Ferrari has announced that it will unveil its upcoming endurance racing prototype on October 30. The car will compete in the FIA’s LMH category and will make its competition debut in March at the World Endurance Championship event at Sebring in Florida.
The unveiling of the new race car will occur on the final of the Ferrari World Finals at Imola, which marks the end of that racing category’s season. The as-yet-unnamed race car has been testing at Ferrari’s test track, Fiorano, since July.
Since then, the car has been all over Southern Europe, running laps at Mugello, Barcelona, Imola, and Portimao. Indeed, Antonello Coletta, the head of Ferrari’s sportscar racing division, told Motorsport.com that the team has now done more than 10,000 km (6,214 miles) of testing.
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“The time we have had is not insignificant, but we will have to do a lot more because there is the matter of accumulating experience and developing in parallel using what we have learned in the field,” said Coletta. “Having said that, we didn’t set ourselves a mileage target to complete the work on the car; the more, the better.”
The team is now looking to test as much as possible between here and Sebring, admitting that others have had the benefit of testing for more than a year, unlike Ferrari. Adding to its challenges is that the car it has developed will race in the LMH category, not the LMDh class.
The latter allows teams to race with an off-the-shelf chassis from specialists like Multimatic, Dallara, and ORECA, and that’s the class that the likes of BMW, Porsche, and Acura will be racing in.
Ferrari, meanwhile, has opted to develop its own bespoke chassis for racing. Indeed, Ferrari told Autocar that almost everything is being built specifically for it, as it shares very few parts with road cars. The sport is a good place to do research for future cars, though.
Ultimately, the team’s focus isn’t technology exchange. Instead, Ferrari is looking to collect trophies.
“Our dream is to win,” said Coletta. “But, unfortunately, that’ll be the dream of the other competitors! First of all, we need the best car and the best solutions, but the target from the first race is the victory, of course.”