How Genesis is building up to a long-term future in the WEC

Genesis isn’t underestimating the scale of the challenge it faces as it enters its maiden World Endurance Championship campaign in the Hypercar ranks this season. It even admits that it has made life difficult for itself: it has a new car, a new engine and a new team, all put together in an ultra-tight timescale.

It’s why the luxury brand of South Korean manufacturer Hyundai is playing down expectations not just for the delayed WEC curtain-raiser at Imola next month, but for the Le Mans 24 Hours blue riband round and the season as a whole. 

Previous WEC newbies have outlined ambitions to make it onto the podium by the end of year one. There’s no such talk here. The targets for the GMR-001 Hypercar, which has been developed around the ORECA chassis spine, and the Genesis Magma Racing operation are altogether less lofty. 

For the opening races, beginning with the Imola 6 Hours on 19 April following the postponement of the original opening WEC round scheduled for Qatar in March, the aims are modest. They are “to have good execution as a team and to be reliable and to be legal”, says Cyril Abiteboul, who is GMR team principal alongside his duties as the boss of the German-based Hyundai Motorsport entity masterminding the LMDh programme.

“Legality,” he says, “plays a big role in today’s world of endurance,” referencing the strict controls on energy usage and the driveshaft torque sensors that control power. Push him a little harder, and he offers some kind of target or ambition for 2026: “I would like to think that later in the season we can be at least in the top five on merit. But I prefer to focus on what is in our direct control, and this is legality, reliability and good execution.”

The sometime Caterham and Alpine F1 boss insists that Genesis is very much looking beyond 2026; he has always said that the marque will be competing at the pinnacle of sportscar racing in the WEC and at Le Mans beyond the lifecycle of the current ruleset that comes to an end in 2029. The philosophy explains some of the decisions made, such as setting up its own structure from scratch at Paul Ricard to run the cars rather than going with an established team. 

“If we were only looking for the best competitive option for the start of our programme, probably using an existing team would have been better,” he explains. “This programme is just the start of GMR’s entry into professional tier-one circuit racing and, in my opinion, if we are in it for the long term, we can only do it with our own soul, our own skills and our own people.”

He uses the term “having skin in the game” and previously talked about avoiding having any kind of “filter or firewall” between Hyundai Motorsport and the GMR-001. This time, he says: “In order to be in control of our product we need to operate the racing ourselves.”

Abiteboul is modest in his predictions; instead his focus is on “legality, reliability and good execution”

Photo by: Genesis

GMR has been established adjacent to the Ricard circuit on an industrial park built by the parent company of the IDEC Sport team with which Genesis partnered for its so-called trajectory programme in the European Le Mans Series last year in LMP2.

The idea was to train personnel in preparation for GMR’s arrival in the WEC. That included engineers and mechanics, as well as drivers. Daniel Juncadella and Mathys Jaubert, three-time race winners along with Jamie Chadwick in the trajectory ORECA-Gibson 07, have segued over to race seats in the LMDh. 

Setting up the WEC organisation, which now incorporates 75 people, has involved significant recruitment. Only 15 or so have moved over from Hyundai Motorsport, whose operations were previously focussed on the World Rally Championship. Staff have joined from Ferrari, Alpine and Cadillac. A good number have come from Porsche after its departure from the WEC’s Hypercar division, though Abiteboul points out there has also been incomings from its Formula E squad. 

“All of our team have huge experience of tier-one motorsport, ranging from endurance to Formula 1 and FE,” he says. The team is now a far cry from the skeleton operation running the car when it turned a wheel for the first time back in August. 

“We put together a clear plan from the outset with strong partners. We set ourselves very clear milestones. I am pleased to say we have been able to deliver on each of these remarkably well” Cyril Abiteboul

The roll-out came just 11 months after the sign-off of the project. “A big challenge” is how Abiteboul describes the timescale involved, though he reckons he has yet to lose any sleep over it. “We put together a clear plan from the outset with strong partners,” he says. “We set ourselves very clear milestones in terms of engine fire-up, car fire-up, car testing, mileage, mileage of a single power unit, and also the head count of the team. I am pleased to say that we have been able to deliver on each of these remarkably well.”

