Why Lamborghini's LMDh exit is significant but not worrying

Manufacturers come and go from whatever racing category or formula. That’s the way the world works. Always has and always will. Not everyone hangs around forever, and it seems we can safely say that Lamborghini has gone from the respective Hypercar and GTP arenas in the World Endurance Championship and the IMSA SportsCar Championship. Is it significant? Yes. Worrying? I don’t think so.

If the “pause” on the IMSA GTP campaign that Lamborghini announced last week turns out, as we expect, to be more than that, the Italian manufacturer’s departure will be the first by a major car maker since the beginning of this new golden era of sportscar racing. That’s why it’s significant. (Just in case you are wondering, this is ignoring Audi ending its programme before its car had even hit the track, plus the disappearance from the WEC’s Hypercar division of garagistes Glickenhaus and ByKolles/Vanwall.)

But worrying it is probably not. A toing and froing of manufacturers is the natural order of things. Think back to Formula E and its the phenomenal growth in its early years as big car marques jumped on the electric bandwagon. Audi, BMW and Mercedes, all motorsport big-hitters by any measure, came and went, and didn’t hang around long if you ignore the initial arm’s length involvement by the first of those.

So it was implausible that every brand to join Hypercar, GTP or both since 2021 would stay put. Circumstances change for manufacturers. It could be that bosses at the top of a company hierarchy change, something implicated in Audi’s FE withdrawal, for instance. There could be a financial downturn, and in the context of the WEC, here I think back to Peugeot’s decision to pull out of the series before it had even begun early in 2012. It wasn’t the time to be seen to be spending big on racing — and it was doing that in the days of LMP1 — at a time when it was laying off production workers.

In the case of Lamborghini in 2025, there is a unique set of circumstances, perhaps more complicated than either of the above, behind its withdrawal. The origins of Lamborghini’s first full-factory prototype programme and the battles to get sign-off from the board are significant in the story. The SC63 project, undertaken in conjunction with Ligier Automotive and confirmed in May of 2022, was third time lucky for Lamborghini Squadra Corse and its first and now departed boss Giorgio Sanna.

An original proposal, which would have involved Dallara Automobili, made to the board in 2020 was turned down. A subsequent attempt to piggyback on the Volkswagen group project that yielded the Porsche 963 and the unraced Audi was thwarted. It seems that its involvement was vetoed by the first of those brands.

Sanna pushed through Lamborghini's LMDh plan despite resistance from the parent company

Photo by: Lamborghini Super Trofeo

The terrier-like Sanna – the words of someone who worked for Lambo – finally wrestled the programme across the line with a key partner. The funding Iron Lynx and its parent company, DC Racing Solutions, brought to the table was all-important. Of that there can be no doubt.

The idea of a dual programme straddling the WEC and IMSA was always part of the thinking. WEC, of course, comes with a place on the grid at the Le Mans 24 Hours, while IMSA was important because North America is Lamborghini’s biggest market. So in year one, Iron Lynx fielded one SC63 in the full WEC and one in four of the IMSA enduros, starting with the Sebring 12 Hours in March.

There was always talk of an expanded programme, at least on the Iron Lynx side, right from the reveal of the SC63 at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in July 2023. Two cars in WEC and a full-season entry in IMSA were mentioned.

The Lamborghini LMDh was overweight, no secret was made of that, while drivers talked of rear-end geometry issues. There were problems in its development that may or may not have hindered it

In fact, if Lamborghini wanted to continue in WEC it had no choice but to field a pair of cars in the world championship. That became clear early last year and was confirmed at Le Mans in June: a rule change for ’25 mandated that manufacturers competing in Hypercar must make two entries. Which is where the relationship between Lamborghini and Iron Lynx broke down.

Scroll back to last year’s WEC finale in Bahrain and it was clear that everything was not well. The rhetoric from Iron Lynx was ‘we are ready to run two cars’, while directing questions about the future of the programme towards Lamborghini. Rouven Mohr, the marque’s chief technology officer who was standing in as motorsport boss after Sanna’s departure earlier in the year, stressed that everything was under review. But he did talk about how the two-car rule was problematic for Lamborghini.

