The FIA World Endurance Championship(WEC) will field 37 full season entries for the coming season, with plans to expand the field for the full season in 2025, according to the series CEO Frederic Lequien.
At the 8 Hours of Bahrain last weekend, WEC CEO Frederic Lequien, ACO President Pierre Fillon and FIA Endurance Commission President Richard Mille told reporters that the figure is the maximum it can handle at two tracks on the calendar.
The limiting factor is that both Circuit of the Americas, which makes a comeback after a four-year break and Imola, which takes the place of Monza as the Italian round next season, have 37 garages.
“Thirty-seven is the right number… That’s the plan,” Lequien said.
In light of the challenges involved with refueling rigs, the FIA and WEC had looked into the possibility of LMGT3 teams sharing garages in order to expand the grid to over 40 cars. However, they have ruled out such prospects for the coming season.
“It’s too complicated about the refueling of the cars,” Fillon explained. “If you have two cars in the same garage you need to have two different refueling systems. It’s unfair if you only have one.”
Meanwhile, Lequien added: “We have to find a solution. The goal is to increase the grid in 2025.”
The grid will have only two classes—the Hypercar and the new LMGT3 ranks that will be introduced in 2024—and neither Lequien nor Fillon would be able to establish the sizes of each of the classes.
Nonetheless, it’s anticipated that the WEC selection committee, which convenes following the deadline for entry requests on November 20th, will choose nine GT3 manufacturers to create an 18-car LMGT3 grid, with 19 spots reserved for the Hypercar category.
In the event that a third Ferrari 499P makes an entry, there could possibly be as many as twenty requests for full-season Hypercar entry.
Fillon on the other hand stated that more Hypercar entries will be considered for the 24 Hours of Le Mans, but he did not guarantee that there would be enough room for 25 cars, which is roughly the approximate number of requests for entries received for the premier class entry in the French endurance race.
It has been confirmed that Lamborghini is preparing a second entry for the SC63 hypercar, while Porsche Penske Motorsport is planning to enter a third car at Le Mans in in addition to up to two entries from Cadillac. It also includes an auto-invite from Action Express Racing for winning the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.
“Hypercar is a very important category for us,” Fillon said. “Of course we can’t have ten Porsches in Le Mans but we try to manage to have a fair representation, similar to this year. At the end there is only 62 garages, at least 15 P2, including the invitations.”
Fillon disclosed that Hypercar teams are not allowed to field a third full-season entry in the WEC and confirmed that there are no plans to field a Garage 56 entry at Le Mans next year.
This implies that the third 499P Ferrari is rumored to be setting up would have to be a customer entry.
