Ford Racing begins its first weekend of preparation at Barcelona this weekend as part of its build-up toward its 2027 World Endurance Championship effort with its new Hypercar program.

The Ford Racing camp is joining forces with Proton Competition and its No. 9 Oreca for the ELMS season, featuring Seb Priaulx and Mike Rockenfeller—both of whom have already been announced for the Hypercar program.

While the two drivers will get their first mileage in an LMP2 prototype, Ford will also have a significant number of its crew members gaining experience through this collaboration.

“There’ll be quite a high percentage,” said Hypercar Manager Dan Sayers. “Largely, if you were to talk about the percentage, probably 80% will be based from the team who will ultimately then go on to do the Hypercar. There are obviously a few difficult times with the test program and the continuation of the race series into October, but again, we will try to spread the workload so people can focus on testing as well because the biggest risk actually is that we focus on ELMS and then it detracts a little bit from LMDH, which we can’t afford to do. So again, my job is to make sure that we learn everything we need to learn from ELMS. The objective is not to go and win the championship. Of course, everyone goes to the racetrack and it’s the most important thing to try and win there, but we need to keep in the back of our minds that it is the processes and preparing for the LMDH program that is the primary objective.”

Beyond getting their hands dirty working on a prototype, Ford Racing will also gain valuable knowledge about the overall processes and behind-the-scenes operations required to run a Hypercar program through ELMS.

“Yeah, it’s an important program, actually. It’s definitely secondary to Hypercar, don’t get me wrong, absolutely it is. But in terms of the drivers getting used to ACO rules, it’s important, and the team for that matter. It keeps us busy while we haven’t got a Hypercar to run. But it’s more—the primary objective is for us to just get everything ready and prove everything out for the WEC program, whether that be the engineering processes, all of the data processing, the aero maps, everything that we want to be ready when we go track testing with the Hypercar so that we’re ready to plug and play, essentially. We’re not going to our first test developing the workbooks, the KPIs, all of the systems and processes behind the scenes, mainly for engineering but also operations as well. So it is really just one, to keep us race fit, as it were, but two, just to refine all the processes and make sure we’re good to go when we get the Hypercar.”

Once the Hypercar program for Ford hits the ground running in 2027, there is already a benchmark to measure against.

Given the strength of Ferrari’s Hypercar efforts, Ford sees the “Prancing Horse” squad as one of several teams to benchmark against.

“I think Ferrari have obviously proved to be the benchmark for the last couple of years, especially at Le Mans. They obviously have a very good car, a very good driver lineup, and they operate very well. So I think there are several teams that we have considered—competition is all of them—but there are some benchmark teams out there. We just need to make sure we go out and measure ourselves against ourselves. We need to ensure we lose zero time with driver errors or engineering decisions or in the pit lane. Again, any time loss caused by the team or drivers, we will evaluate, analyze, and make sure it doesn’t happen again. And again, we’re just going to measure ourselves like that and largely try to ignore the external influences or things you can’t influence and just focus on the things we can influence at the moment.”

In addition to the operational and developmental benefits, Ford is also gaining early insight into the drivability characteristics of its future Hypercar platform—an area that has already drawn positive internal feedback.

“Regarding Hypercar drivability, I think everyone’s been pretty happy. I think what you see in F1 is quite different in terms of how drastic the clipping is. Whereas in LMDh, you’re not getting it to that degree. And yeah, just touching on drivability a little further, I think it’s positive for me. I’ve spoken to many drivers from other teams that have an Oreca chassis Hypercar, and it’s very similar in feeling and drivability to an LMP2 Oreca. So having driven the LMP2 car and knowing I get along really well with it, that’s definitely beneficial. And regarding the hybrid, it’s nowhere near as extreme as what you see in F1.”

Ford is also continuing to make progress on the simulation side of its Hypercar development, an area Sayers emphasized as critical ahead of on-track testing.

“We have pretty much everything we need in the sim at the moment. The one thing we don’t have just yet is the LMDh buck on the sim, but that comes within a matter of a couple of weeks. So we’ve had a nice time just to get our models up to speed, get as much correlation against the drivers—not data, just the drivers—as we can get. And then we’ll have the proper buck, the proper steering wheel, everything will be as it’s going to be in the car, which is really important to us because that’s the whole point. Everything needs to be as it will be in the car, which is the main benefit of the sim. So, within a matter of weeks, that will be representative, and then we’re good to go until we’ve got some data to correlate against.”

Image Courtesy to Ford Racing/Ford