New halo cars coming ahead of 2020

With the new hypercar regulations for WEC in 2020 and the homologation requirements of a minimum of 25 units to be produced, this means that we will see new road going halo cars from each of the new entrants in LMP1.

The first cars to be referenced to as hypercars were the Holy Trinity of the Ferrari LaFerrari, Porsche 918 Spyder and McLaren P1.  Since then much lesser supercars have far exceeded their levels of performance. The newest hypercars all have 800+ HP from their gasoline engine and most have hybrid technology on top of that to produce in excess of 1000 HP. In addition to simply being more powerful, aerodynamics have come a long way in the past 5-7 years and most new supercars and hypercars (see McLaren Senna and Lamborghini Aventador SVJ) have active aero kits previously only seen in top level motorsports. The much cheaper Lamborghini Huracán Performante lapped the famed Nordschleife a staggering 5 seconds quicker than the Porsche 918 Spyder.  In a matter of a couple of years Lamborghini was able to improve their ALA aero system, along with the extra grunt from the V12 in the Aventador SVJ to improve that time by a further 8 seconds to a blisteringly fast 6:44.97.

Now imagine the racing with the next echelon of cars above those supercars.

Aston Martin is likely going to race a heavily modified version of the the upcoming Valkyrie, which is already insane, or the upgraded Valkyrie AMR Pro. Since it takes years of planning and engineering to produce a car of this level, at this late stage of the game I don’t see Aston Martin pulling another hypercar out of their back pocket so it’s probably a safe bet on that we’ll be seeing a version of the Valkyrie racing next year.

McLaren may limit their involvement to being a supplier by utilizing their technology arm, McLaren Applied Technologies. McLaren Racing CEO Zac Brown has been quoted saying that “Anything we do outside of F1 will not pull on F1 resources, that team is that team. We have 4,000 employees. So if we were to go endurance racing or IndyCar racing, we might use some of the machinery and tech we have from F1, but guys from F1 will not go work for WEC or IndyCar, it’d be different people, a different setup.”

It wouldn’t be a stretch to see McLaren enter a version of either the new Senna GTR or the upcoming LT version of the 720S, often referred to as the 750LT, although both would need to have hybrid technology fitted to them to meet the regulations.  The latter wouldn’t be too far of a stretch with the new 720S GT3 car being available to customer teams starting in the 2019 season.

The car that I am most excited to see is the one which will come out of Maranello. Ferrari continuously set the bar for performance cars over the past few decades including the F40, F50, Enzo, F12 TdF and of course the LaFerrari. Unbelievably the LaFerrari is over 5 years old already,  having been released in 2013. Ferrari is known for keeping extremely tight lipped about their new car development, so the fact that nothing has been leaked about a new model is not surprising.

Ferrari is well known for its racing and actively participates in many series around the world from Formula 1 to their own Ferrari Challenge series.  They’re also well known for producing incredible road cars. We’ll have to see what they come out with but, I am expecting to see it unveiled sometime early in 2019 in order to have time to ramp up production ahead of the 2020 WEC season. Ferrari have a lot of experience with hybrid technology between F1 and the development of their FXX K track only car so this aspect should not be much of an issue for them in their new hypercar.

Glickenhaus be using their recently unveiled LMP1 hypercar, the SCG 007. The company has indicated on their website that they have committed to a limited run of 25 road going units, although this is only sufficient for 2020’s season.  2021 requires 100 units to be produced, which I suspect that they will struggle to meet since they’re such a small manufacturer. The SCG 007 has a strong resemblance to a cross between the Maserati MC12 Corsa and the Ferrari 488 Pista, both of which are stunning cars, and I am very excited about seeing this blasting around the race track.

If Koenigsegg enters it will likely use a variant of their Agera RS replacement, nicknamed Ragnarok. We’ll have to wait until the 2019 Geneva Auto Show to see it in the flesh but Founder Christian Von Koenigsegg has been quote as saying that the new car will have “more than 1400 HP”.

The excitement that came from the release of the P1, LaFerrari and 918 will be hard to top, but from what we’ve seen so far I think we’ll be in for some great road going head-to-head comparisons as well as great on-track action.