He pointed out that Lamborghini is a small company in comparison to its rivals on the grid in both WEC and IMSA. That’s not just in terms of its financial might, but also with regard to the capacity of its racing operations. Squadra Corse was just 30 people, he was keen to stress.

Those 30 people were also deep into the development of Lamborghini’s next-generation GT3 racer, the Temerario that was unveiled at Goodwood this year. The marque has made much of that car being the first racer to be exclusively developed at Squadra Corse, a reference to the lead Audi took in the development of its predecessor, the Huracan.

Lamborghini's in-house capacity and focus have been taken up by the launch of the Temerario GT3

Photo by: Lamborghini S.p.A.

Confirmation of Iron Lynx’s switch from the Lamborghini Huracan GT3 EVO2 to the Mercedes-AMG GT3 for the LMGT3 arm of its programme effectively signalled the end, temporarily or otherwise, of the SC63’s participation in WEC. Full confirmation that Lamborghini was taking a “pause” – the first use of that word with regard to its LMDh – followed shortly afterwards.

What triggered the breakdown in the relationship between Lamborghini and Iron Lynx isn’t entirely clear. Whether it was as simple as some kind of impasse over who was going to contribute what to the programme, or a decision on the part of Squadra Corse that it couldn’t service three cars across WEC and IMSA at the same time as developing the Temerario, will only come out in the fullness of time.

Lamborghini made much of a change to the terms of engagement of its WEC entry, but that doesn’t sit comfortably with talk of an eventual desire to run two cars in WEC, given the Italian manufacturer itself mentioned the benefits of running two cars after its maiden campaign with a single SC63 in 2024.

With the WEC campaign on hold, Lamborghini refocused on IMSA. But without a partner, it was forced to the fund the programme itself. That explains why it opted just to run the rounds that made up the IMSA Endurance Cup again, this time including the Daytona 24 Hours season-opener. It turned to the Riley Motorsport team as a service provider in what was a very different relationship to the one it enjoyed with Iron Lynx.

Lamborghini made it clear from the beginning that if it was to continue in IMSA beyond this season, it needed another team to come in with funding. But the problem was the SC63 wasn’t an attractive proposition: it wasn’t a competitive car, not in IMSA and not in WEC. A pair of seventh places, one at Sebring last year and one at Watkins this summer, stand as its best results in North America, though arguably its biggest achievement was a top 10 on debut at Le Mans in ’24.

The Lamborghini LMDh was overweight, no secret was made of that, while drivers talked of rear-end geometry issues. There were problems in its development that may or may not have hindered it. A month’s worth of testing was lost early in its development when Mirko Bortolotti crashed heavily in the first car.

Lamborghini has also conceded that it underestimated what was involved in building and running an LMDh, though it wasn’t alone there. Porsche, too, reckons that the price-saving that was meant to come with developing an LMDh over a Le Mans Hypercar wasn’t quite as significant as it imagined.

A top-10 result on its Le Mans debut was about as good as it got for the SC63

Photo by: Marc Fleury

It all added up get us to where we are today, the apparent end of the SC63 programme after it makes its final two IMSA appearances at Indianapolis next month and then Road Atlanta for the Petit Le Mans finale in October. You can call it a unique set of circumstances, if you like.

Circumstances will conspire to bring to an end another Hypercar/GTP programme, perhaps sooner rather than later, of that we can be sure. As things stand, come 2027 there will be 12 manufacturers competing in the top class of either WEC or IMSA, with the arrival of Genesis next season and Ford and McLaren the year after.

The flow of manufacturers is still on the inward direction. So don’t get too worried about the outbound trajectory of just the one.

The top category ranks in both WEC and IMSA are set to grow in the coming years

Photo by: Art Fleischmann