The 3.2-litre twin-turbo V8 in the back of the GMR-001 fired up on the dyno at Hyundai Motorsport for the first time in February. Work on the engine actually started in the summer of 2024, along with the first aero work, ahead of the project receiving the green light. There wasn’t time to waste. Nor to start from first principles. The V8 builds on the technology from the 1.6-litre turbo engine from Hyundai’s i20 N Rally 1. 

Abiteboul points out that building an engine from scratch even if it builds on existing in-house knowledge contrasts with the majority of its rivals that have developed LMDh machinery. For example, BMW turned to an engine formerly used in the DTM, though now in turbocharged form, and Alpine to the Formula 2 V6 developed by Mecachrome for their internal combustion engines. 

There were some teething problems as Genesis began proper testing at Ricard at the end of August after initial shakedowns at the facility’s training track. Cooling and driveability were among them. “It was all part of learning a hybrid car,” says Justin Taylor, who joined as chief engineer early last summer. 

GMR-001 package has clocked up 12,500 miles in testing to get on top of reliability

Photo by: Genesis

“We had to adjust some of the radiators and heat exchangers based on our initial assumptions,” adds Taylor, who came on board following stints at the Chip Ganassi Racing Cadillac squad and Ferrari, where he engineered the 499P Le Mans Hypercar that won at La Sarthe in 2023.

“To minimise the radiator size to give the aero guys the most freedom, we had to find where the best trade-offs were. We took longer than we would have liked to work out how it is best to cool the oil versus the water versus the gearbox versus the MGU [motor generator unit]. It was nothing more than figuring out the monster of the system that we have put together.”

The major breakthrough on driveability came in late October at the second of a pair of consecutive tests at Magny-Cours. “From one to the other we made a big step forward,” recalls Pipo Derani, who was announced as one of the first two Genesis drivers along with Andre Lotterer in December ’24 on the launch of the programme in Dubai.

“Everything was running fine, it was just that as a driver you have a feeling that this should be this way and that should be that way. We were trying to fine tune. It was like we understood what we needed. That was quite a big relief.”

Genesis has hit its targets on track so far. They included putting 8000km (nearly 5000 miles) on a single engine. That’s comfortably more than the distance a car is likely to do if it finishes Le Mans. Validating the reliability of a package that has now exceeded 20,000km (12,500 miles) was priority number one for GMR, which undertook a 30-hour simulation at Aragon in November. “We didn’t hit 30 hours, but we came damn close,” says Taylor. “We went for as many hours as we possibly could before the track stopped us.”

Successfully achieving and exceeding its mileage targets allowed Genesis to move onto performance testing. “We set our sights on endurance from the beginning, and once we ticked those boxes, we moved on to performance,” he explains. “Simply put, there is no point trying to make something fast if you don’t think it is going to last.” Taylor adds that the team is “not done with reliability stuff”, although there isn’t another Le Mans simulation in the plan right now ahead of the French enduro. 

Where the GMR-001 stands against its rivals can only be informed guesswork at the moment. All of the testing done by Genesis has been undertaken alone, though Taylor explains that it has been to tracks “in close proximity” to some of its rivals. “We have got some [lap] times through friends, so we have a clue,” he says. “But we are missing the proper data to show where we are really at.”

Genesis will now have to wait until Imola to gain a fuller understanding of that. Abiteboul concedes that the clear and necessary requirement to postpone Qatar – it is now scheduled for October – as a result of the war in the Middle East is a blow. He says that it needs a benchmark in order to work out its development plan through the season.

Back row, left-right: Juncadella, Jaminet, Lotterer, Chatin; front: Jaubert, Derani, Chadwick

Photo by: Genesis

“There is a limit to what you can do without that,” he says. “After a good 18 months of preparation, we feel there is less and less we can do without racing and understanding where we are from a competitiveness perspective.”

The postponement of the Qatar 1812Km, effectively a 10-hour event, also means that there are just two shorter races over six hours, at Imola and then Spa in early May, prior to Le Mans. That will result in reduced mileage being put on its cars and fewer hours for the GMR squad to gel and become what might be termed as race fit prior to the centrepiece round of the WEC in June.

To that effect, when the Qatar decision was announced, the squad “immediately jumped on the schedule of the team and different race tracks to see what we could do to not leave ourselves without some action”, says Abiteboul. He didn’t want the team to “lose momentum”. 

