Motorsport Analytics

A less-quant-than-it-ought-to-be look at the LMGT3 field

This is the LMGT3 section of my preview. The Hypercar part of my preview is here

In the Hypercar version of this preview I commented that it should be somewhat easier to preview than last year’s because in the second year of the new format there was obviously going to be more continuity than there was last year.

Yeah, about that. Seems nobody told the GT3 teams:

• Iron Lynx have switched from Lamborghini to Mercedes machinery.
• But they’ve not brought the Iron Dames with them, as they’ve moved to Porsche.
• So have Ryan Hardwick’s 1stPhorm outfit, this time from Mustang, with neither Porsche squad from last year returning.
• Satoshi Hoshino and D’Station don’t return for Aston Martin, replaced by Swiss outfit Spirit of Léman.
• Darren Leung doesn’t have a fancy name for the people whose salaries he’s paying, but he’s moved from BMW to McLaren and taken Sean Gelael with him.

All told, only 20 out of 54 drivers are sat in the exact same seat they were in last year, with Ferrari the only squad returning all six drivers from last year. So we’re back to the same table as last year to look at how well these teams know each other…

Last year I explained this as a result of the feeding frenzy for places in the championship. This year? Some of it’s how much WEC costs to run in, but I’m genuinely surprised by quite how much turnover there’s been.

Last year I was optimistic that the ACO would quickly manage to find a reasonably accurate balance of performance (BoP). Therefore I thought that the main differentiating factor was largely the strength of the driver lineups and team preparation. That….didn’t really happen, with Porsche dominating the season up to a big rebalance in Austin and Ferrari taking 2 of the remaining 3 races. There’s been another fairly large rebalance to start the season though, so possibly things will be better this year. Or perhaps they won’t.

There’s a significant rule change in LMGT3 this year as it relates to qualifying. While previously the Bronze driver did the full thing, now the Silver driver switches in for Hyperpole. This…would harm teams with the best Bronzes, but the era of legendary Bronze drivers in WEC is largely over. Sarah Bovy’s been promoted to Silver, Ben Keating’s recent IMSA results haven’t been that great, and PJ Hyett’s not here. Even should Keating turn out to have an edge over his fellows at Bronze, he’s also teamed up with one of the fastest Silvers in Jonny Edgar, so it wouldn’t make much difference. What it does mean is that the starts of races might be more chaotic, as the starting drivers won’t be in order of how fast they were. Instead they’ll be in order of how fast their Silver team-mates were.

Balance of Performance is also a bit more confusingly expressed in the LMGT3 class. Instead of an absolute power value in kilowatts, the BoP table names a power setting, with each number from P1 upwards indicating an extra 1% of power removed from the homologation value. So Porsche being “P7” during the prologue means the 911 GT3 R was running at 7% less power than it was homologated at. In any case, expressing a power-to-weight ratio as I did for Hypercar isn’t even particularly useful, since the cars weren’t all designed to fit in a similar aerodynamic window. So I’ve just reproduced the power setting and weight values, including the power boost (this time applied at 200 kph, since GT3s are slower than hypercars) in brackets. Obviously these are again all subject to change, and in general it’s a good thing when that happens.

Anyway the upshot of all of this is that I’m nowhere near so confident of putting the GT cars in any kind of order beyond alphabetical…

Aston Martin (Heart of Racing/Spirit of Léman)

Aston Martin were one of the four marques who did manage to win a race last year, and unlike BMW they didn’t even need the help of an odd wet-dry race to do it. That said, the only driver that returns from the Heart of Racing crew that did it is Bronze (and team principal) Ian James. Alex Riberas has been promoted to their new Hypercar squad and then-Silver Daniel Mancinelli is now a Gold. In their place are Zacharie Robichon and Mattia Drudi. Drudi’s got a perfectly reasonable resume as a factory driver, winning the GTWC Sprint Cup for Audi in 2023 and picking up two podium finishes out of four races in the recent Asian Le Mans Series. Robichon and James ran together in IMSA last year and picked up points but weren’t title contenders, which seems like the most likely fate of this squad also.

Replacing D’Station in the other Aston Martin are ELMS squad Spirit of Leman (named for the French name for Lake Geneva and not the 24-hour race). They’re largely the team that consistently picked up points and a couple of podiums on the way to third last year. The one change is replacing Caspar Stevenson with Eduardo Barrichello. I think that’s probably a slight downgrade since Barrichello has no GT3 experience, but by the same token that makes it very hard to predict how good he’ll actually be. But most likely this is another team that should be consistent but not amazing.

