McLaren’s upcoming World Endurance Championship (WEC) hypercar is set to spawn a track-only customer version, and the British brand will make several tweaks to ensure it’s as accessible as possible to amateur drivers.
Codenamed Project: Endurance, the limited-production customer car is being developed alongside the full-fat WEC racecar and will be available to buyers in late 2027, ahead of the commencement of new customer experiences and track programs from 2028.
McLaren Automotive’s head of HyperTrack Cars Neil Underwood said the customer car would parallel the racing hypercar where possible, but but let slip on some of the differences that will emerge.
“The idea is to make the customer car as similar to the car that we’re going to race in the WEC in 2027 [as possible],” he told CarExpert.
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“Saying that, what we did is we looked long and hard at the proposition. WEC have a mandatory requirement to run a hybrid system, it’s obviously highly complex, highly technical, and we decided that for this application for the customers, we would remove the hybrid system from the car.”
Mr Underwood confirmed that both cars will use a 2.9-litre twin-turbocharged V6 engine, but the WEC car will add a powerful hybrid system, per LMDh regulations, and produce around 680ps (500kW) of power – this is due to a competition-levelling Balance of Performance (BoP) mandate.
The customer version, meanwhile, will be powered by the V6 engine alone. Importantly, Mr Underwood estimates this application “would develop around 740ps”, or roughly 545kW.
“That has a number of advantages. Firstly, cost of maintenance and the actual ability to be able to run the car outside of our track program is really important, but also it’s 150kg lighter, which obviously has a benefit,” he said.
“But it’s really about the customer-centric proposition in terms of usage of the car, ease of maintenance, ease of running, that we decided to go that route”.
Otherwise, Mr Underwood confirmed both cars will use the “same gearbox, same suspension, same braking system”.
“The only difference on the brakes are with the racecar, it will use a brake-by-wire system, and on the customer car, we will use ABS (anti-lock braking system) braking to make the car more accessible, more safe for our amateur drivers,” he said.
Interestingly, McLaren considers the Project: Endurance track car a successor to the iconic F1 GTR from 1995, as it’s the first track-only McLaren derived from a real race car since. The P1 GTR (2015) and Senna GTR (2019) were not raced.
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.
A key drawcard of Project: Endurance is therefore its historical link, which, along with a fully fledged, two-year customer experience program, is expected to generate healthy buyer interest.
“Owning that piece of history, having the opportunity to have a hypercar in its most recent format that can win Le Mans outright is a pretty pretty compelling argument,” he said.
“The race program came first, and then looking at what we could offer our customers on the back of what we’ve done with Solus, which has been extremely successful, and how we can evolve our track program, we thought the Project: Endurance would fit into that space very nicely.”