Last weekend, the European Le Mans Series returned to our screens in a thoroughly thrilling 4 hour contest at Barcelona, and this weekend it’s the turn of the World Endurance Championship as it sets up for a 6-hour season opener at Imola. Naturally, an extended off-season has only increased the anticipation for the upcoming weekend, and with so much changing and chopping over the off season I’ve compiled a list of everything that will be peaking everyone’s interest.

The Debut of Genesis

It’s been a project we’ve heard about for over a year, a car we’ve seen testing extensively since its public launch in August 2025 and now Genesis will finally be able to show us what their GMR-001 package can produce. Of course it’s going to be a weekend of unknowns, but everything does look rather optimistic for them. Their target will of course be to finish and post competitive lap times, but with one of the most experienced lineups in the Hypercar field including Mathieu Jaminet, Pipo Derani and Andre Lotterer and a youthful spark with Mathys Jaubert they could well exceed expectations. Free Practice will be our first insight of course, with the first running due to begin at 10:15 local time on Friday and our first true experience of the race-ready Hyundai V6. I really can’t wait to see what they can do.

BMW Goes Retro In LMGT3

We’re more than used to seeing a BMW art car on occasion, and throwback liveries are aren’t too strange a concept to WEC – just look at Porsche’s extensive tributes to their own history at Le Mans – but BMW may have outdone themselves this year. Announced ahead of this weekend was a quite revolutionary idea, as WRT will adorn their #69 BMW M4 LMGT3 Evo with a unique livery at each WEC outing this year, each of them a tribute to an iconic BMW livery of the past. For Imola: DTM dejavu, as Alexander Bergstaller’s #35 Valier Motorsport M3 is the subject. Originally, the M3 ran for a single weekend in the 1992 DTM campaign with white and green Tic Tac sponsorship to a best placed finish of 16th at the now defunct Deipholz street track. An extra challenge for those creating spotters guides and wrapping the car, but for the fans a simply brilliant initiative into paying respects to some of the most iconic – or, in this case, just plain epic – liveries in the marque’s extensive archive. My one request: A V12 LMR throwback at Le Mans.

LMGT3 Silly Season: The Dust Settles

With the exception of Genesis, Hypercar had a total of 6 – count them, 6 – driver transfers in the offseason. LMGT3 however was the complete opposite. With new teams in McLaren’s Garage 59 and Corvette’s Racing Team Turkey, and with The Heart of Racing gaining a second LMGT3 for Aston Martin in 2026, there’s almost too many to name. What’s certain is the class – and likely the pecking order – is set to change big time this year. Let’s go through them shall we?

Starting with the new team on the block, Garage 59 have stripped clean the old lineup of United Autosports and selected six new names for their debut campaign in WEC. Most notably perhaps is young German star Finn Gehrsitz, who impressed with Lexus last year, while in come Asian Le Mans Series champion Auntares Au from Hong Kong. The 47 year old is set to be the bronze rated driver in the #10 car, with Tom Fleming and Marvin Kirchofer joining the grid for their debuts in the series. Kirchofer is a man known for his endurance skill, having claimed pole position at last year’s 24 Hours of Spa and also won the 24 Hours of Daytona in the GTD class last year. Gehrsitz meanwhile will form a trio with Swedish businessman and racing driver Alexander West, with Benjamin Goethe completing the #58’s lineup.

Over to Aston Martin, where a second car for THOR means a brand new lineup, beginning with the most experienced of the three: Johnny Adam will make his return to the series since driving for Aston Martin’s GTE programme with TF Sport. He’ll be joined by a man familiar with Aston Martin. Kobe Pauwels made his start in touring cars, but when ComToYou switched to the British marque for its GT campaign Pauwels made the step up. He also has an overall win at the 24 Hours of Zolder. Joining the team also will be Gray Newell, the son of THOR’s founder Gabe Newell who gained fame and fortune in founding Steam, an online gaming store. They’ll be lining up together in the #23, with Eduardo Barichello expected to fill in at some rounds. The #27 meanwhile will retain Mattia Drudi, Zacharie Robichon and Ian James who all competed last year.

At BMW, not only will the aforementioned #69 run with a new scheme every race but it will sport a new trio of drivers too. Parker Thompson and Anthony MacIntosh will join Dan Harper, all of whom are making their WEC debuts providing an extra element of intrigue to the TIC-TAC machine this weekend. As for the sister car, Sean Geleal joins from McLaren to partner his AF Corse duties in the GT World Challenge, while Darren Leung and Augusto Farfus maintain their positions amongst the BMW lineup.

