The new combinations to look out for as GT3 arrives in the WEC

Variety is back in vogue in the World Endurance Championship’s GT class. While there was nothing wrong with GTE Am’s sea of Porsches and Ferraris, with the odd Aston Martin and Corvette mixed in, the new era has plenty of upsides – chiefly, that nine manufacturers will be represented, each with two cars.

At least 18 GTs will be on the grid at each round, four more than last season’s highest non-Le Mans tally. It would surely be more had the full season overall entry not been capped at 37, since LMGT3 cars have ABS, which make them more accessible to the non-professional bronze drivers who are GT racing’s lifeblood.

“It makes it easier to make that last step quicker,” explains WEC newcomer James Cottingham, “because you get so much more seat time in a GT3 car quickly, and just transfer that to WEC where it’s not about relearning the car, so to speak.”

Pro drivers with allegiances to manufacturers that previously lacked an eligible car now have a pathway to the top. Sure enough, the 2024 grid features a wealth of experienced GT3 racers new to the WEC.

Many drivers predict that ABS will make the racing closer too. Much will also depend on how teams acclimatise to the new-for-2024 Goodyear tyre, designed to start from cold without heaters. ASP Lexus boss Jerome Policand has been impressed by their performance so far in testing, finding warm-up is “not a problem at all. It’s not a tricky situation when you exit the pits, they work well. Now the key will be if we can do two stints with the same set.”

As in Hypercar, cars will be subject to limitations on energy consumption per stint. This is measured by driveshaft torque sensors and covered by the Balance of Performance.

The Qatar Prologue ended with as many different makes in the top four on the timesheets, with McLaren heading Ferrari, Lexus and Aston Martin, that teases a wide-open season ahead...

Aston Martin Vantage GT3

HOR team continues with unchanged lineup from last year as it embarks on a first full WEC campaign

Photo by: Shameem Fahath

#27 Alex Riberas/Daniel Mancinelli/Ian James
#777 Marco Sorensen/Erwan Bastard/Clement Mateu

The Aston Martin Vantage GT3’s latest evolution will arrive in the WEC with two squads that partnered the marque’s Prodrive-run Aston Martin Racing operation last year.

Heart of Racing’s line-up, which made its series debut at Spa under the NorthWest AMR banner, is unchanged after taking a best finish of third in Bahrain from its four GTE Am outings. Pro racer Riberas enters his third full season with a squad he first represented in 2020 alongside veteran James, an LMP2 podium finisher at Le Mans in 2005, and silver Mancinelli.

D’Station Racing has an all-new line-up led by Aston works driver Sorensen, whose most recent of his three WEC titles came in GTE Am in 2022. His French team-mates are both WEC rookies, but experienced Porsche racer Mateu’s links with Aston date back to the FIA GT1 era when his family team Hexis claimed the 2011 teams’ title. Promising silver Bastard, a French and European GT4 champion, has a year of GT3 racing under his belt in Sainteloc-run Audis.

Sorensen says the 2024-spec Vantage is “basically a brand-new car” such is the extent of its upgrades to bodywork and suspension, which he feels makes it “definitely easier to drive”. “It should be more in the window when you get to the new tracks we’re going to this year,” he adds.

BMW M4 GT3

Rossi's silver categorisation allows him to remain with Martin after success in GTWCE Sprint last year

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#31 Augusto Farfus/Sean Gelael/Darren Leung
#46 Maxime Martin/Valentino Rossi/Ahmad Al Harthy

Rossi’s arrival to the WEC with BMW has naturally dominated discussions over WRT’s entry into LMGT3. The MotoGP legend’s silver driver grading allows him to continue a partnership with fellow factory driver Martin that yielded a first GT World Challenge Europe Sprint victory at Misano last year. They are joined by capable bronze Al Harthy, who won two Blancpain Endurance Pro-Am titles in a successful GT3 spell prior to his WEC debut with TF Sport last year.

Gelael remains with WRT after two seasons with the Vincent Vosse-run squad in LMP2. It’s the Indonesian’s first full season in GTs, though he has raced the M4 in the Dubai 24 Hours. He’s joined by reigning British GT champion Leung, who claimed the title aboard an M4, and veteran factory BMW ace Farfus, back in the WEC for the first time since he raced an Aston Martin in 2021.

