Rewind 12 months to the centenary of the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France and the big story was the return of Ferrari and Porsche. Ferrari won this event in its first attempt back at Le Mans’ top class for 50 years. Now, three more major automakers are trying to do the same.
Alpine, BMW and Lamborghini have joined the Hypercar category for this year. These are original machines that drive the multi-class races for which Le Mans has long been famous. Slower LMP2 prototypes and more road-car-like GT cars make up the rest of the field.
The number of participating Hypercar manufacturers had increased to five last year from three in 2022. Now, with the addition of the Isotta Fraschini team, factory entries from Alpine, BMW and Lamborghini make it nine manufacturers competing for overall Le Mans success . Overall, these teams provide the cars that have the best chance of winning the race.
“We will have a bigger event than last year,” said Pierre Fillon, president of the Automobile Club de l’Ouest, which has organized Le Mans throughout its 101-year history.
More established teams enter this year’s match as favourites. Ferrari will be looking to defend last year’s victory in front of around 325,000 expected spectators. Toyota, which won the previous five races, came close to beating Ferrari last year. Toyota also won one of the three FIA World Endurance Championship races this year. Porsche won the other two.
But for newcomers, what Ferrari achieved in 2023 is “a great inspiration”, said Vincent Vosse, who owns Team WRT, which will run BMW’s two cars at Le Mans this year.
“It was something very important,” Vosse said in an interview in May.
This is reflected in the club’s interest metrics for the WEC it hosts. While Le Mans is the championship’s most famous race and usually sells out, the other seven races on the calendar are much smaller. This is also compared to Formula 1, which is running races at six of the same tracks as the WEC in 2024.
Fillon said the Belgian WEC race at Spa-Francorchamps had around 90,000 spectators in May. That’s up from about 70,000 last year and 54,000 in 2022. Fillon said the increase it was proof that the involvement of additional automakers was fueling interest.
“It’s this virtuous cycle,” he said. “The grid is fantastic, so you have more fans. You have more fans, so you have more media. You have more means and so on.’
The Hypercar rules are now four years old. They focus on keeping cars from different manufacturers racing at similar speeds. Costs are also lower compared to old Le Mans classes such as Le Mans Prototype 1 or LMP1, cars that made up the top class before 2021. Team budgets are also around 80 percent lower than previous standard sets that were approaching 200 million euros. or about $226 million. Hypercar designs must also feature hybrid engines.
“Hypercar is a good balance between the financial impact, the competition, what we learn and how big the audience is,” said Rouven Mohr, Lamborghini’s technical director.
In 2022, Lamborghini decided to enter the Hypercar class with a factory team for 2024. It has previously built cars to compete in GT races and runs its own championship just for Lamborghini models called the Super Trofeo series. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it produced engines for many Formula 1 teams.
Mohr said Lamborghini viewed motorsport as “one of the central pillars of our company’s strategy” for selling its road cars. But he also uses the competition experience to increase the knowledge and skills of road car mechanics.
“We strongly believe that motorsport is always a good level of training,” said Mohr.
Alpine has previously entered the Hypercar category. A custom LMP1 car was allowed to run in 2021 and 2022 within the class, which was new at the time. But the 2024 car is Alpine’s first special design Hypercar. The brand belongs to the Renault Group and has a Le Mans pedigree: It won the race in 1978.
“Alpine’s strategy is to develop brand awareness worldwide through motorsport,” said Bruno Famin, Alpine’s vice president of motorsport. Famin is also the head of the Formula 1 team.
“Two of the main pillars [in that strategy], one is much bigger than the other — Formula 1, the most globally recognized motorsports championship in the world,” Famin said. “The second is the 24 Hours of Le Mans, a world event as well, where Alpine has a history. And with this incredible race in mind, that’s why Alpine is racing in the WEC.”
When BMW ran its Hypercar in tests in 2022, Franciscus van Meel, managing director of motorsport and high-performance road cars, said the rules were ideal “to show how exciting BMW M electric cars will be in the future ».
But BMW is also bringing a new Art Car to Le Mans this year. It will be the latest iteration of its long-running program in which artists create the color of the car. Since 1975, 20 artists, including Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, have contributed designs, six of which are used on cars that raced at Le Mans. This year, Ethiopian-born artist Julie Mehretu will produce the latest art car.
“It’s a great feeling,” Vosse said of this piece of BMW history at Le Mans.
Vosse also has a special relationship with it. When BMW last won Le Mans — in 1999 — it was racing for a Porsche GT team that occupied the pit lane area next to the BMW team.
“I couldn’t believe that 25 years later I’m sitting there with the people at BMW, trying to achieve our goals [of winning again]” said Vosse. “It’s something very special.”
Famin and Mohr said Le Mans would be a learning experience but wanted their new cars to be competitive against the established frontrunners.
BMW is “in a very different situation,” Vosse said. That’s because in 2023 its car began racing in the International Motor Sports Association, or IMSA, championship, which shares the Hypercar rules in the Grand Touring Prototype class. Porsche and another Hypercar competitor, Cadillac, also ran in IMSA last year, but those teams also raced in the WEC, gaining a year of experience at the tracks the championship visits. Vosse believes this gives them an experience advantage at BMW.
“We know how difficult this is,” he said. “We know that BMW, when they started the program, they started a little bit late — if you compare to other manufacturers, who were already there [in W.E.C.] in 2023.”
This is the biggest hurdle for all three newcomers as they seek to match Ferrari’s success at Le Mans last year. Andrea Piccini, the Lamborghini team principal, said he was “like David and Goliath” about such expectations for his team, considering Ferrari’s WEC entry is designed alongside its Formula 1 car.
But when brands come to Le Mans, ultimately “their goal is to win,” Fillon said.
“After so many years with just Toyota, it was a breath of fresh air for all the fans to see Ferrari win last year,” he said. “But I think it was really important to have that fresh air,” to have new winners.
