McLaren Will Return to Le Mans with the Mighty MCL-HY

McLaren Returns to Le Mans with the Mighty MCL-HY McLaren McLaren has won at Le Mans before. When the team arrived at the Circuit de la Sarthe in 1995, few predicted that a lightly modified road car, the F1 GTR, would walk away with outright victory at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Yet, in one of the wettest races in the event’s history—with about 17 hours of steady rain—the team’s F1 GTR driven by JJ Lehto, Yannick Dalmas, and Masanori Sekiya drove off with a victory, McLaren’s first win at the Vingt Quatre Heures.

Of course, McLaren won there before, when Bruce McLaren himself drove a Ford GT40 MkII to the victory in 1966. Now McLaren is ready to return to victory with this, the MCL-HY FIA Hypercar that will enter the FIA World Endurance Championship’s Hypercar class in 2027. Current Hypercar competitors include: three-time winners Ferrari AF Corse with the Ferrari 499P, Toyota Gazoo Racing with its GR010 Hybrid, Porsche Penske Motorsport’s 963, Cadillac V-Series.

R, BMW M Team WRT with the BMW M Hybrid V8, Alpine Endurance Team’s A424, Peugeot TotalEnergies’ 9X8, Aston Martin THOR Team’s Valkyrie, and Genesis Magma Racing’s GMR-001. It won’t be just a race car, it’ll be available as a track day car for a handful of lucky customers. But, sadly, it won’t be homologated as a street car.

The track day variant, called the MCL-HY GTR, will be developed in parallel with the race car. The MCL-HY test car will be developed in a robust 2026 test program ahead of homologation, McLaren says. McLaren It’s all part of a more audacious plan.