There will be loads of cars on the starting grids at both FIA WEC and Le Mans in 2017.
28 cars are ready for FIA World Endurance Championship, which is a bit less than the number of cars in 2016, but the grids are totally packed for the 24 hours race of Le Mans.
We’ll publish the details about the individual teams and their drivers combination in separate articles.
Porsche, Toyota og Bykolles will compete in LMP1, where Porsche and Toyota come with two WEC cars and Bykolles with one. But Toyota will come with a third car for Spa and Le Mans.
The cars in LMP2 will all have ORECA chassis, where ten will drive for the whole season and 15 additional cars for the 24 hours, making it a total number of 25 cars. Manor once again come with two cars, just as Rebellion Racing, with Dane David Heinemeier Hansson in one of the cars, as well as TDS Racing, Signatech and Jackie Chan DC Racing. Team Graff will also come with two cars for Le Mans, which furthermore will compete in the ELMS. Apart from that, there are many one-car teams from ELMS, AsLMS, IMSA (for Le Mans) and the WEC series.
Photo: Gabi Tomescu – AdrenalMedia.com
In GTE Pro we have a fixed number of eight cars with two cars from last year’s WEC champion Aston Martin racing, with Nicki Thiim and Marco Sørensen trying to defend their title, two cars from AF Corse, two from Ford Chip Ganassi Racing Team UK as well as two cars from Porsche GT team, where Michael Christensen will pilot car 92 for Porsche. For Le Mans, Ford Chip Ganassi Team USA will come with two cars, just like Corvette and their usual two cars with Jan Magnussen behind the wheel in one of them. Last but not least, Risi Competizione comes with their Ferrari 488 GTE. In total there will be 13 GTE Pro cars at Le Mans.
Five cars will compete throughout the whole WEC season in GTE Am, with 11 extra cars for Le Mans. A new Swiss team called Spirit of Race will come with a Ferrari 488 GTE. Clearwater Racing, the AsLMS GTE champion from 2016/17 season will also show up with a car from the Italian brand. Dempsey-Proton Racing has a single Porsche, while Gulf Racing will bring two cars from Stuttgart. Lastly, there is Aston Martin Racing with one car. For Le Mans Larbre Competition will come with a Corvette, while Spirit of Race and Clearwater Racing will double up. Scuderia Corsa comes with two cars, with 2016 IMSA champion Christina Nielsen driving one of them. DH Racing from Hong Kong will show up with a Ferrari 488 GTE, meanwhile JMW Motorsport will come with a little older 458 Italia. Proton Competition comes with two Porsche cars, while Beechdean Racing and TF Sport will take one Aston Martin each with them. The last two will compete in ELMS for the rest of the season.
There are two cars on the reserve list: RLR M Sport with a Ligier LMP2 car, and Mentos-Proton Racing with a Porsche 911 RSR GTE-Am car.
You can read the full FIA WEC list here
And the complete Le Mans list here
