Why Hyundai won't be an invisible touch with new Genesis Le Mans project

You might not have even heard of Genesis when it announced in September that it was building an LMDh prototype. And for good reason: Hyundai’s premium brand is not yet 10 years old. That explains why it has been absent from the world of motorsport until now. But the time was right for an entry into the World Endurance Championship in 2026 and the IMSA SportsCar Championship the year after.

There was no point in going racing before there was something to promote, points out Luc Donckerwolke, chief creative officer of Genesis Motors since the foundation of the brand. He describes its motorsport entry in the top echelons of sportscar racing as “a natural evolution” for a marque that was announced in 2015 and hit the market with its first car two years later. 

“Racing and not having products that are close to the products you race, there is a disconnect, a lack of believability or credibility,” he says. That is changing with a new line of performance models carrying Magma badges from which a race team to be known as Genesis Magma Racing takes its name.

“It is very important for us to race and get a return on investment,” Donckerwolke continues. “I don’t just mean in terms of marketing, but also in terms of technology and knowhow as well as inspiration for the designs.”

That is why the respective Hypercar and GTP classes of WEC and IMSA are described as a natural fit for Genesis’s motorsport aspirations, he says: “Endurance racing is highly compatible with our core brand values.”

Genesis is a style-led car maker: Donckerwolke points out that he has 1200 designers under him at three studios around the world. Top-line endurance racing today allows a manufacturer to import its styling DNA into its race car. 

WEC is regarded as the perfect platform to introduce Genesis to motorsport due to opportunity to import styling DNA

Photo by: Toyota Racing

“The first one is the direct relationship to our line-up of cars,” says Donckerwolke of the reasons why Genesis chose endurance racing over other categories – he admits that Formula 1 and Formula E were discussed. “It is the technology, but also the aerodynamic research is more applicable than if you do open-wheel racing. That is a completely different discipline. The learning is difficult to transfer into normal vehicles. This is why we believe in endurance.”

Genesis has been evaluating its first foray into motorsport for more than a year. It coincided with Hyundai Motorsport, the organisation that has masterminded the South Korean manufacturer’s World Rally Championship campaigns of the past 11 seasons and developed its line of TCR touring cars, taking a deep dive into the endurance racing regulations.

Rumours had abounded about a possible Hyundai entry before it emerged that its real interest lay in the future hydrogen rules: Hyundai is one of the few manufacturers to sell a road car powered by a fuel cell: the Nexo SUV. 

The short timeframe involved in the project, 16 months from sign-off to homologation at the end of next year, was the catalyst for many of the key project decisions

Two things derailed a Hyundai entry using a car built to the hydrogen rules now scheduled for a 2028 introduction. The first was the decision to allow combustion-engined hydrogen prototypes, announced in 2023, and the second was the FIA’s announcement early this year that hydrogen vehicles competing in international motorsport will have to store the fuel in liquid form. The Nexo uses gaseous hydrogen. 

Quite how Hyundai’s examination of hydrogen fits into the narrative of the Genesis programme isn’t entirely clear. What is apparent is that it has come together late.

The sign-off of the project didn’t come until the beginning of September, which Donckerwolke describes as the point of no return if a car to be called the Genesis GMR-001 Hypercar was to be ready for 2026. He reveals he had been due to meet with Genesis’s leadership on the last Friday of August, but that the meeting was cancelled due to conflicting agendas. 

“I was forced to send an email on Friday afternoon: basically my email was, ‘It is now that we have a slot to enter endurance, we will be racing to this calendar and this is the level of investment’,” he recalls. “It was the longest weekend of my life, waiting for an ‘Are you out of your mind?’ or a ‘Yes’. On the Tuesday it was a ‘Yes’.”

Abiteboul will head up the new project, which will be based on an ORECA spine due to time constraints

Photo by: Vincent Thuillier / Hyundai Motorsport

A quick decision was important: “Either we decided yes or we made an already very tight timeline impossible.”

The short timeframe involved in the project, 16 months from sign-off to homologation at the end of next year, was the catalyst for many of the key project decisions. The first is that Hyundai opted to go down the LMDh route rather than developing a Le Mans Hypercar for its entry into the WEC and IMSA. 

Hyundai Motorsport director Cyril Abiteboul, whose Frankfurt-based operation is leading the LMDh programme, has revealed that the initial thought from company headquarters in South Korea was to go the LMH route. That would have involved a ground-up design rather than producing its challenger around French constructor ORECA’s chassis spine already used as the basis of the Acura ARX-06 and Alpine A424. 

“The initial expression of interest from corporate headquarters was to have bit more freedom and authority on the design,” explains Abiteboul, who will take the team principal role of the GMR operation. “But I said it depends on what kind of timing we are talking about. If you give us three years, yes, if you give us one year, it’s a no-go.”

