WEC Classes

Audi R18 at Le Mans

Not everyone, including racing fans, is particularly familiar with the World Endurance Championship, but their signature race, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, or "24 Heures du Mans" in the original French, is quite a bit more famous. In fact, it's considered part of the Triple Crown of Motorsport, in addition to the Indianapolis 500 and the Monaco Grand Prix.

Every motorsport series has its challenges, and endurance racing has its own unique challenges. With races of six, twelve, and even twenty-four hours, it's not as simple as a head-to-head duel against the next guy on track. It's about the long game. A lot can happen in twenty-four hours. The idea behind endurance racing was to showcase not cars that can be quick for a couple hours but which cars can be run hard for a long time. It's not just the endurance of the cars, though, but also the drivers, mechanics, and engineers. You can be on top of your game an hour in, but what about twenty-one hours in? It's also multi-class, with dozens of entrants spread out across those classes all sharing the track at once, so negotiating traffic is a critical skill.

I remember a couple decades back when the available car classes were LMP1 (Le Mans Prototype), LMP2, GT1, and GT2. LMP1 was the top, fastest, and most expensive class. LMP2 was more like entry level, less expensive prototypes. Then there were two tiers of GT cars, which seemed closer to what you're familiar with on the street. I was a fan of the Audi prototypes - the R8, R10, R15, and R18. I miss their rivalry with the Peugeot 908. Today there is no LMP1.

Where did LMP1 go? If you're here, you're probably a motorsport enthusiast, so there's a good chance you're already familiar with WEC and you already know the answer. Some folks are more new to racing or aren't equally familiar with all forms of motorsport. The answer is that the car classes aren't permanent. They change over time. It's not just tweaks to what's permissible but entire classes come and go. LMP1 has been replaced with hypercars some years back. LMP2 still exists, for now, which feels odd to me, having LMP2 without there being an LMP1.

LMP1 died off towards the end, with only five LMP1 entrants for the class's final run in 2020, none of which were my Audis or Peugeots. They were replaced with hypercars in 2021, which again only had five hypercar entrants. It was the same story for 2022, but by 2023 that expanded to fifteen. As of the most recent running in 2026 there were eighteen hypercars from eight manufacturers, including Alpine, Aston Martin, BMW, Cadillac, Ferrari, Genesis, Peugeot, and Toyota. 2027 will be seeing the addition of Ford and McLaren hypercars, which should make the class even more interesting than it has already become.

I miss LMP1, but I get the appeal of the newer hypercar class. LMP1 cars were expensive, high-tech engineering projects with no budget caps, so a team could be looking at tens of millions of dollars a year to field LMP1 cars. Hypercars have budget limits which can be appealing to would-be competitors that can't afford $20,000,000 a year. LMP1 cars exceeded 1,000 horsepower, while hypercars are limited to 670. The hypercar class also sees Balance of Performance (BoP) to reign the cars in to be more directly competitive. The hypercars are still the fastest class and still have an advanced look, but without the overly advanced price tags and with more competition.

BMW M Hybrid V8

I was going to go through all the changes in classes over the decades, but that's an awful lot to go through. The original running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans was way back in 1923, on a circuit extremely different from the modern course. There have been a total of 94 24 Hours of Le Mans races, with none being held from 1940 through 1948, for obvious reasons. That's too much history for one article.

We could take a glance back at 1923 and look at its four categories, which were based on engine size. The top tier was for very large engines, over 3.0 liters, for which there were seven entries. The next tier covered cars falling between 2.0 and 3.0 liters, for which there were thirteen entrants. Then came 1.5 to 2.0 liters, with seven participants. Finally there's the bottom tier, for cars up to 1.5 liters, which featured ten cars. Thirty-seven cars competed altogether across these four performance levels.

1923 Chenard-Walcker 3-Liter

Bookending that with 2026, car classes are more than just how big your engine is, but there remained four classes. As we've already addressed, there's the hypercars on top. After that is LMP2, followed by LMP2 Pro-Am. The bottom class is LMGT3. However, that's largely just on paper. There's no actual difference between LMP2 and LMP2 Pro Am. It's just about professional versus amateur drivers, including drivers rated between bronze and platinum. This means realistically there's three classes, at the moment, but technically they recognize four.

In a way it feels wrong to me to keep changing all the classes. Again, I tend to think of the classes I walked into years back - LMP1, LMP2, GT1, and GT2. However, times change and the world changes. What manufacturers want changes. We've seen a dying LMP1 class replaced with a growing, exciting hypercar class. If change means revitalizing the top tier with more competitors from more manufacturers, then it's a change that I can accept.