Aston Martin will have had a good year if: They pick up another race win from somewhere while maintaining consistent points finishes

BMW (WRT)

BMW also managed to win a race last year, in their case the odd wet-dry (at the same time!) Imola event. Once again it’s just a single driver from the winning squad who returns, this time pro Augusto Farfus. Joining him are last year’s runner-up Yasser Shahin and last year’s gave-up-after-three-races-possibly-because-the-Lexus-was-bad Timur Boguslavskiy. If we blame the car for Boguslavskiy’s season but credit Shahin with responsibility for his this squad looks excellent. The application of slightly more logical consistency suggests they have a serviceable but not great Bronze and a Silver who got great results in GTWC but lacks experience in multi class racing. That doesn’t seem all that different to where they were last year, so this team will likely have its moments again, at very least.

In the other squad, after a short panic where the ACO released an entry list that didn’t have a #46 on it, Valentino Rossi returns alongside Ahmad Al-Harthy. This time the Pro slot’s filled by Kelvin van der Linde. The difference between van der Linde and the Mercedes-bound Maxime Martin, though, is probably not very significant. It’s definitely much less important to Rossi’s chances of race wins and championships than whether or not Al-Harthy can cut out the errors that caused major problems last year. It’s still reasonable at this point to give him the benefit of the doubt, as such errors weren’t characteristic of him in previous years. But then, nor was the pressure of being the lead-off driver for the most-watched GT team in the paddock. Rossi himself remains a fine driver and somewhat above average for a silver. In fact, since both of these squads have excellent silver drivers they’re likely to be found high up the grid on a regular basis. This is one more reason they ought to be championship contenders….but I said that last year, too.

BMW will have had a good year if: Really the championship should be the target. Race wins for both cars at least.

Corvette (TF Sport)

One of the easier units to preview is the #81, which returns in full from last year, where they were 10th. However, following the big BoP rebalance at Austin they closed out the year with a 4th and a 2nd, raising hopes for a stronger campaign this year. ACO weren’t having any of that, though, and thwacked Corvette with a 30 kg weight increase. That seems like a slightly odd call when it was Ferrari that actually won two of those three races, but ACO’s odd calls do sometimes bear out. Overall it seems likely that another mid-table season beckons, but the team is capable of more if the BoP gods smile.

Joining the 81 in lugging around 30 extra kilos is the 33 car of Ben Keating, Jonny Edgar and Dani Juncadella. That is, no doubt, a combination of drivers with a fearsome reputation. Keating and TF Sport have even won titles together before. However, his LMP2 campaigns in IMSA over the last two years have been increasingly error-strewn, and Juncadella definitely had a down year in 2024. You might equally observe, though, that GT3 cars have more in the way of driver aids than an Oreca 07 does, and Juncadella’s 2023 was just fine. Edgar was rather more than fine last year, having raced as part of the reigning champion ELMS crew. Mind, it was in LMP2 rather than GT3, and had Cool Racing had better reliability they would have won instead. Still, provided Keating keeps it together and ACO don’t throw any more random weight increases at them, they should be championship contenders.

Corvette will have had a good year if: Race wins for the #33 back up a championship challenge while the #50 is solid.

Ferrari (AF Corse)

Like the #81, both Ferraris return the same crews that raced last year. That seems like a reasonable thing to do, given that both won races towards the end of the season. The #55 was more reliable at picking up points, hence finishing four spots higher, but Thomas Flohr’s #54 car has been very consistent in previous years. So overall we’ve got some solid evidence that both Ferraris can pick up points and win when things favour them.

That’s almost certainly the formula for a championship. Of course, it relies on the opportunities arising. They did not for some marques last year. In terms of the initial BoP, the ACO has tried to peg them back from the race-winning pace they held at the end of last year. Though as almost everyone is slower, it’s hard to say if the 3% off the power and extra 9kg will be relatively that much compared to the other manufacturers. (The main goal seems to have been to boost Ford and Lexus).

So both Ferrari cars are…probably contenders? Based on more recent form, the #21 is likely favoured over the #54, for all that I remain tremendously unconvinced by Simon Mann. The fact that the Silvers are solid rather than chargers isn’t going to help in Hyperpole, but endurance race qualifying is rarely particularly important.

