**McLaren’s next World Endurance Championship (WEC) hypercar will be a track-only version of the car, and the British brand will make several changes to ensure it is available as easily for amateur drivers. ** **
With the full-fat WEC racecar, Codenamed Project Endurance is being developed as a limited-production customer car that will be available for sale to buyers in late 2027 ahead of the start of new customer experiences and track programs from 2028.
But McLaren Automotive’s head of HyperTrack Cars Neil Underwood, said the customer car would parallel to the racing hypercar where it could be possible but let slip on some ‘the differences that will emerge.
He told childcareman.xyz that the idea is to create a customer car like the car we’re going to race in 2027 [as possible] and this was what we want.
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“It’s a long and hard proposition, we did it.’ Saying that ‘what we do is look very much at the proposal as well as our own words of wisdom to this point”. WEC have a requirement to run ‘hygienic system’, it’s obviously very complex, highly technical and we decided that for this application for the customers we would remove the hybrid system from the car. , ” and.
Mr Underwood confirmed that both cars will use a 2 in the same car. Despite the fact that 9-litre twin-turbocharged V6 engine is still in operation, LMDh rules say WEC car will add a powerful hybrid system and generate approximately 680ps (500kW) of power – this is due to competition-levelling Balance of Performance (BoP) mandate.
meanwhile, the V6 engine alone will be used as fuel for the customer version of the. Mr Underwood, a senior adviser at the time, says this app would ‘develop around 740ps’ or about 545kW.
That has a number of benefits,’ . He said ‘Firstly, cost of maintenance and the fact that we can actually run the car outside our track program is really important but it’s 150kg lighter – obviously this has a benefit.
And that is the true reason we went on that route,’ “It’s really about the customer-centric proposition in terms of use of the car, ease of maintenance, easy running”.
Otherwise, Mr Underwood confirmed both cars will use the “same gearbox, same suspension, same braking system”.
He said ‘The only difference on brakes is with the racecar, it will be a brake-by–wire system and we’re going to use ABS (anti-lock) braking for making the car more accessible, safer for our amateur drivers.
McLaren, surprisingly, says that the Project Endurance track car is an alternative to the iconic F1 GTR from 1995; it’s the first track-only McLren ever made out of a real race car since. No race was run for the P1 GTR (2015) and Senna G TR (2019).
It’s also a vastly different car to McLaren’s most recent track toy, the Solus GT, given that its origins come from a heavily regulated race car. In contrast, the Solus GT is the only McLaren car with a V10 engine and described as “quite old school” by Mr Underwood.
Its historical link, along with a full fledged, two-year customer experience program, is also expected to generate healthy buyer interest as it’s the key drawcard of Project Endurance.
He said ‘It’s a pretty good argument to have – and that is the most recent format of hypercar, which can win Le Mans outright.’ The phrase was written in his statement at the time for this piece of history when it comes to being used as ‘the only one I think we should be doing with my own Hypercar (and then having an opportunity) on its last form so they could get me into what would be such but not just because there has been some kind of hard-hitting them.”
It was the first, and then we looked at what we could sell our customers on the back of what has been so successful Solus (and how can we evolve our track program) that we believed Project Endurance would fit into that space very well. Paraphrast.
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