How Ford is "hitting milestones" in preparation for WEC Hypercar assault

“One of those goosebump moments.” That’s how Mark Rushbrook describes seeing the new Ford LMDh with which it will enter the World Endurance Championship’s Hypercar ranks next year run on track for first time at Paul Ricard in August.

He’s got skin the game as global director of Ford Racing and one of the key architects of the project, but a first sight of the American marque’s latest sportscar challenger, whether in the flesh next year or in the photographs released so far, should excite any motorsport fan. That’s because it is the car with which the Blue Oval is bidding to reprise its successes at the Le Mans 24 Hours of the late 1960s. 

The significance of Ford’s return to the top flight of international sportscar racing stretches beyond the Ford Motor Company’s rich racing pedigree that over time has straddled just about every format of motorsport and today embraces everything from Formula 1 to drag racing. It is important because this is Ford’s first serious bid to win Le Mans outright since the heady days more than half a century ago when it completed its quartet of consecutive victories in 1969. 

Ford hasn’t been a stranger to endurance racing in general and Le Mans in particular during the interim. The eternal Cosworth DFV, funded by the company ahead of bursting upon the Formula 1 scene in 1967, twice won overall at Le Mans and claimed multiple class victories in Group C2 in the 1980s and into the early ‘90s. More recently, its Ford GT won in GTE Pro on debut in 2016, 50 years on from Chris Amon and Bruce McLaren taking the first of the four overalls in 1966 with a Shelby American-run Ford MkII. Since 2024, it has had a place on the grid at the Circuit de la Sarthe in LMGT3 with its Mustang GT3, a car that has given Ford a global footprint in sportscar racing. 

Yet Ford’s successes at the top of the sportscar pile have been confined to North America in the years since ’69 when JW Automotive Le Mans took win number four with a Gulf-liveried GT40 driven by Jacky Ickx and Jackie Oliver. There were victories in the original IMSA GT Championship from 1981-86 for three different kinds of Mustang racer and its Ford EcoBoost turbo engine programme yielded a Daytona 24 Hours victory in 2015. But at world championship level, Ford’s sole attempt as a factory to reprise its 1960s Le Mans triumphs came with the C100 Group C prototype in the early 1980s. The project masterminded by Ford of Europe was beset by delays and political machinations before being cut down ahead of a 1983 WEC campaign just as it looked like it might come good. 
  
The more recent backstory of Ford’s Le Mans adventures played as an important part in its return in Hypercar as the ones in the depth of history. The Ford GT and Mustang GT3 were important flags in the sand on the road. They helped to whet Ford’s appetite for what was to come. “The Ford family and the company leadership saw the success of the Ford GT, and I do believe it re-whetted their appetite,” says Rushbrook. 

Ford looked seriously at a return to top-flight sportscar racing as the GT programme drew to an end, he explains. But with uncertainty over the future rules landscape, the timing wasn’t right: “At the point we needed to make decisions, it didn’t seem right to us - there wasn’t full clarity on what was going to happen.” The shifting sands of sportscar racing instead led Ford in another direction. 

The replacement of GTE regulations, first in the IMSA SportsCar Championship in 2021 and then in WEC for 2024, presented what Rushbrook calls “a great opportunity to develop our global sportscar, the Mustang — our icon — as a GT3 car and race it IMSA as a factory and with customers all over the world. There was also the opportunity to have a GT4 Mustang and a one-make car with our Darkhorse R. That was a massive amount of work to do: to develop, set up the manufacturing and customer support for three very different cars. That consumed us.”

#88 Proton Competition Ford Mustang LMGT3: Stefano Gattuso, Giammarco Levorato, Logan Sargeant

Photo by: FIA WEC / DPPI

All three cars arrived in competition in 2024. Ford gained entries for the WEC’s new LMGT3 class, which put Ford back on the Le Mans grid that summer after four years away. 

“We were so happy to have our icon at Le Mans and will continue racing the car in GT3 for as long as we can,” continues Rushbrook. “That is when it became clear that we wanted to be back in the top class. That’s when we started to ask the question, What would it take to do that?” Ford’s joy at being back competing in a race so embedded in its history coincided with an announcement that the lifecycles of the twin LMDh and Le Mans Hypercar rulesets were to be extended by two years through to the end of 2029. 

Within six months or so, Ford Racing had worked out the answers to the questions. At the end of January 2025, it revealed to the world that it would be expanding its presence in the WEC by entering Hypercar with a new LMDh. Another expansion of its motorsport portfolio, announced almost exactly two years before, was central to the decision to choose the LMDh route using an off-the-shelf chassis spine and hybrid system.