Salih Yoluc and Charlie Eastwood have history together, having won the LMGTE Am class at Le Mans in 2020 for Yoluc’s own Racing Team Turkey. Since then RTT have been absent from the WEC grid, but now they’re back with Peter Dempsey completing the trio, as they will join TF Sport’s Corvette staple. TF Sport were previously involved in running Racing Team Turkey, so it isn’t an entirely new team to the WEC grid, but it is a brand new livery and a slight change of pace for Corvette. The #34 car which they are due to share will certainly be one to watch throughout the week and of course the season. And with Ben Keating’s forced absence from Imola this weekend, the sister #33 machine will have a new face to fill in. Blake McDonald got his first taste of the American muscle he’ll be driving at the ELMS curtain-raiser on Sunday, in preparation for his duties this weekend alongside Johnny Edgar and Nicky Catsburg. The #33 won the season opening round last year – can Corvette repeat the feat? We’ll find out soon enough.

This time last year, Mercedes were one of the hottest topics. With Lamborghini’s exit from both Hypercar and LMGT3 a spot was open for two cars to compete, and the German marque duly filled it. Iron Lynx had previously been running the SC63, so it made for something of a connection when they partnered up for a full WEC campaign in 2025. That being said, they struggled at times but with a year under their belt, they’ve made a couple of changes to their lineup. Johannes Zelger, who made a remarkable recovery after suffering a huge accident at this year’s 12 Hours of Bathurst will join the returning Matteo Cressoni and Lin Hodenius in the #79, while Rui Andrade – who competed for Corvette last year – teams up with Martin Berry and Maxime Martin.

As Ford prepares itself for a WEC assault in Hypercar next year, thus it has taken a greater interest in its current LMGT3 programme with Proton Racing’s two Mustangs donning works liveries for the first time. Only two driver changes have been made though to accommodate for two of Ford’s future Hypercar drivers. Logan Sargeant joins the #88 of Stefano Gattuso and Giammarco Levorato, while Eric Powell becomes Ford’s newest bronze graded driver in the #77, with Sebastian Priaulx and Ben Tuck completing the lineup for what will be Ford’s most important season yet.

Lexus meanwhile are set for a farewell to the universally adored elder statesman of not just LMGT3 but of the GT3 world itself. 2026 will be the last year for the RCF GT3 which has competed consistently since its debut in 2017. For that final season in come Hadrien David and Tom Van Rompuy who will team up alongside Esteban Masson in the #78. The #87 meanwhile will be one of the very few cars to retain an identical lineup, as Clemens Schmid, Jose Maria Lopez and Razvan Umbarescu all return to compete in the upcoming WEC season.

And finally, of all the teams making the headline moves Porsche may have made the most striking of them all. While the #92 of Yasser Shahin, Ricardo Pera and Richard Leitz is unchanged, the #91 cannot say the same of itself as it sports a brand new trio for 2026. With James Cottingham moving over from McLaren, Porsche have brought in existing factory driver Ayhancan Guven and former BMW man Timur Boguslavsky to their stable for 2026.

Phew. LMGT3 will be a class I’m keeping a close eye on in 2026, and not without reason, the driver transfers a huge reason why.

Toyota and BMW’s Facelifts.

The old Toyota GR010 more than showed its age in 2025, going winless until the final race in Bahrain and ending its perfect record of driver’s championships that started in 2021. A change in the relationship between the brand themselves and service provider Gazoo Racing also proved another point of contention and you can see why they felt a refresh was necessary. And from the looks of things, they’ve done a brilliant job. The newly-named TR010 – the TR standing for Toyota Racing – sports a far meaner look, an angrier engine and and completely re-designed aero package. By all accounts it may well be a completely new car, and the livery choice reflects that. Gone is the black and white, this one’s all red in tribute to the GTP-One. That car never won Le Mans, so poetry would be the word if Toyota were to take it’s livery to the top step of the Circuit De La Sarthe.

As for BMW, their changes are far less wholesale, with merely a simpler aero redesign, not feeling the need for such a rethink. The first thing you will notice is the smaller front air intakes, but there’s also been changes under the hood and in the more intricate areas concerning aero, in an attempt to keep up with the various upgrades deployed by each manufacturer over the off-season. Whether it can revitalise a somewhat stagnant WRT Hypercar project, we’ll have to find out.

New BoP Parameters

Admittedly there’s not much to say here since under the current WEC regulations speaking publicly on the controversial Balance of Performance system is prohibited, but we do know there’s a new system in place this year following significant difficulties in 2025 regarding the equalisation of performance. So we’re simply waiting on whether it will deliver the racing promised to us. Free Practice will be a good chance to measure this up when it comes to how close the field are.