McLaren is said to be considering a return to the Le Mans 24 Hours after a 19-year hiatus. The British sports car manufacturer won the race outright in 1995 with the BMW-poweredF1 GTR, but this time it will not aim for overall victory.
Instead, McLaren wants to build a GTE version of the 650S GT3 race car unveiled last week at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. “I would be very surprised if you don’t see a 650S running at Le Mans at some point and we hope to be there from 2016. That’s what we want to do, but we still need a set of regulations to build the car to,” McLaren GT boss Andrew Kirkaldy told Autosport.
Regulations for the GTE class in the World Endurance Championship, the United SportsCar Championship and the European and Asian Le Mans Series, are established by the Automobile Club de l’Ouest and the FIA. The two sanctioning bodies have revealed plans to come up with an evolution of the existing rulebook for 2016.
This comes after so-called convergence talks designed to align the GTE and GT3 classes have been cancelled. Kirkaldy said the 650S GT3 is already a step in the direction of a GTE car as a result of the convergence concept.
“The new car is not far from a GTE car in some aspects, like the hubs, suspension and bigger wheels and tyres — it is a good step towards that,” he explained. McLaren didn’t say whether it wants to run a factory team should the GTE-spec 650S be built.
By Dan Mihalascu
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