As the dawn of their LMDh challenger approaches, McLaren have appointed Garage 59 as the new team who will run their 720s LMGT3 team for the 2026 FIA World Endurance Championship. The move allows United Autosports to focus solely on preparing for the as yet unnamed car’s debut in the 2027 IMSA Weathertech Sportscar Championship.

On the surface at least, it appears to make perfect sense. With just under 18 months before their LMDh chassis makes its debut crunch time is fast approaching, and with testing inevitable from next year United Autosports will be wanting as much time as they can get their hands on to ensure the car is competitive. Cutting them free from the LMGT3 project also allows them to focus purely on setting the team up to run LMDh machinery.

One thing they do have to their advantage is an incredibly successful LMP2 team, which will no doubt have given them invaluable data and unlike Penske Motorsport and AF Corse they won’t need to set up a new prototype outfit for 2026. They’ve already got championship winning cars and drivers, and have years of LMP2 experience under their belt.

It raises an interesting dilenma. While names are being thrown in left right and centre as to who will get a seat for 2027, including the likes of Mick Schumacher, Jenson Button and Malthe Jakobsen, could a strong 2026 season prompt McLaren to promote from within and hand out a drive to one of their many LMP2 stars?

That will be for them to decide ahead of the car’s debut, but in the meantime Garage 59 will now be scrambling to form their own formidable lineup as the team prepare for their biggest year yet. Thus far, the team launched only in 2016 have plied their trade in the GT World Challenge Europe, with forays into British GT in 2020 and 2021.

They didn’t have to wait long for plaudits as the team won its first ever race, the 3 Hours of Monza. A further win at Paul Ricard propelled the team to an Endurance Cup title.

Ever since, it’s been more glory. Five further titles in both British GT and GT World Challenge Europe have certainly decorated the trophy cabinet, and their 2026 appointment feels only justified. For me, it’s a team that’s more than proven themselves deserving of such a huge gig.

McLaren themselves don’t have the raw numbers of Ferrari, Porsche and BMW when it comes to the European GT circuit, and certainly far less in the wider world yet this season Garage 59 have found themselves frequently at the front despite this. At the 24 Hours of Spa earlier this year Marvin Kirchofer took a dominant pole, and they won overall just two weeks ago in Barcelona. It’s safe to say 2025 was one of their strongest years, and the perfect way of proving their mettle ahead of the biggest test in 2026.

It’s important to also note that they’ve competed at Le Mans back in 2022 as part of a collaboration with Inception Racing – albeit with a Ferrari 488 GTE – where a faultless run from drivers was put to an abrupt end thanks to a driveshaft failure 14 Hours in.

For all intents and purposes then, the decision is a sensible one and it will also see extra benefits for the team who move out of their Brackley home into a new, state of the art Northampton headquarters with greater engineering and car development opportunities ahead of their debut campaign next year.

All seems to be on the up then, but make no mistake that 2026 could still prove a tough year for Garage 59 as they take on arguably the toughest set of GT Teams and drivers in the world with the likes of Manthey, Iron Lynx and WRT no doubt wanting to establish their own intentions from the get go.

Garage 59 may be the new kid on the LMGT3 block next year, but here’s hoping they can deviate from the ‘plucky brit’ cliche and genuinely go toe-to-toe with the world’s best.

thumbnail credit – Lukas Raich, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons