a narrative perspective is that the battle for pole looks to be between Toyota and Cadillac, who are the two mainstays from two formerly separate championships. In this year of convergence, Toyota vs Cadillac is the sportscar racing equivalent of Batman vs Spiderman; two heroes from disparate universes making an unlikely and ambitious crossover. Fascinating!

For fans of a more old-school match-up, just behind those two we also have Porsche vs Ferrari for the first time in this category since the 1970s. Seen the original Le Mans movie? Here's a real-world sequel. Make some popcorn... oh, and Peugeot had to face off against Toyota at the end of the Group C era, so there's some precedent there too.

SCG 007 (LMH), Toyota GR010 (LMH), Iron Dames Porsche 911 RSR (GTE-Am)
Image from Michelin's FB page

But endurance racing isn't just about large OEMs beating the shit out of eachother and never has been. The indie curios are what characterise the sport just as much. Sadly Rebellion Racing isn't here for this party, which feels wrong after they were such a respected stalwart of the LMP1 underdogs, but there are two 'garagiste' teams to look out for. Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus, founded by the... 'characterful' American film director and Ferrari collector James Glickenhaus, entered the first season of LMH in 2021 (before IMSA had introduced GTP, which started racing this year) with its own car design and a made-to-order twin-turbo V8 from specialist supplier PIPO Moteurs. Last year they could only afford a partial season, but they proved their worth in that time with a podium at Le Mans. How will they fare with more competition?

The team formerly known as ByKolles is now, despite some legal wrangling, using the revived name of Vanwall and brings its 'Vandervell 680' equipped with the naturally-aspirated Gibson 4.5 V8 previously seen in the Rebellion/Alpine LMP1 cars and detuned to suit LMH. They've had to claw their way onto the grid after initially being rejected by the FIA last year, and they bring Jacques Villeneuve with them. Let's see how that goes...

Additionally, not present at the Prologue is a team bringing back another long-lost name: Isotta-Fraschini. After months of renders and promises, they have built a car. But not in time to get a full-season entry. They are now angling for partial-season entry on a race-by-race basis and hoping they'll earn a more legitimate place for next season that way, whilst acquainting themselves with the sport in the meantime by working with the Vector Sport LMP2 team.

The Centenary Running of the Le Mans 24 Hours

2023 Le Mans 24h Centenary Trophy

Don't call it the 100th running, because it's not. 2023 will see the 91st running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the greatest and most prestigious endurance race of them all. However, the 1st running took place in 1923, which you don't need to be good at maths to work out was 100 years ago. As such, this is going to be the biggest event it has ever been before, with celebrations, parades, pomp, circumstance and at some stage a very long motor race as well, just to cap things off. We'll have to see whether they go just as big for the 100th running in (I presume) 2032, but a 100th-anniversary event is one of those things that can only happen once. I have a ticket. If you don't then you're too late – around 300,000 people beat you to it and raceday(s) tickets are now sold out. Best find yourself a live stream come the middle of June! Or suffer the Eurosport broadcast...

Hypercar Bluffer's Guide

Right, so if you're now getting the point and thinking of watching (the Sebring 1000 Miles is on Friday 17th March and in the UK can be watched on Eurosport, or is globally accessed on the FIA WEC app for a fee), then you'll want to be able to tell who's who. Whilst there are two car types, all of these machines are entered in the WEC's Hypercar class with red number boxes, as of the opening round at Sebring, and will be the cars competing for outright wins. Unless they all break down.

Here's each Hypercar-class machine at a glance, in alphabetical order:

Cadillac V-Series.R

IMSA GTP (Dallara) | 5.5-litre V8 (NA) | Rear-axle ERS
Easily the best-sounding car in this or any sportscar class, with the American muscle soundtrack sharpened-up and revving higher than you'd expect... and yet somehow they seem to get competitive-enough fuel mileage! Cadillac took three cars to the opening round of its local IMSA Sportscar Championship – the Daytona 24 Hours – but just one of those (the blue one) is doing 'double duty' with a full-season entry in the World Endurance Championship. It will be rejoined by its brethren at Le Mans, where some IMSA-specific crews will be allowed in with the WEC folks for the main event of the year (Porsche is doing similarly).

-

Ferrari 499P

FIA LMH | 2.9-litre V6-TT | Front-axle ERS

All aboard the Tifosi hype train! GTE Pro champions AF Corse (and its drivers) have been promoted into the top class, but the 499P is the last manufacturer-entered car to be completed, having turned its first wheel in July 2022 when Peugeot was already racing, so while they've covered 24,000km in private testing, they've had to do it in the shortest window of time. They have openly talked about prioritising reliability from the start, and surely every team grappling with a brand new car/category will find teething troubles. The pace looks decent in pre-season testing, but the toughness of the two debuting Ferraris will be interesting to understand as the racing begins.

-

Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus 007

FIA LMH | 3.5-litre V8-TT | No ERS

From the Ferrari-made car to the car made for a guy who owns a lot of Ferraris. This isn't Glickenhaus's first original car – you can go back over a decade to the F430-based Pininfarina P4/5 Competizione that raced around the Nürburgring and get more bespoke from that point forwards – but after spending a season and a half keeping Toyota amused with the only other first-year LMH machine, it's now time for them to see what they're really made of as an independent team taking on the big dogs. They are running one car for the full season, plus a second one exclusively at Le Mans.

