The new verbage for the 2023 Prototype landscape will take a little getting used to.
With IMSA’s 70th annual Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring set for Saturday, and a WEC race firing off at Sebring on Friday, it might be a good time to decode the alphabet soup surrounding the new-for-2023 Prototype that will be eligible to race in both IMSA and the World Endurance Championship.
Let’s start with Prototype. That’s a race car built from the ground up, as opposed to GT cars, which start life as a passenger car.
The Porsche LMDh for 2023 is now the Porsche GTP
HZ/Porsche Motorsport
In January of 2020, IMSA, the U.S. sports car sanctioning body, and the WEC, IMSA’s European counterpart, jointly announced the new LMDh Prototype, which would debut at the 2022 Rolex 24 at Daytona, but that has been postponed to 2023. Though the two sanctioning bodies’ rules have been similar, they were different enough that the top class in each series was not eligible to compete in the other’s races.
The LMDh would be built to one set of rules, making it possible to race the same car in the Rolex 24 at Daytona and the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The name LMDh, which stood for Le Mans Daytona hybrid, was changed to the historically significant GTP by IMSA, and to Hypercar by the WEC. But they are the same thing. In IMSA, the car replaces the DPi, or Daytona Prototype international.
In the WEC, it replaces the LMP1, or Le Mans Prototype 1. (There is an LMP2 in both series, one step down in class.)
The Toyota Gazoo program dominated the Hypercar class in 2021.
James Moy PhotographyGetty Images
The WEC also has a car called the LMH, or Le Mans Hypercar, which has dominated Le Mans in Toyota’s hands. The GTP/Hypercar is rear-drive only, has a standard hybrid system, and can be powered by a four-, six- or eight-cylinder engine, pumping out a total of about 670 horsepower.
The LMH car is rear- or all-wheel-drive and may or may not have some sort of more powerful hybrid component. The chassis choice if open, while in GTP/Hypercar, the chassis has to come from one of a handful of select manufacturers.
If an LMH team wants to race in IMSA, it will have to be performance-balanced (the ol’ Balance of Perfomance) to match the GTP/Hypercar. So far, none have decided to try to race in IMSA.
Got it? Fortunately, as the professor would say, none of this will be on the test until 2023.
The DPI, shown here, will be replaced in IMSA in 2023.
Brian ClearyGetty Images
Keyword: Prototype Alphabet Soup: Primer on LMDh, LMH, Hypercar, GTP, LMP1, DPi