WRT’s LMGT3 crew may be WEC newcomers – its LMP2 team has transitioned to Hypercar – and in just its second year with the new-for-2022 M4, but has GTWCE laurels by the bucketload and boasts impeccable credentials. Sporting director Kurt Mollekens, the 1996 Zandvoort Formula 3 Masters winner, previously ran his own KTR single-seater squad, while team manager Elliot Hoffet this year celebrates his 10th anniversary with WRT after spells in Fun Cup and TCR.

Ferrari 296 GT3

Ferrari enters the new season seeking to add to its 296's successes at the Nordschleife and Daytona

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

#54 Davide Rigon/Francesco Castellacci/Thomas Flohr
#55 Alessio Rovera/Simon Mann/Francois Heriau

Since its ORECA-built 296 GT3 entered the stage last year, the 488’s successor has already proven its worth to Ferrari with wins in the 24-hour races at the Nurburgring and Daytona. Now the AF Corse-run cars, overseen as in the 2023 WEC by the acclaimed Ron Reichert, who led the Red Bull-backed Ferrari DTM project in 2021-22, will seek further glory on the biggest stage of them all.

Factory drivers Rigon (part of AF’s GTE Pro line-up from 2014-20) and rising star Rovera lead the respective crews, the older Italian fresh from conquering Daytona with Risi. Ominously, Rigon suggests “this year for LMGT3 we are much more prepared” to extract the car’s full potential.

As in 2023, Rigon partners Flohr and Castellacci, the duo entering their seventh WEC season together in AF-run equipment. They will naturally look forward to Fuji, where last year Flohr scored his second win at the track where he broke his duck in 2017.

Rovera, the 2021 GTE Am champion, was part of the line-up that gave the 296 its first GTWCE win in the 2023 Endurance Cup finale at Barcelona. He joins experienced prototype racer Heriau, who has been gaining 296 mileage in the Asian Le Mans Series with Mann and Rigon, the trio peaking with third in Dubai.

McLaren 720S GT3 Evo

Saucy ended up with the fastest time from the Prologue as United returns to GT racing

Photo by: Shameem Fahath

#59 Gregoire Saucy/Nicolas Costa/James Cottingham
#95 Marino Sato/Nico Pino/Josh Caygill

In the absence of LMP2 (apart from at Le Mans), Richard Dean and Zak Brown’s United Autosports remains on the grid courtesy of a tie-up with McLaren. United’s established technical structure remains intact, with the programme overseen as in P2 by technical director Jakob Andreasen and team manager Simon Finnis.

Its 2024 line-up has a grand total of one WEC start courtesy of 19-year-old Chilean Pino, who took third in P2 at Le Mans last year around a race-winning European Le Mans Series campaign with Duqueine. But what they lack in experience, United’s crews compensate for in promise. Ex-Formula 2 racer Sato claimed three ELMS wins with United’s P2 operation last year, while former bike racer Caygill is known to the team from ELMS LMP3 outings. Pino will be shuffled out of the McLaren line-up into United’s LMP2 squad for Le Mans, where Caygill is replaced by Hiroshi Hamaguchi.

Saucy switches to sportscars after three podiums in two seasons of F3, and is joined by reigning Brazilian Carrera Cup champion Costa – who as the silver could prove United’s secret weapon. Accomplished historics racer Cottingham completes the line-up after finishing second in British GT last season before gaining experience with the 720S, which received an Evo upgrade in 2023, in the Asian LMS. “The McLaren seemed like the strongest package, especially with United running it,” he says.

Lamborghini Huracan GT3 EVO2

The all-female Iron Dames team will continue with the Huracan it campaigned in GTWCE last year

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#60 Franck Perera/Matteo Cressoni/Claudio Schiavoni
#85 Michelle Gatting/Doriane Pin/Sarah Bovy

After running Porsches with Proton during last year’s WEC, Iron Lynx switches to Lamborghini for its LMGT3 attack to align with its Hypercar assault. But the Andrea Piccini-led team hasn’t completely ditched its Weissach links. The Italian squad is running 911s in the ELMS “because we like to make it a bit more complicated for us,” Bovy jests.

The Belgian reprises her partnership with Gatting that netted a first WEC GTE Am victory for the all-female Iron Dames in the 2023 Bahrain finale. Mercedes junior Pin joins them in place of Dames project manager Rahel Frey after Gatting was reclassified as a gold.