Ferrari will have had a good year if: A championship challenge emerges and both cars are in the mix for race wins at some point in the year

Ford (Proton)

Proton had something of a revolving door at Silver and Bronze last year and they’ve followed that up with some slightly off-the-wall recruits this time around. Also off-the-wall is that team owner Christian Ried has eschewed his own squad to drive an Iron Lynx Mercedes. Hard to know what to make of that other than that it’s not really new as he also jumped out of the Mustang last year, clearly not being a fan for whatever reason.

Anyway the drivers they do have – assuming they hang on to them – for this year in the 77 are former Portuguese rally driver Bernardo Sousa, who’s not done any notable motorsport for years, and Bens Tuck and Barker. The recent history of having a former rally driver at Bronze is labelled “Crashes of Luís Perez Companc, vol. 5”, but it would be unfair to tar Sousa directly with that. Still there’s very little evidence to suggest he does know what he’s doing either. Tuck did a pretty good job – albeit in a Ferrari 296, a very differently handling car to the Mustang – in the recent Asian Le Mans Series, his team coming fourth overall in a large GT field. Barker’s mostly a journeyman veteran, with a lot of experience and some good results in second-tier series, but rarely at the sharp end in top-level ACO and SRO racing. All told it doesn’t add up to that much.

Much the same can be said of the other car. Stefano Gattuso’s mostly been racing in the Italian GT Championship. It’s not a terrible series, but the last Bronze we had come up from a national GT series – Darren Leung – had just won the title and even then was only OK. Gattuso isn’t a champion so he probably also won’t hit the heady heights of averagedom. Levorato at least ran in IMSA GTD last year making him significantly more experienced. Sadly he was also 15th, last amongst the full-season runners. Dennis Olsen’s another journeyman pro, with decent experience but no huge victories….until last month.

Which brings me on to the reasons to maybe believe Proton might be able to do a thing or two. The first is Daytona, where Olsen – along with Christopher Mies and Frédéric Vervisch – won GTD PRO, with another Mustang taking third. The second is the BoP change from which they’re relatively unchanged but many others have lost out. Well. They got a 15kg increase but also a 4% power increase; I read that as relatively neutral.

In other words, it seems like Multimatic might have got a handle on the car while the ACO are currently being helpful towards them. So for Proton, the time is probably now – things are unlikely to get much better.

Ford will have had a good year if: The car’s performance at Daytona is replicated and the weak driver lineup can exploit the mechanical edge in the races before the ACO BoPs it.

Lexus (ASP)

Much like Proton, there’s a lot of gloom with limited reason for optimism for Lexus. Last year’s campaign was abysmal, mostly blamed on the aging car – but the new GT3 isn’t ready yet, so the car’s back. And it’s another year older. Not all that surprisingly quite a lot of drivers have jumped ship. The replacements are…well, let’s start with the good news. Ben Barnicoat is an IMSA champion and multiple race winner in the very car which ASP are struggling so much with. Perhaps he can help bring some of Vasser Sullivan’s ability to extract performance from the car.

Unfortunately I also have some bad news. Finn Gehrsitz has a reasonable amount of experience but much of it involves finishing in the lower reaches of the top ten in LMP3. In terms of GT3 racing, he’s mostly appeared in series like ADAC GT Masters and GT World Challenge Asia. He did, to be fair, finish third in his class in the 2022 Asian Le Mans Series. However, that achievement looks less impressive when you realise his class only had five cars in it. As for Razvan Umbarescu, well. He seems to have previously competed as a Silver but is now a Bronze, and his record does rather merit that. He did manage to not eliminate himself in GTWC Europe sprints in 2021. This allowed Jules Gounon to carry him to a couple of podiums and 7th overall. So he’ll probably at very least manage to hand the car over to Clemens Schmid in good condition. Unfortunately Schmid and Jose Maria Lopez didn’t really do much with the cars they were handed last year.

To the extent that they might do more this year, the hope again lies in the BoP (and any magic Barnicoat can work). While most teams have been pegged back Lexus basically stood still; the problem is, so did Porsche, and even post-Austin nerf Porsche were (lots) faster than Lexus. Unlike with the Mustangs there’s no ray of light at Daytona either – rather the reverse in fact as Vasser Sullivan had a miserable race. So this does mostly seem like another holding season until the new car shows up.

Lexus will have had a good year if: They manage to somehow import Vasser Sullivan’s ability to extract performance from the car, which would lead to regular points finishes.

