What to expect from sportscar racing's bold new Hypercar era

A new era starts for sportscar racing this weekend, what surely will be a golden one at that. Not that you would guess it by scanning down the entry list for Saturday’s opening round of the World Endurance Championship at Spa. There are only three cars entered in the new Hypercar class, and one of those is an old LMP1 machine.

Yet it’s who we know is coming that makes the future of top-flight prototype racing in the WEC and at the Le Mans 24 Hours such a mouthwatering prospect. 

Toyota’s new Le Mans Hypercar and the Signatech-run Alpine team’s ORECA-Gibson LMP1 design, which raced as the Rebellion R-13 over the past two seasons, will be joined by boutique manufacturer Glickenhaus sooner rather than later this season. Peugeot will arrive with an LMH in 2022, but the year after that is when it really all kicks off.

Ferrari will end its absence from the pinnacle of sportscar racing as a factory after 50 years when it brings out an LMH in 2023, while Porsche and Audi are returning to the WEC’s top division after much shorter absences via a second route into the Hypercar class. They are building LMP2-based LMDh hybrid prototypes for campaigns in both the WEC and the IMSA SportsCar Championship in North America. Both look pretty much certain to be represented in the WEC by a factory team and, in the fullness of time, customers. 

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That makes for a scrumptious future, not least because the top three in the all-time Le Mans winners’ table will be slugging it out in the WEC come 2023. Porsche’s 19, Audi’s 13 and Ferrari’s nine Le Mans combined, with three each for Toyota and Peugeot, make 47. So between them, the marques already committed to the new era of the WEC have notched up victories in more than 50% of the races since the 24 Hours was inaugurated back in 1923.

“What’s not to like?” says Jim Glickenhaus, the brainchild of the marque that bears his name. “Great-looking cars from some great manufacturers racing at great circuits around the world.”

#7 Toyota Gazoo Racing Toyota GR010 - Hybrid: Mike Conway, Kamui Kobayashi, Jose Maria Lopez

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

That’s a spot-on assessment of the future that lies in front of sportscar racing right now, and one that offers an insight as to why. Manufacturers can style their cars to look like their road-going machinery and then race them across the two major championships in the world. (IMSA is definitely working towards allowing LMH machinery, though it has yet to make a firm commitment.)

A car maker can get a double return on a relatively modest investment. The same aerodynamic rules that prescribe maximum downforce and minimum drag to make it affordable also offer the chance to build lookalikes. The windtunnel is no longer king when it comes to the shape of the cars.

There has already been more good news, and there is undoubtedly more to come. Honda’s Acura brand has committed to LMDh in North America. It’s not a global brand and doesn’t sell cars in Europe, but it will be on the grid at Le Mans if Wayne Taylor, whose eponymous team is now part of the Japanese company’s roster, has anything to do it with. 

So that’s six major car manufacturers as well as Glickenhaus committed to the Hypercar class. Or double the number that slugged it out in LMP1 in the WEC, not counting Nissan’s brief and unsuccessful dalliance in 2015. That’s put it at least on a par with the original version of what can generically be called the world sportscar championship in its late-1980s Group C pomp.

As glorious as the new era could be, it’s not going to be a bed of roses, not in the two seasons before Audi, Porsche and Ferrari arrive in 2023, and not when we get to that nirvana

And also more than raced at Le Mans in days when there was no world series in the late 1990s. There were five manufacturers chasing outright glory in both 1998 and 1999, plus Panoz, the period equivalent of Glickenhaus.

There could be more marques coming. General Motors, currently racing in IMSA’s outgoing Daytona Prototype international class with Cadillac, is evaluating segueing into LMDh with one of its brands, while Renault-owned Alpine is looking at what to do beyond this year.

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McLaren has long since made clear its aspirations to race at the front of the field at Le Mans, while Bentley and BMW are among the manufacturers to have expressed interest in joining the party. IMSA has put the number of manufacturers interested in LMDh as well into double figures. 

#10 Wayne Taylor Racing Acura ARX-05 Acura DPi: Ricky Taylor, Filipe Albuquerque, Alexander Rossi

Photo by: Richard Dole / Motorsport Images

But as glorious as the new era could be, it’s not going to be a bed of roses, not in the two seasons before Audi, Porsche and Ferrari arrive in 2023, and not when we get to that nirvana. 

Everything suggests that the two Glickenhaus-Pipo 007LMHs will be at round two of this year’s campaign at the Algarve Circuit in Portugal in mid-June, but when there will be another new-rules contender on the grid isn’t clear. Peugeot hasn’t decided when it will start racing over the course of 2022. No decision will be made until after it starts testing its new contender at the back end of this year. That could mean a very slim grid until well into next season. 

The Hypercar class, as the top division of the WEC is simply yet confusingly called, allows for multiple ways to skin the cat. The provision is still there, it should be pointed out, for someone to come with a road-based car, as Aston Martin was planning with its Valkyrie until early last year.

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The WEC is going to be fought out by machinery built to at least two rulesets, and LMH allows for different architectures of cars. The Toyota is a four-wheel-drive hybrid, as will be the Peugeot, while the Glickenhaus is rear-drive without energy retrieval. The LMDh rules mandate a spec rear-axle hybrid system. The job of the rulemakers – the FIA and the Automobile Club de l’Ouest – will be to equate the performance of the cars. 

