FIA WEC 2026

The 24 Hours of Le Mans has been run since 1923 and the championship that contains it did not exist until 2012. That gap of almost ninety years explains everything else: here the series was organised around the race, not the other way round.

The consequence shows in how the paddock behaves. A manufacturer can plan an entire season around one weekend in June, and many do: there are marques that arrive at Le Mans with parts they have not run at any other round, saved precisely for that one. The rest of the calendar, six hours a race, works both as a championship in its own right and as a test bench for the single event outsiders can name.

That dual nature is also what brought the manufacturers back. Winning an endurance world title sells cars; winning Le Mans enters the brand's story for decades, which is a different currency altogether.

Ferrari won Le Mans in 2025 for the third consecutive year, with the number 83 499P of Yifei Ye, Phil Hanson and Robert Kubica. And that third straight win brings a prize almost nobody knows about: whoever wins three consecutive editions keeps the trophy for good. The one lifted each June is a replica.

The marque completed the year by also taking the Hypercar manufacturers' championship, while the drivers' title went to the crew of the number 51 AF Corse car: Alessandro Pier Guidi, James Calado and Antonio Giovinazzi.

A clean sweep, then, in the category Ferrari had abandoned for half a century. They returned to endurance's top class in 2023 and won Le Mans at the first attempt; three years on they have let go of neither the race nor the championship.

The grid's new arrival does not come from a familiar manufacturer with a new team, but from a marque that had never competed in anything. Genesis, Hyundai's luxury division, debuts in Hypercar with two cars and not a single race behind it as a constructor.

The project is called Genesis Magma Racing and had to be built from nothing — team, engineering, drivers — to make the first round. Entering endurance's top category with a freshly founded operation is not the usual route: the norm is to buy an existing structure or start in a lower class.

With those two cars, the Hypercar grid stands at seventeen entries from eight different manufacturers: Toyota, Ferrari, BMW, Alpine, Cadillac, Aston Martin, Peugeot and Genesis. It is the most crowded top class modern endurance racing has ever had, and that is exactly why none of the eight can take anything for granted.

The year comes to eight rounds and seven of them last six hours. The eighth lasts twenty-four, and it does not sit at the end but in June, in the middle of the calendar: Le Mans splits the season in two and pays out nearly double what any other round does.

The shape of the year is recognisable. It opens at Imola in April and runs into Spa in May and Le Mans in June, three straight European rounds that define who will be up there. Then it crosses the Atlantic to São Paulo in July and Austin in September, jumps to Fuji a fortnight later, and comes back to Europe to close at Barcelona in October and Monza on 8 November.

Barcelona is the new entry on the map, and Monza as a season finale is just as unusual: endurance racing used to end in Bahrain, at night and in the desert. Closing on a fast European circuit in November changes the kind of car you want ready for the final date.

The grid's new car is called the GMR-001 and it carries an unusual decision inside. Its engine, a 3.2-litre turbocharged V8 named the G8MR, is developed from the in-line four-cylinder Hyundai use in the World Rally Championship. In other words: a block born to jump along dirt roads for three days has ended up as an endurance powerplant for twenty-four hours of asphalt.

That reuse is not just a saving. A rally engine is designed to survive dust, impact and the brutal thermal cycling of a stage; an endurance engine, not to break across a whole day at a constant rhythm. They are different demands sharing a single obsession: lasting.

And above all of them sits the leveller. The category adjusts power and weight car by car so that eight manufacturers with technically incompatible concepts can fight the same race. It is a system nobody entirely wants, and yet it is the only reason the grid holds eight marques and not two.