GT3 Class to Replace GTE at Le Mans from 2024
Photo: Nissan
The Automobile Club de l’Ouest, which organizes the FIA World Endurance Championship and 24 Hours of Le Mans, has announced it will discontinue the GTE class and instead adopt GT3-based cars from the 2024 season onwards.
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To the untrained eye, GT3 and GTE cars look largely the same. The rulebooks, however, view them quite differently. While both require homologation, GT3 cars tend to be closer to their road-going counterparts and feature more stock parts. GT3 cars are faster and built according to a stricter set of rules. They’re more specialized and thus more expensive.
As a result, they’re also less popular among manufacturers and the teams that run them. Over the past decade, the GT3 class has become one of the most popular sports car racing category in the world. Following the departure of Aston Martin, BMW, and Ford, there are only four GTE manufacturers remaining in the GTE Pro class that competes at Le Mans, but there are about a dozen GT3 manufacturers competing in various events each year, like the 24 Hours of Spa.
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The change to GT3 rules will also further the convergence between the FIA’s World Endurance Championship and the IMSA’s SportsCar Championship, as the latter is adopting a new GT3-based class in 2022 and introducing the highly-anticipated LMDh prototype class in 2023 —prototypes that will be able to compete with the Le Mans Hypercars that debuted this year.
The ACO and IMSA also announced they would extend their partnership agreement for another 10 years as they continue to work together on technical and sporting regulations. For motorsport fans, this is great news that bode well for the future of GT racing.
Kurt Verlin was born in France and lives in the United States. Throughout his life he was always told French was the language of romance, but it was English he fell in love with. He likes cats, music, cars, 30 Rock, Formula 1, and pretending to be a race car driver in simulators; but most of all, he just likes to write about it all. See more articles by Kurt.