It would be fatuous to pipe up and say that it would be better if there was just one set of rules. Some have suggested that the WEC should have adopted what became LMDh lock, stock and barrel. But that’s to ignore the tortuous journey that has brought sportscar racing to its current point. Don’t forget that the original LMH rules, which were very different to what we have ended up with, were published back in December 2018. There were multiple twists and turns along the way even before LMDh was announced in January of 2020. 

“It’s difficult to rewrite history, you can’t rewind,” says Pascal Vasselon, Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe technical director. “It has all been related to what the manufacturers around the table wanted.”

Toyota wanted to be able to develop a car with its own hybrid system, not to use a spec or one-make unit as prescribed in the LMDh rules. Put simply, no LMH would have meant no Toyota, and no Glickenhaus for that matter.

“An LMDh wouldn’t have been our car,” says marque founder Jim, who finds it amusing that he has built his own car, while Porsche, for all its rich sportscar pedigree, is developing a contender based on an off-the-shelf LMP2.

Romain Dumas, Glickenhaus 007 LMH

Photo by: Motul

The WEC was never going to disenfranchise Toyota, its longest-serving participant in its top class. That makes it difficult to imagine where the series would be right now had it abandoned the LMH rules. 

Those rules underwent a major philosophical change on their long and winding road. The idea that performance of different varieties of car would need to be equated under a Balance of Performance was adopted along with the road-car route at Aston Martin’s insistence. It was a condition of its commitment announced on the eve of Le Mans in 2019. Toyota has never made any secret of its dislike of the BoP.

“We are not fans of the BoP, but we have accepted it and stayed in the series for one reason – because it will attract more competitors,” says Vasselon. “It was the only way, and we are very pleased that the strategy is paying off and the championship has a lot of momentum.”

"Our job is to ensure that every car gets a good level of performance and longevity, and safety of course. If we force people with significant differences in architecture to use the same tyres, it will be unfair. Everyone will have access to the same technology" Matthieu Bonardel, Michelin

It is easy to look back at the efforts of the rulemakers to balance Toyota’s TS050 HYBRID with the non-hybrid LMP1 privateers over the course of the 2018-19 WEC superseason and conclude that equating hybrid four-wheel-drive machinery with non-hybrids driven through the rear wheels is a near-impossibility.

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Yet that is to overlook a key difference between then and now. Hybrid punch is no longer the performance tool it was. Not only is a total power for the cars laid down – 500kW or 670bhp – but so too is the power curve of the complete powertrain. No longer can hybrid boost be used to nip past slower cars in traffic. 

Nor is there a significant traction advantage from a front-axle energy-retrieval system. Hybrid power cannot be deployed until the car has reached 120km/h or 75mph in the dry, and a higher figure between 140 and 160km/h in the wet that had yet to be published as we went to press. 

Tyre longevity can be another key advantage of four-wheel drive. The rules allow two sets of tyre widths to LMH participants: 14in front and rear, and 13.5in front and 15in rear (LMDh rules will mandate the second option). Toyota has chosen the former and Glickenhaus the latter. 

#7 Toyota Gazoo Racing Toyota GR010 - Hybrid: Mike Conway, Kamui Kobayashi, Jose Maria Lopez #8 Toyota Gazoo Racing Toyota GR010 - Hybrid: Sebastien Buemi, Kazuki Nakajima, Brendon Hartley

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Michelin, now the one-make supplier in the Hypercar class, doesn’t believe that whether a car is two or four-wheel-drive will be the main differentiator in tyre wear. “The most important technical parameter that affects tyre life is the load, which is weight plus downforce,” says Michelin motorsport director Matthieu Bonardel.

But he is adamant that Michelin will not produce “tyres that degrade as a BoP tool”. It will be developing different tyres for different architectures of car, what he calls families, and can’t say for sure right now that Peugeot’s 2022 LMH contender will run on the same tyre as Toyota’s GR010 HYBRID.

“Our job is to ensure that every car gets a good level of performance and longevity, and safety of course,” explains Bonardel. “If we force people with significant differences in architecture to use the same tyres, it will be unfair. Everyone will have access to the same technology.”

Vasselon stresses that the BoP will have a role to play in ironing out any differences in tyre longevity: “Tyre degradation will be captured by the BoP process. It will capture the stint lap time profiles and will compensate for the degradation.”

That suggests the BoP could militate against wheel-to-wheel racing because the car that looks after its tyres better will be ‘bopped’ to be slower in peak performance on fresh rubber. But Vasselon doesn’t believe that there will be big differences in tyre longevity between the cars. “The choice of the bigger rear tyre for the two-wheel-drive cars should compensate for that,” he says.

There will also be no advantage in the length of a stint that a hybrid car, which is regenerating energy out on track, can achieve, explains Vasselon.

“We no longer talk about fuel, only acceleration energy,” he says. “All cars will be given the same amount of acceleration energy, which will set the stint length, only the hybrids will use less fuel.”

There appears to be a confidence that the different types of car that will eventually appear in the Hypercar division will be able to compete on equal terms. What’s more, the FIA and the ACO have got two years to fine-tune the process. So roll on 2023.

#7 Toyota Gazoo Racing Toyota GR010 - Hybrid: Mike Conway, Kamui Kobayashi, Jose Maria Lopez

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images