The new Hypercar regulations have been approved for 2020/2021. Below are the most important things you need to know, with a full technical analysis in our February issue.

What you need to know about the 2020 Hypercar regulations

The FIA and ACO have announced their new regulations for the 2020 Hypercar concepts, having negotiated with Toyota, Aston Martin, Ferrari, Ford, and others, suspected to include Peugeot, before finalising their proposal. The regulations were presented to the FIA World Motorsport Council in November, and the plan was voted through in December.

1. Limited tech

The highlights are that the 2020 Hypercar regulations have necessarily limited technology and development, included Formula 1-style weight distribution limits (48.5 per cent front +/-15 percent), and taken away much of what made the current LMP1 cars the high-tech laboratories that the ACO and fans so craved. The only ones who didn’t like it were the accountants, and they held sway.

2. Powertrain

Gone from the regulations is diesel. Internal combustion engines remain as four-stroke only, but the interesting bit is that for manufacturer engines 25 power units, including the MGU-K, must be presented to the FIA and installed in production cars by the end of year 1, with 100 production cars produced by the second year of competition. There is scope for a pure race engine as long as it is not built by an OEM and it conforms to the rest of the regulations.

There are performance losses too; interlinked suspension systems are banned, brake by wire is to the front axle only, BSFC is set high, maximum speed of a bespoke MGU is limited to 25,000rpm, unlimited for an OEM road based system, weight is increased to 1040kg to avoid the use of exotic materials. The engine production engine is limited to 180kg, -10% maximum for the racing version.

3. Chassis

Cockpit width has increased from 1900mm to 2000mm, and the passenger compartment must be at least 90 per cent of the driver side. With a frontal area of 1.8m2, the cars will be bigger in size, and so that rules out completely the current breed of LMP1 cars. Teams who have invested in BR Engineering’s BR1, or ORECA’s RB13, will either have to scrap that investment, or be allowed to race in a separate, slower class and are awaiting a decision from the FIA on what the future holds for their investment.

Ultimately, this was a set of regulations designed to get the ball rolling. There is a lot of detail in there, enough for those involved in the meetings to give their board of directors, the decision makers. Should they agree, and sign up, they will have more influence as the regulations are refined further.

4. Success?

The target lap time at Le Mans has dropped significantly, and rightly so. The track could not cope with the speeds of the LMP1 cars, and it took almost 50 years for cars to reach lap times of 3m14s once again following regulation changes and track changes. There was, in my opinion, no logic to having such speeds as a starting point for these regulations.

The success or otherwise of this set of regulations will depend on who commits. Manufacturers have sat around the table and debated, the FIA and ACO have delivered, and are selling to other manufacturers.

5. Killing GTE?

One concern is, if this succeeds, what is the future for of GTE? The bodies have gone to Porsche and Aston Martin, Ferrari and BMW, and likely to Corvette too, and tried to sell them this hyper car concept.

They could be in danger of killing the GTE class, which would explain why Lamborghini and McLaren stepped away from their advanced planning stages of their GTE programmes. Who will commit? No one knows, but they have to make their decision quickly to be ready for August or September 2020. If they haven’t already started, they will be up against the clock although it is understood that the FIA and ACO will give dispensation to manufacturers who are not ready for the start of the season.

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