What the former team principal at both the Caterham and Alpine F1 squads describes as a “hyper tight” schedule also explains the “staged approach” to Genesis’s entry into endurance racing. It makes sense to join the WEC first, he adds, because GMR will be an autonomous in-house operation whereas the marque will seek a partner team to work with when it enters IMSA. He explains that he wanted GMR to be “as close as possible to the product” during its first year of racing.

“I don’t want to have any filter or firewall between us and the car,” he says. “That is behind the decision to do WEC [first]; we know that in IMSA we will never be able to do it in a such a way.”

Abiteboul reveals that Genesis has been looking for short-cuts as it readies itself for its first race early in 2026. That includes the development of the internal combustion engine that will make up the GMR-001’s power unit along with the off-the-shelf energy-retrieval system mandated in LMDh.

A twin-turbo V8 will be based on existing technology employed in the 1.6-litre turbo inline four that powers the Hyundai i20 N Rally1. Genesis has confirmed that the engine capacity will exactly double that at 3.2 litres. 

Proven capability of WRC technology means it will form basis of Genesis V8

Photo by: Austral / Hyundai Motorsport

“If you look at where our competitors were when they started their programmes they already had an engine up and running,” he says in reference to the likes of Porsche and BMW using variants of engines already used respectively in LMP2 and the DTM. “So that is why we decided to go for the short-cut by using the WRC engine as the base engine. It may sound a bit strange, but it is a good short-cut.” 

He adds that it is a “short-cut that has been used by other people”, a reference to the twin-turbo V8 that powered the Glickenhaus 007 LMH that competed in WEC in 2021-23. Its V8 was developed by Pipo Moteurs in France, which formerly worked with Hyundai on its Rally1 programme and still does on its Rally2 powerplant.

Hyundai motorsport technical director Francois-Xavier Demaison explains that many of the key components will carry over from the rally engine in modified form.

IDEC is part of what Genesis is billing as its trajectory programme. It is a means by which it trains personnel for the WEC team

“We can say that the pistons, the cylinder liners, conrods, the combustion chamber and all the valve train is a one-to-one from the rally engine to the LMDh V8, but modified, of course,” says Demaison. “We will have to change the cylinder spacing, for example, but the main parts of the engine will be very similar just to avoid any issues. We don’t have time to fail.”

So much so that Hyundai Motorsport opted to begin work on the engine in advance of the programme’s sign-off. Demaison reveals that this process began in the middle of the summer. The aero programme started around the same time. Donckerwolke sent stylists from its European design office to ORECA in Signes near Paul Ricard to begin development of the body shape. The message is loud and clear: there isn’t time to waste.

Genesis also has a team to establish, or rather it needs to turn the operation that won this year’s WRC drivers’ title with Thierry Neuville into a race team. (Hyundai looks likely to outsource its WRC team after next season.) The IDEC Sport LMP2 team, which took third in class at Le Mans this year, was announced as a partner when Genesis took the wraps off the programme in Dubai last week, but it is not an Audi/Joest or Porsche/Penske type relationship. 

IDEC is part of what Genesis is billing as its trajectory programme. It is a means by which it trains personnel for the WEC team: staff from Frankfurt as well as new recruits will be embedded at IDEC for its assault on the LMP2 class of the European Le Mans Series with an ORECA-Gibson 07 in Genesis colours. 

Le Mans expertise of IDEC Sport team Genesis will partner with in 2025 ELMS will prove useful in its operational learning curve

Photo by: Marc Fleury

“I want to be independent as soon as possible,” points out Abiteboul. “We are going to work with people who are going to make us self-sufficient in the future. The end game is to have that autonomy.”

How long the trajectory programme runs for isn’t clear, but the link with IDEC will continue. GMR will be based on a new business park built alongside Paul Ricard’s Mistral Straight by its parent company IDEC International.

The trajectory programme is also about nurturing future driving talent. Logan Sargeant, who lost his Williams drive after August’s Dutch Grand Prix, Indy NXT race winner and three-time W Series champion Jamie Chadwick, and Porsche Supercup racer Mathys Jaubert will drive the ORECA.

“We want to give an opportunity to drivers to be part of what we are in the process of building,” explains Abiteboul. “There will be a very strong connection with those drivers, so maybe there is a future between them and ourselves for 2026 onwards.”

Abiteboul stresses that there is no mechanism in place by which they will automatically join Andre Lotterer and Pipo Derani, the first GMR drivers announced for the WEC programme.

“We want to keep it a bit loose,” he says. “We are giving them the opportunity, the platform, and then we will see.”

Hyundai insists it is in endurance racing for the long haul. That means at least until the end of 2029, when the current rules cycle ends. Just how ambitious it is becomes apparent when it talks about a future beyond that. It’s already evaluating what comes next.

Genesis has big plans for its entry into the WEC and is already thinking about its long-term future

Photo by: Genesis