LMEM and ACO have announced the race schedules for the 2026 European Le Mans Series and Michelin Le Mans Cup.
The six rounds are completely identical to the 2025 schedule, with only a few date adjustments, and a very significant change for the LMC field.
The season starts in Barcelona at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, where the first race weekend is held as well on 11-12 April.
Next stop is Circuit Paul Ricard in France in May, with both series being present there as well.
ELMS will have June off, but that is only because a lot of the teams and drivers will be competing in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
The Le Mans week itself brings a significant change to the Michelin Le Mans Cup. It’s been a tradition to run two 55-60-minute races, but that will switch to a single 3-hour race on Friday.
That change is down to the experiences from the past years, where two short races have resulted in way too much panic in the field, and way too few laps for the drivers. The Le Mans circuit is just under 4 minutes per lap for the LMP3 and GT3 cars, and that, mixed up with Slow Zones or Safety Cars, makes it very hard to do 30 laps during the week, with the average being around 20-25 laps.
It will, of course, cost a bit more, since there will be 1 more hour of racing – but you only need one qualifying instead of two, and if you give the drivers more time for that, the ever-returning issues might be eliminated. It’s almost become a tradition that several drivers crash on their very first flying lap, since they only have three or four, with the regulations so far, and that’s if they weren’t hit with a Red Flag.
So that’s an exciting change, and that will hopefully calm things down a little and create some good racing.
LMC will be on their summer break in July, while ELMS goes to Imola.
Both series join up again at Spa Francorchamps in Belgium in August, with great challenges for both cars and drivers, as we saw just last weekend.
Silverstone is back with another mid-September race, while the season finale will be run one week earlier than this year in Portimao, Portugal. That creates a bit more space for the Asian Le Mans Series, which is expected to start earlier for the 2026/27 season than it does in the upcoming 2025/26 season. A lot of teams have had to pretty much ship their cars, right after the chequered flag, so they can reach the Far East for the season opener.
All ELMS races will be 4 hours, which has become the norm for the series, resulting in a total of 24 hours of racing.
The LMC races are two hours, which became possible again after the latest generation of LMP3 engines was introduced for the 2025 season. The 2025 Silverstone race, however, is only 1 hour and 50 minutes, since the organisers have no recent information about LMP3 fuel usage, since they haven’t run there since 2019, with the first-gen engines. So if that is the case for 2026, or if they will have a full 2-hour race, it is not yet revealed by LMEM.
Both schedules in full look like this:
Graphics: ELMS
Graphics: LMC