-

Peugeot 9X8

FIA LMH | 2.6-litre V6-TT | Front-axle ERS

It's just SO COOL! Because WEC was a winter series that ended with Le Mans in June, back when Peugeot started pursuing this project in 2019, when the pandemic then saw it shift back to a single-calendar-year schedule Peugeot suddenly found its development plan was half a year out of sync. Rather than rush itself, though, it committed to only the post-LM rounds of the 2022 season, giving it three dress rehearsals in Monza, Fuji and Bahrain with newborn machinery before the real performing has to begin in 2023. They found it tough, with reliability issues and inconsistent pace at all three rounds. Is that an omen to all the newcomers? And have they sorted it all out? It's not long until we start to get answers. I hope they have. It's so cool...

-

Porsche 963

IMSA GTP (Multimatic) | 4.6-litre V8-TT | Rear-axle ERS

Porsche and endurance racing go together seamlessly. They've won Le Mans 19 times over the past 53 years (the record). No GT race is complete without a 911 and its flat-six howl filling the air (there are a few of those in the GTE-Am class this year, to be sure). Whilst I'd consider it more 'pukka' if they'd used their free choice of car formats to go the LMH route, there's no doubting that the 963 – named as a spiritual follow-up to the 962 ground-effect car that dominated Group C in the 1980s – is a big deal in the make-up of WEC's new era. They've raced at IMSA's big 24h race at Daytona already, where issues with the hybrid system hampered what looked at times like very strong pace. I would expect them to be a factor before long, though.

They are also the only manufacturer selling customer cars to racing teams in the first year, with JOTA Sport and Proton Competition getting theirs in the post next month. Maybe that's why they went the lower-cost route...

-

Toyota GR010

FIA LMH | 3.5-litre V6-TT | Front-axle ERS

Some argue that Toyota kept LMP1 alive in its final years. Some argue that they had no real competition in that time, as the FIA tried holding them back to let the independent, non-hybrid LMP1s catch-up whilst also (tinfoil hat alert) quietly wanting the only team with hybrid cars to win and make the series look environmentally on-point. All that philosophical strain and internet arguing is out of the window now, thank goodness, but the result of the 2018-2022 lean years in prototype racing is that Toyota went from perennial runners-up to winning Le Mans five times in a row. One can't help thinking, however, that winning a sixth against names like Porsche, Ferrari and Peugeot would mean quite a lot more to them, and everybody else, than four of those five put together (the first is always uniquely important, no? Especially after their 2016 nightmare).

What Toyota does have in its advantage is that Gazoo Racing is a well-oiled machine going up against teams and crews that aren't as dialled-in as they are. How many of Audi's Le Mans wins came from them simply executing their race better than everyone else, including those with faster cars than theirs? This is endurance racing. Wisdom, fortitude and being well-rehearsed are three things as good as horsepower.

-

Vanwall Vandervell 680

FIA LMH | 4.5-litre V8 | No ERS

When this team was called ByKolles and entered cars like the ENSO CLM 01, they... didn't impress often. A cursory glance of their Wiki reveals that in the 10 times they've entered Le Mans, they've had a DNF in 9 of them. Yet still, here they are, trying again. It's admirable in its own way. During the Prologue, however, they were plum last among the Hypercars and "star" driver Jacques Villeneuve (1997 Formula 1 World Champion and frequent F1 Pundit Unpopular Hot Takes World Champion thereafter) was literally seconds behind his co-drivers on lap times and struggling to match the meant-to-be-inferior LMP2 cars. Once the racing kicks off, legal rights to intellectual property could become the least of their worries...

Don't Forget the Other Classes!

I've nearly made a cardinal sin of endurance racing coverage here, and focused solely on the top class. LMP2 is carrying on for the next couple of seasons at least. Whilst previously there were multiple chassis suppliers, the WEC lineup for these cars is an Oreca 07 one-make series nowadays, with the standardised engine being a 4.2-litre Gibson flat-plane V8. Think of it like Formula 2. The cars are basically the same, so it's down to the teams and drivers to make the difference. The racing can be just as close and just as random as Formula 2 as well! Pick a team with a driver you recognise and cheer them on. It'll be fun. At Le Mans, you could just write all the LMP2 entries on a pack of cards and shuffle them every 20 minutes and it'd be about the same as how the running order can change.

Iron Dames Porsche 911 RSR (GTE-Am), Prema Oreca 07 Gibson (LMP2)

Last but by no means the least entertaining, is the GTE field. Up until recently there were two ways to enter in a GTE car (a unique spec of supercar-based racer for WEC/LM) depending on driver lineup, but with manufacturers decrying the cost of GTE when GT3 is so much more accessible, the all-Pro class has been axed for this year. GTE-Am is the final fling for LM-GTE cars before they are completely replaced by GT3 machines, so all the cars are of a year-old (ex-Pro) design and feature the teams with, generally, the smallest budgets. They're the slowest cars on the grid, but GT racing by any subdivision tends to serve up unpredictability, especially with wildcard 'gentleman drivers' in the mix. 

The pink 911 you see above is the Iron Dames team, sister car to the Iron Lynx team and running an all-female driver lineup. Don't roll your eyes, cynics; they have finished WEC rounds on the GTE-Am podium and taken victory in the European Le Mans Series. Also representing women behind the wheel is reigning Ferrari Challenge Europe champion Doriane Pin, racing with Prema in LMP2 (car also pictured above).

If one class is spreading out and getting a bit boring, hunt around for footage and info about one of the other classes. There is always, always something happening during an endurance race. You just have to keep looking for it. The sport deserves to enjoy plenty more people doing just that, now that it is reinventing itself to create a potential golden age.