The 24 Hours of Le Mans is important to Ford. Its consecutive overall victories there from 1966-1969 are the stuff of legend, and a great source of pride for Ford to this day. In 2027, Ford will look to repeat the feat. At a Thursday event in Charlotte, North Carolina, Ford announced that it’s building a car to compete in the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC), including the 24 Hours of Le Mans, in 2027.
Ford’s announcement is sparse. The automaker simply confirmed it’s entering WEC with a factory team and a car built to the LMDh ruleset.
LMDh is a joint creation of America’s premier sports-car governing body, IMSA, and the governing body of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the ACO. The rules stipulate cars with chassis from one of four providers and use a common hybrid system with an electric motor between the engine and transmission. Bodywork can reflect the brand’s styling, and engine restrictions are fairly permissive.
Aimed at being cheaper than prior top-level racing formulas and eligible for both the IMSA WeatherTech series and WEC, LMDh has been a huge success, with Acura, Alpine, BMW, Cadillac, Lamborghini, and Porsche all signing up. Hyundai’s luxury brand Genesis has also announced it’s building an LMDh car, the GMR-001, to compete in IMSA and WEC, and don’t be surprised to see McLaren join the class, too.
In both series, LMDh cars compete against cars built to the FIA’s Le Mans Hypercar (LMH) ruleset, which stipulate that entrants must build their own chassis and allow for more technical freedom. Among the LMH ranks are Ferrari, Peugeot, Toyota, a handful of privateers, and soon, Aston Martin.
Photo by: Motorsport Images
Ford isn’t saying whether it’ll compete in the IMSA WeatherTech series yet, and it hasn’t announced a chassis partner either. It’s easy to see Ford working with Multimatic, though, as the Canadian company built its second-generation GT road and race cars, and currently builds the Mustang GT3. Multimatic also makes the chassis for the Porsche 963, currently the most successful LMDh car.
We also don’t know what team Ford is partnering with for this program. In recent years, it’s turned to Chip Ganassi Racing, which has availability now that it’s partnership has ended. Ford also has a relationship with Proton Racing, which while traditionally a Porsche team, currently fielding a customer 963, runs the Mustang GT3 program in Europe.
Ford hasn’t had an outright victory at Le Mans since 1969. It ran a Group C car in the early 1980s, the C100, though it never finished the race. In 2016, it returned to Le Mans with the GT GTLM car, getting a class win on the 50th anniversary of the 1966 race, and while that program ended in 2019, Ford returned last year with the Mustang GT3.
“When we race, we race to win,” said Ford chairman Bill Ford in a statement. “And there is no track or race that means more to our history than Le Mans. It is where we took on Ferrari and won in the 1960s. It is where we returned 50 years later and shocked the world and beat Ferrari again. I am thrilled that we’re going back to Le Mans and competing at the highest level of endurance racing. We are ready to once again challenge the world, and ‘go like hell!’”
Read the full article here