“We are hitting all the test milestones"

Dan Sayers

Ford revealed its return to F1 with Red Bull Racing in February 2023. A first factory involvement at the pinnacle of the sport since 2004 and the end of its campaigns with Jaguar, then part of its portfolio of brands, ticked some  of the same boxes that LMH would in terms of development of a motor generator unit and the battery. “We looked at what was available for us to learn in LMDh and LMH, we felt that the incremental learning that you get from LMH wasn’t worth it. The control systems are maybe the biggest area where learnings can be applied to production vehicles.” They remain free in LMDh.

A series of announcements followed as the Ford Hypercar programme gathered pace. ORECA Motorsport was revealed as chassis development partner in the summer of ’25, then at the beginning of this year, it was finally confirmed that the car would be powered by a normally-aspirated V8 based on the same architecture as the Coyote V8 in the Mustang. Significantly, it has been billed as the first bespoke race engine to be developed and built in-house by Ford at company headquarters at Dearborn to the west of Motor City, Detroit. 

Fast forward six months, and the first Ford LMDh — the type designation won’t be announced until the end of November - was up and running and Rushbrook had his “goosebump moment”. The car hit the track on 5 August, with a series of systems tests on the Ricard activity centre track and then on the airfield adjacent to the main circuit. That was followed by three days on the full track with two thirds of the 2027 WEC driver roster — Logan Sargeant, Mike Rockenfeller, Matt Campbell and Tom Blomqvist — taking turns at the wheel. The other third, Nick Yelloly and Sebastian Priaulx, were present for the tests.

So far so good, reckons Dan Sayers who was announced as the programme manager in summer of ’25. “We are hitting all the test milestones,” says the Briton, who was recruited from Red Bull Powertrains, which has developed the F1 turbo V6 that bears Ford’s logos, and was previously technical director at Prodrive-run Aston Martin Racing. ”The target from a very long time ago was 5 August as the first shakedown day. Would we like more time? Who wouldn’t? But because we have been planning for it, it is going okay at the moment. We are on a condensed schedule so we have to maximise every second we are on the track.” 

Ford LMDh, Silverstone test

Photo by: Ford

That explained the unusual test programme at Ricard. “The schedule was one day, miss one, another day, miss four and then another day, so we had plenty of time to work on the control systems, analyse the data and make sure we were progressing every day,” explains Sayers. “It was quite rare to be able to do that, so that was good. We left Ricard, and I was pleasantly surprised where we were. First test and being able to do the laps - it ran round and worked as we expected.”

The Ford completed approximately 1300km (800 miles) at Ricard and then a similar distance at test number two at the Portimao circuit in Portugal’s Algarve. Next up were two days at Silverstone, which will host the WEC next year for the first time since 2019, just up the road from team headquarters in Witney, Oxfordshire. It has partnered with Venture Engineering to set-up an in-house operation to run its pair of LMDhs in WEC.

Monza is next on the schedule later this month when Ford will have two cars for the first time. Chassis number three will join number one from now on (chassis two is in the US for windtunnel testing at the Windshear facility in Concord, North Carolina). 

“For Monza it will be one for mechanical performance, let’s say, and one for control systems, and then from then on we will put one on endurance testing,” reveals Sayers. Ford is taking a leaf out of Ferrari’s book: it followed a similar route from the early stages of development of its 499P LMH over the second half of 2022.

A first endurance simulation is planned for Aragon in November before the development programme moves to North America for runs at Austin and Sebring. Another endurance test is planned over the demanding latter venue in the new year as Ford gears up for entering competition in the Qatar WEC season-opener at the end of March. 

Ford understands the scale of the task it is entering as it joins the packed Hypercar grid and goes up against seasoned competitors in pursuit of Le Mans and WEC honours. With the Ford GT, it won the 24 Hours on debut, presciently 50 years after the ’66 overall triumph, Rushbrook admitting that the “pressure was on” to mark the half century in style. Entering Hypercar, he admits, is “a bigger challenge given the number of competitors and the fact that many of them have four years of experience and many of them have done evo joker upgrades already”. He concedes that Ford is ”playing catch-up in so many ways” with a brand new car, engine and team. 

“We always compete to win races and championships,” adds Rushbrook. “Are we trying to win in 2027? Absolutely, but we recognise what a massive challenge it will be.”

Dan Sayers and Mark Rushbrook

Photo by: Ford