McLaren (United Autosports)

By the second half of last year the McLarens were reliably qualifying right at the sharp end and then fading back towards the lower end of the top 10 during the race. This does suggest certain grounds for optimism, as does escaping from the BoP rebalance with a small 6kg weight increase.

The thing is there’s…not a lot of reason to believe the same thing won’t happen again, unless we’re to believe United have unlocked the secret of GT3 racing over the break. The Pro drivers in each car are unchanged, which isn’t great when your problem is falling back towards the end of races. Each car has a new Silver who raced somewhere else last year – Sebastian Baud from Corvette and Sean Gelael from BMW. Gelael, at least, is famously hard to pass, which might come in handy. But he’s not known for his speed. Baud was fairly anonymous, generally keeping the Corvette in the lower reaches of the points. That’s somewhere the McLarens are quite likely to be mostly inhabiting for another season, too.

McLaren will have had a good year if: they can back up last year’s pole positions with race wins. That has to be the target, but I’m skeptical about it being achieved.

Mercedes (Iron Lynx)

What can you say about Iron Lynx? Had a large falling out with Lamborghini about which we still know fairly little, switched to Mercedes, brought on the owner of a different team to drive one of their cars and are proud to continue sporting the slowest Bronze in the championship.

Matteos Cressoni and Cairoli’s chances in the #61 will largely depend on the existence of appropriately timed safety cars to erase the deficits that Claudio Schiavoni will doubtless build up. That’s not exactly a championship strategy. However, they might well be a threat for individual race wins.

It’s possible the #60 might join the party by having the worst Silver! Lin Hodenius has switched to GT3 racing after a season in Italian F4 which can be accurately described as “bad”, finishing 25th in the championship with a best place of 8th and a median placing of 21st. That follows a pointless season in Spanish F4 in 2023. Before that, he did manage to win the Porsche Sprint Challenge Southern Europe, which is not, as far as I can see, a professional series. To be fair, he’s only 18 and has plenty of time to improve…but he can charitably be described as out of his depth at this level. Christian Ried as a driver blows hot and cold; he has his moments and, well, his moments. Maxime Martin is a fine driver who’ll doubtless make the best of such chances as he gets, and his fifth at Daytona indicates his up to speed with the Mercedes.

The Iron Lynx operation overall is quite professional and, as can be seen by how badly the Lamborghini has run in its absence, contains many skilled engineers. But it’s increasingly hard not to wonder what they’re playing at with driver selections.

Mercedes will have had a good year if: Their Pro drivers take advantage of circumstances to post some decent one-off results. Anything else is likely beyond them.

Porsche (Manthey)

The defending champions celebrated by doing the obvious thing and getting rid of both of the teams that took them to a 1-2 finish. To be fair, Pure Rxcing couldn’t have continued as Alex Malykhin was promoted to Silver, and it seems that Yasser Shahin made his own decision to decamp. Manthey simply carried on and took a 1-2 in the Asian Le Mans Series.

The 2 in that 1-2 was the 1stPhorm lineup of Hardwick, Pera and Lietz. While the standard in the Asian Le Mans Series isn’t perhaps quite so high as WEC (not that anyone who’s read this far is going to be impressed by all the WEC entries) that’s still impressive. The team that beat them was based on last year’s champions Sturm and Bachler, and was slightly more consistent overall. There’s every reason to believe this team is capable of challenging for the championship.

The Iron Dames have for a long time been synonymous with the lightning starts provided by the controversially Bronze-rated Sarah Bovy. But Bovy is now Silver-rated and the Dames enter a new era with Celia Martin at Bronze. That also started at the Asian Le Mans Series, and things went…OK. Which is to say that a team of Martin, Bovy and Gatting occasionally threatened the points and ended up 16th overall. A certain amount of improvement can be expected from the switch from Proton-prepared to Manthey-prepared cars – almost everyone agrees the quasi-works outfit are just slightly better at Porsches than everyone else. Similarly, Rahel Frey will likely prove an upgrade on Sarah Bovy (or be replaced by Marta Garcia). Michelle Gatting continues to improve and is a fine defensive driver who proved in the Asian Le Mans Series she can hold off Platinums almost indefinitely. But that requires having a lead, and that seems unlikely this year. They’ll pick up points, but in a learning year for Celia Martin more than that seems unlikely.

Porsche will have had a good year if: The #92 defends the championship while Celia Martin improves strongly over the season pushing the Iron Dames forward.