The FIA World Endurance Championship has announced their 2024 schedule.
The series will expand from 7 to 8 race weekends, going towards the left of pre-COVID-19, which put a damper on many things. A further expansion is expected for 2025.
As previous announced, the season is going to start in Qatar with the Prologue and opening round in February. That will be a race of maximum 10 hours, or 1812 kilometers.
But more big changes are happening after that.
The second round will be a new 6-hour race at Imola in April, before the series goes to Spa Francorchamps, as the classic May warm up for Le Mans. Imola will take over the Italian round from Monza, which has been on the schedule in 2021, 2022 and 2023, in addition to the Prologue in 2017.
Then we of course have Le Mans in June.
The series then goes to Sao Paulo in July, which is the first time in 10 year, for a visit at the Brazilian Interlagos circuit.
After a one and a half months break, the series will go to Circuit of the Americas in Texas, which is returning for the first time since 2020, where it actually replaced Sao Paulo.
Only fourteen days later, we have the regular Japanese Fuji round in September, before the season ends on the first week of November in Bahrain.
So that is a goodbye to SuperSebring, after three successful years on the American track. The local fans absolutely loved the race, but from a commercial point of view, with the qualifying on Thursday evening European time, and a race on Friday afternoon/evening European time, it was just not working. The FIA WEC would always be the second priority to the big -for the Americans – 12 hours race, which is always locked in on Saturday.
Portimao in Portugal will disappear from the schedule too, after having been on for 2021 and 2023.
The British fans will surely still be irritated about the lack of Silverstone. But it is a tough puzzle, and you have to remember, that FIA WEC is a World Championship, where you can’t do too many rounds in Europe.
The full 2024 schedule looks like this:
