Le Mans | McLaren winks at LMDh with rules extended to 2029

McLaren’s ambitions of repeating its 24 Hours of Le Mans victory in 1995 remain, and have received a boost from the extension of the current prototype regulations until the 2029 season.

McLaren Racing boss Zak Brown said an entry into the Hypercar or GTP classes of the respective World Endurance and IMSA SportsCar Championships is “more of a when than an if”.

He explained that the decision to extend the lifecycle of the Le Mans Hypercar and LMDh regulations by two years, announced last week, had given McLaren “more breathing room”.

“Costs across all categories are critically important and I think the extension certainly helps our business model that we have defined internally,” said Brown, who has spoken openly about McLaren’s Le Mans aspirations since taking over his current role in 2018.

“We have to work on a two-year time window: if we were to talk about 2026, we would have to make a decision tomorrow. And you wouldn’t enter a category in its last season.”

Brown revealed that McLaren is looking at every scenario regarding what would be its first such effort since the F1 GTR program of the 1990s.

“But, clearly, if you race endurance it’s because you want to win Le Mans.”

Brown has never hidden McLaren’s ambition to field an official team with two LMDhs in the WEC and perhaps a customer team in IMSA. “LMDh would be the ideal category,” he confirmed.

What we need to understand, however, is whether there could be room in the Hypercar class between now and the end of this decade: despite the expansion to 40 cars, in fact, the grid already seems full for next season, for example.

However, the commitment in GT3 with United Autosport could be a crucial viaticum for making the leap towards the premier class, as Brown himself explained.

“We need a commercial partner and the exposure we are having in GT3 is giving us an idea of ​​what the market is looking for, but also how much support we could find.”

Brown also stressed that it will be important that a high-level program does not distract from McLaren Racing’s other activities in Formula 1, IndyCar, Formula E and Extreme E.

“If we take on another project, we need to make sure it doesn’t disrupt our other businesses,” he said. “We are not far from thinking that we can take on another project without diluting our F1 team, the IndyCar team or our teams in the electric series.”

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“We are making a profit as a racing team; McLaren Racing is very healthy, and then it’s just a question of timing.”

Michael Leiters, CEO of McLaren Automotive, insisted that no fundamental technical decisions have been made on a potential LMDh project.

Among these, the choice of engine: the inadequacy of the M840T V8 for the road was one of the reasons why McLaren’s prototype aspirations remained on hold.

“First of all we have to decide when and how to do it, and then we have to decide on the engine,” he explains. “It would be perfect to have an engine in line with our plans with road cars – it would be our dream – but we would never compromise our competitiveness.”