Bovy, the highest-placed returning bronze from 2023, accepts that the deeper field means “we have no idea what we’re going to be faced with”. But all three Dames have raced the Huracan – which gained its second Evo update in 2022 – in GTWCE Endurance and IMSA SportsCar rounds over the past 12 months, with former LMP2 racer Pin qualifying third of the GT entrants at Petit Le Mans in October.

DTM race winner Perera gets a long-awaited WEC debut in the lurid yellow Lambo, after the ex-Toyota Formula 1 tester’s sporadic entries with Iron Lynx in IMSA. He joins the Schiavoni-Cressoni pairing that peaked with second at Monza alongside Alessio Picariello last year.

Ford Mustang GT3

Proton is one of several teams forging a new manufacturer relationship and developing a new car to boot

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#77 Ben Barker/Zacharie Robichon/Ryan Hardwick
#88 Dennis Olsen/Mikkel Pedersen/Giorgio Roda

The Blue Oval returns to the WEC for the first time since its four-year campaign with the Ford GT ended in 2019, with the new Mustang GT3, reprising its technical cooperation with Multimatic. The decision of Proton Competition boss Christian Ried to switch camps from Porsche to Ford wasn’t only down to pragmatism, since he sought to secure the future of a team that has been a GTE Am mainstay since 2012. It continues a relationship with Multimatic that dates back to 2021.

The team has already raced the car at Daytona, where its GTD pro-am entry featuring Hardwick and Ford works driver Olsen retired with accident damage.

Roda, 29, was part of Proton’s roster that finished second this month in the Asian LMS LMP2 standings. He joins Pedersen, part of Proton’s GTE Am winning line-up at Monza last year, and DTM race winner Olsen, the Norwegian branching out after racing Porsches since 2016.

The Robichon-Hardwick axis that stormed to the ELMS LMGTE title last year is partnered by Barker, now a factory Ford driver after eight years in GTE Am partnering Michael Wainwright. The Brit concedes that “there’s going to be a lot of learning on the race weekends” as the programme gathers momentum, but is anxious to get going in Qatar. “We’re chomping at the bit to get started,” he adds.

Lexus RC F GT3

Experience of former Toyota Hypercar racer Lopez will help ASP adapt to WEC

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

#78 Kelvin van der Linde/Timur Boguslavskiy/Arnold Robin
#87 Jose Maria Lopez/Esteban Masson/Takeshi Kimura

The French ASP squad will return to Le Mans for the first time since 2014 after swapping Mercedes machinery for Lexus. Jerome Policand’s operation, which won the Spa 24 Hours in 2022 and the past two GTWCE Endurance titles, has had links with Lexus parent marque Toyota for the past 12 months, running its GR Supra GT4 Evo in France last year. That project’s lead engineer, Adrien Cera, now heads up the Lexus programme, which has benefited from the input of IMSA GTD Pro champ Jack Hawksworth and TRD USA during testing.

“We had roughly two and a half months to make everything happen since Zandvoort, the last race in [GTWCE] Sprint with Mercedes, until we had to load the container to Qatar,” sighs Policand. “We needed support from everyone.”

Two-time WEC champion Lopez joins after six years in the top class with Toyota, and his Le Mans-winning experience will be invaluable as ASP adapts to the WEC. Kimura, a series regular with Kessel-run Ferraris, and 2021 French F4 champion Masson complete the roster.

Two-time Nurburgring 24 Hours winner van der Linde gets his shot at the world stage in the sister car alongside ASP regular Boguslavskiy, who conquered GTWCE Endurance last year with two Mercedes works drivers. Robin won last year’s Le Mans Cup GT3 title with an Aston Martin.

Chevrolet Corvette Z06 GT3.R

TF Sport has traded Aston Martin for Corvette

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#81 Charlie Eastwood/Rui Andrade/Tom van Rompuy
#82 Daniel Juncadella/Sebastien Baud/Hiroshi Koizumi

The 2022 GTE Am title-winning TF Sport squad of Tom Ferrier will run a GT car other than an Aston Martin for the first time since its foundation when it fields the brand-new Z06 GT3.R in Qatar. “For everybody it’s a completely new challenge – how the car works from the pitstops and everything else,” points out Eastwood, a team regular since 2018 who claimed Le Mans GTE Am spoils with TF in 2020.

