The preliminary FIA World Endurance Championship 2019/20 calendar has been announced today.
Its a calendar with a lot of usual things, but with some new twists and turns too.
The season starts at Silverstone on the first weekend of September, before the teams will sea fright all their equipment to Asia, where Fuji in Japan, Shanghai in China and the Sakhir track in Bahrain will be visited. That all happens in the fall/winter 2019 before the equipment will be shipped to Brazil, with Sao Paulo being run in February, before Sebring is scheduled for March.
Then the series will head back to Europe where Spa Francorchamps will be run as “warm up” to the 24 hours race in Le Mans.
So Bahrain is back on the calendar, and Sao Paulo returns for the first time since 2014. 2014 was the final race of Tom Kristensen as a professional driver for Audi Sport.
Photo: JJ Media
Other than those adjustments to the calendar, where will be adjustments to the race lengths. The 2019/20 calendar will be a mix of 4, 6, 8 and 24 hour races. Silverstone and Shanghai will be 4 hours each, Bahrain and Sebring will be 8 hours each, while Fuji, Sao Paulo and Spa Francorchamps remains the usual 6 hours. And Le Mans remains at, no surprice, 24 hours.
It is a preliminary calendar so far, and some of the teams might not be impressed about going all the way to Shanghai, only to race for 4 hours + practice and qualifying.
The calendar for 2019/20 looks like this so far:
01 September 2019 4 Hours of Silverstone (Great Britain)
13 October 2019 6 Hours of Fuji (Japan)
17 November 2019 4 Hours of Shanghai (China)
14 December 2019 8 Hours of Bahrain (Bahrain)
01 February 2020 6 Hours of São Paulo (Brazil)
xx March 2020 1000 Miles of Sebring (8 hours) (USA) *
03 May 2020 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps (Belgium)
13-14 June 2020 24 Hours of Le Mans (France)
