Dan Sayers is no stranger to developing new projects through Ford Racing.

The man behind the brand-new Hypercar program, Sayers brings a wealth of knowledge to the top-flight sportscar effort that the “Blue Oval” will field in 2027.

Having developed the powertrains for Ford’s F1 return this year, Sayers understands the ins and outs of creating a system involving hybrid technology—one that he feels will translate to the new Hypercar.

“A fair bit actually has transferred,” said Sayers. “One, it’s fascinating seeing in Formula One just the scale and the level of detail—it’s just astonishing. Of course, we haven’t got an army of 750 people working on the powertrain, but you can still take some of those practices, some of the structure, and build it into the hypercar.”

“One area that is directly transferable is the software and the control software. Ford had a couple of engineers—two or three engineers—dedicated to doing the F1 hybrid controls. So again, all of their learning from the last two or three years has directly come across to the LMDH, with some tweaks, of course, but that learning specifically has transferred.”

“For myself, I think, again, it’s useful to see more the operational practices that go into place—the boring things like how you manage faults and the operational processes, if you like—that we’ve implemented a lot of those into this program, and again, we’re rolling them out across Ford programs because managing those faults, reliability, it’s all key, and the level of detail that goes into ensuring you never see a mistake or an issue twice is fundamental to the racing we’re going to be doing. I also haven’t quite got the budgets they’ve got either.”

While the car has yet to hit the track, Sayers and the team at Ford Racing are right on schedule with its development, with more progress set to come during the year.

“Yeah, I think we are exactly where we expected to be, to be honest with you. It has gone well. It’s always going to have problems, but it has gone quite well.”

“We’re starting to build the test car engine fairly soon, so all of that is underway. The modification process has already started, so that’s on schedule.”

“And we expect to be building the car in the next three or four months, and then as soon as that’s done, we’ll roll it out in the south of France. We’ll spend a week, I envisage, just on the rollout, debugging, that kind of thing, and then we’ll start our first track test the same month—so beginning of Q3, still on track.”

“The whole of the test plan is booked and confirmed, so we’re pushing like hell to make sure we are ready, because if we miss one of those tests, you have a huge knock-on effect.”

“So yeah, all of that is planned. At the moment, there’s nothing to suggest we won’t make that, so it’s great news, and there’s a huge amount of effort going in everywhere to make sure we do stick to that.”

As for where the program will hit the track on its path toward a 2027 debut, Sayers stated that “we certainly will get two cars out there at points. We will focus—for the first few months we’ll focus in Europe, and we will finish off with a 30-hour test in Europe before we then go to America to finish off the testing. The plan is to do another 30-hour test probably early in the new year, and again, some of those tracks in America, Sebring for example, are great for durability, so we plan to visit there to do an endurance run as well. The difficulty is with a finite amount of time and a sensible mileage we need to get in, we’re trying to stage the tests with a good couple of weeks in between to allow us to do development analysis and code updates. So it’s getting that compromise between enough time to move forward, but not too long such that we get very few tests. So we will focus on Europe, then move to America, and then go to the first race in Qatar not very long after.”

Image Courtesy to Ford Racing