Cyril Abiteboul described the ‘balance’ the FIA World Endurance Championship holds for its brands as head of the new Genesis Hypercar project.
The team principal of Genesis Magma Racing complimented the competitive WEC environment with his newfound role on the Hyundai-Genesis Hypercar effort.
Genesis will enter two GMR-001 LMDh cars in the 2026 FIA World Endurance Championship season, utilising an Oreca-developed chassis.
The former Renault Formula 1 team principal spoke in a 20-minute interview published on the WEC YouTube channel, on the back of leading Hyundai to drivers’ championship glory in the FIA World Rally Championship.
“I think right now, the momentum that FIA WEC is enjoying is absolutely fantastic,” he said.
“It’s clearly a perfect balance of brands and cost control, of differentiation and also some form of standardisation of technology.
“What we really want to be focused on is developing the brand and developing people.
“We feel that the combination that FIA WEC has achieved in the current cycle enables us to really bring our story about aesthetic design out there.
“We’ve got the ability to do that. So that’s one thing – gaining the brand exposure that we need.
“Then, on the other side, people. For sure, technology matters in the automotive industry, but technology is enabled by people.
“That’s why one of the decisions that we’ve made is to operate the cars ourselves in FIA WEC.
“The reason we want to do that is precisely because we want to maximise the authority that we will have over the racing cars with engineers, with mechanics, with technicians.”
Utilising an LMP2 campaign and WRC experience
The WEC features a diverse selection of eight manufacturers alone in the Hypercar category.
Reigning WEC Hypercar champion Andre Lotterer joins Pipo Derani as fully confirmed drivers so far.
Although, IDEC Sport are fielding three more talents in the form of ex-F1 Williams driver Logan Sargent, Jamie Chadwick and Mathys Jaubert in the European Le Mans Series.
The team will run an Oreca 07 which has been the go-to LMP2 platform for teams globally.
Abiteboul continued: “We will have a strategic partnership over the course of 2025 with IDEC Sport, leveraging their LMP2 platform to put some of our staff and some of our potential development drivers in ELMS.
“So we will be out there somewhere.
“You will see some drivers in Genesis colours as well as some technicians, engineers and mechanics because they will be learning what endurance is about and what the challenges are in the sport, so that they can bring that expertise into our future WEC team in 2026.
“I’ve seen mechanics in F1 and I’ve seen mechanics in rallying, and what probably makes the world of rallying a bit closer to endurance is the fact that when your car is coming back to the service park in rallying, you have absolutely no idea what you’ll have to fix, injecting a bit of ‘dealing with the unknown and managing the unexpected’ – but what you do know is that you’ll have a very short period of time to fix it.
“You’re never going to think about changing a turbocharger in Formula 1, but that’s definitely the sort of thing you have to do in a very limited amount of time in a very controlled manner [in rallying and endurance racing], ensuring reliability and perfection of execution.”
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