Now a GM factory driver, the Northern Irishman got a first taste of the V8-powered ’Vette for customer squad AWA at Daytona, but TF’s pre-Qatar test wasn’t quite so productive thanks to flooding in Dubai. Eastwood is joined aboard the yellow-nosed #81 by experienced prototype racer van Rompuy and Angolan racing hero Andrade, who retains his silver driver grading after scooping last year’s LMP2 crown with WRT.

In the reverse colour scheme on car #82 with the black nose, Juncadella joins Corvette’s works roster after many successful years with ASP-run Mercedes. For his WEC debut, the 2022 Spa 24 Hours winner and GTWCE Endurance champion teams up with fellow series rookie Baud, the Frenchman also an AMG GT3 regular in recent years. Bronze-rated Koizumi was the Le Mans Cup GT3 runner-up last year in a Ferrari, and raced at Fuji in a first WEC appearance since the same event in 2013.

Porsche 911 GT3-R

Fresh from its Asian LMS title victory, the #92 crew is bidding for WEC glory too

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#91 Richard Lietz/Morris Schuring/Yasser Shahin
#92 Klaus Bachler/Joel Sturm/Alex Malykhin

The Manthey team’s credentials need little introduction given its years of running Porsche’s GTE Pro operation in the WEC from 2013-22, adding three Le Mans class wins to its brace of GT drivers’ and manufacturers’ titles. The team run by brothers Nicolas and Martin Raeder has good form in GT3 racing too, and this month added Bathurst 12 Hour glory to the DTM title it earned last season in the first year for Porsche’s new 4.2-litre 992 model.

Lietz, a 2015 WEC GT champion with Manthey, returns after being absent from the full season in 2023 for the first time since the series’ inception. Shahin, owner of The Bend circuit in Australia, and 19-year-old Porsche Supercup standout Schuring – the Dutch youngster was aged two when Lietz took the first of his four Le Mans class victories in 2007! – join him in a 911 entered under the Manthey EMA banner.

Belarusian Malykhin, the British GT Silver/Am champion in 2022, graduates under the Manthey Pure Rxcing banner with the drivers he partnered in GTWCE Endurance last season. His alliance with 22-year-old Sturm, who enters his third full season in a GT3-spec 911, and works driver Bachler has already snared the Asian LMS GT title this season. It will be Bachler’s first WEC appearance since Le Mans 2017; the Austrian has since largely focused on GT3 rather than GTE.

Manthey is gunning to put Porsche on the top of the pile

Photo by: Shameem Fahath

GT racing gets more eyeballs

Several elements combine to make sportscar racing difficult for newcomers to follow. But in streamlining the World Endurance Championship’s class structure for 2024, not only should it be more straightforward to grasp for those lured in by the current golden era, but it will also ensure that the GT battles get a larger share of the television coverage.

It’s the nature of the beast with multi-class racing that the fight for outright honours will get top billing. But for the first decade of the WEC’s modern existence, the rest of the pie had to be split three ways between LMP2, GTE Pro and GTE Am. Now the structure is somewhat simplified thanks to the vast growth of the Hypercar class, which prompted the call to drop the LMP2 category and devote the rest of the grid to LMGT3.

Based on his experience in the IMSA SportsCar Championship, BMW driver Augusto Farfus believes enthusiasts are set for a treat.

“I’ve seen in America that many times the GT class gives better racing because the cars to a certain extent allow for more contact, more close racing,” explains the Brazilian, who raced the M Hybrid V8 GTP car Stateside in 2023. “In IMSA especially there is as much attention on the GTD class as there is on LMDh, so I think it’s a matter of time that people understand.

“Of course, the WEC having these three classes in the past, it was not so easy also to broadcast the races because there was always something going on in the classes, and now we’re going to have pretty much two distinct classes running together. I have no doubt that the show will be nice and the fans will learn to appreciate the GT class as well.”

The absence of LMP2 cars is also a win-win for drivers, reckons Aston Martin ace Marco Sorensen. The reduction in performance forced on the de facto single-make ORECA class since 2021, to ensure that they didn’t usurp the new breed of Hypercars, meant they had a smaller advantage relative to the GT pack and therefore a greater impact on their race when overtaking.

“[The organisers] had to slow down the LMP2s so much in the past for the Hypercars,” states the Dane. “It was a whole mess where the slower the LMP2s actually got, the more annoying it became for the GT cars.”

With the LMP2 category out of the equation, LMGT3 should get a larger slice of the TV footage

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images