Genesis has been able to reschedule another two days of testing at an unspecified circuit in the weeks leading up to Imola. How it will utilise those days hasn’t been fixed: Abiteboul concedes there is a balancing act between trying to squeeze more performance out of the GMR-001, “particularly on the software side”, and undertaking long-distance runs to partially make up for the loss of track time after Qatar’s postponement. 

The delay of the season-opener has come with a benefit. Abiteboul concedes that the team would have been “extremely marginal” on its stock of spares had Qatar gone ahead

There will also be the chance to undertake what GMR’s boss calls “shakedown runs” back at base at Ricard. The team has “the opportunity to squeeze in a couple of hours at the end of a day when the track is being used for other purposes”. It was, he adds, “why we decided to position our workshop at Ricard”.

The delay of the season-opener has come with a benefit. He concedes that the team would have been “extremely marginal” on its stock of spares had Qatar gone ahead. The extra few weeks will “put us in a much better position in terms of the logistics of our package”. 

After the extra testing, it will be on to Imola, a track where the team was running last week with its development chassis. There will be a pre-season Prologue test at the Italian venue, a single day on the Tuesday of race week replacing the two scheduled at Qatar. Genesis will finally get its benchmark and the drivers will see how they stack up against their rivals. 

The driving roster in the cars is being made up largely of recruits from elsewhere in Hypercar and also GTP in the IMSA SportsCar Championship in North America. The focus was on bringing in drivers with LMDh experience. Derani and Lotterer came from Cadillac and Porsche respectively, while Mathieu Jaminet also arrived from Porsche and Paul-Loup Chatin from Alpine.

Cooling and driveability were among the car’s initial teething problems, now addressed

Photo by: Genesis

Jaminet, however, was a replacement for an LMH driver, Stoffel Vandoorne. His deal to join Genesis was derailed by his desire to keep a foot in the FE camp as Jaguar’s reserve driver when GMR was demanding exclusivity. 

“The car we have is an LMDh, so it was important to have LMDh drivers and, by extension, GT drivers,” says Abiteboul. The last point is a reference to Juncadella, a longtime Mercedes and subsequently Chevrolet factory driver, and the ease with which GT drivers have taken to LMDh machinery. 

“An objective was to have a driver who was familiar with the ORECA spine and that is something we have been able to get with Paul-Loup,” explains Abiteboul. “He knows it from Alpine; he was involved in the development of that car [the A424].” Alpine clearly understood the rationale behind the recruitment and held Chatin to his contract right up to the end of last year: he wasn’t permitted to get into the Genesis until GMR tested in Qatar in January. It was “fair game”, reckons Abiteboul.

Twenty-year-old Jaubert is by far the youngest driver on the squad. Next youngest is Jaminet at 31. Abiteboul explains that Genesis is trying to balance immediate aims and those of the future. Jaubert’s signing is “a way to build a long-term future”, he says. “This is nothing but a long-term programme with long-term views on things, on people, technology and facilities, but also on drivers.”

To that end the trajectory programme has been expanded for this year to include a pair of young South Korean drivers competing in single-seaters. It is part, says Abiteboul, of a mission to “develop a motorsport culture in South Korea” as much as an attempt to prepare a driver from Genesis’s homeland for an eventual Hypercar seat.

Lotterer, Derani and Jaubert are teamed in one car, Jaminet, Chatin and Juncadella the other, though running two drivers at some of the six-hour races remains a possibility. “It is too early to announce the exact details of our plan,” says Abiteboul. “But we are at the start of the programme, so it is clear we have to give enough mileage and driving time to all of our drivers. Expect to see us to be biased a bit more towards three drivers rather than two.”

The aim at Imola and then Spa will be to get the two Genesis entries to the chequered flag. But race one for the GMR-001 will also be the beginning of the delayed next phase of the programme. 

“We have a solid base to start, but we still feel we have a lot to improve,” says Derani, who insists he has no regrets about leaving Cadillac’s IMSA programme with Action Express Racing to pursue his dreams in the WEC. “If you ask me, would we have liked to have had more testing before we go racing? Of course I would say yes. But you also need to be thrown into the deep end and start competing. That will accelerate our progression rate much quicker.”

This article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the April 2026 issue and subscribe today. 

Genesis GMR-001’s racing debut has been pushed back by the postponement of the original season opener in Qatar

Photo by: Genesis