Prema unlikely to defend ELMS title, could run two WEC cars

An increased presence in the LMP2 class of the WEC rather than a split campaign spanning the ELMS in the second season of sportscar racing for the single-seater powerhouse is a possible scenario as it gears up for its graduation to the Hypercar car class in 2024 with the Lamborghini LMDh under the Iron Lynx banner.

A new arm of the team called Prema Engineering was announced at the weekend as the provider of technical and engineering support for Iron Lynx’s twin entry into the WEC and IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship with the Italian marque’s forthcoming LMDh prototype.

It follows the parent company of Iron Lynx, DC Racing Solutions, buying a controlling interest in the Prema Group in 2021 and then taking the team into sportscar racing in the LMP2 division with a pair of Oreca 07s.

Iron Lynx team principal Andrea Piccini told Motorsport that it is “most likely we will only go for the WEC”, despite winning the ELMS with Louis Deletraz and Ferdinand Habsburg this year.

“This season it was important for us to do both championships to gain as much experience as possible and speed up the learning process,” he explained.

“Now the most important thing is to look to the future and you can’t race an LMDh in the ELMS, so for sure the focus is going to be on the WEC.

“Next year is going to be pretty busy with testing LMDh, so if we focus on the WEC with one or two cars then we can have more resources available for development of the new car.

“It could be two cars in WEC, but it is not decided because it is not easy to put together the line-ups we want.”

Prema’s 2022 WEC line-up of Deletraz, Robert Kubica and Lorenzo Colombo were second in class at Le Mans, its best result so far in a season that climaxes with Bahrain 8 Hours this weekend.

Prema won the ELMS title in 2022 but will focus on WEC for next season ahead of its Lamborghini LMDh race debut in 2024

Photo by: ELMS

Bahrain will be the last race for Iron Lynx running a GTE Ferrari: Piccini has confirmed that the team will not continue with the 488 GTE Evo in either the WEC or the ELMS next season after linking up with Lamborghini.

The partnership will kick off with campaigns in both the four long-distance IMSA rounds and the GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup with the Huracan GT3 EVO2.

“For sure we will not continue in GTE Am the way we have been racing,” said Piccini without using the word Ferrari.

“It has been a nice chapter for Iron Lynx [since entering the ELMS in 2020 and the WEC in 2021], but we are now somewhere else.”

Piccini revealed that the team is evaluating ways to continue its GTE programmes but “hasn’t decided which way to go”.

Several Iron Lynx drivers, as well as Piccini, tested a Proton Competition Porsche 911 RSR-19 straight after last month’s ELMS finale at Portimao.

Piccini explained that Iron Lynx co-founder and driver Claudio Schiavoni had always wanted to sample the Porsche and insisted that the test did not automatically mean that Iron Lynx would be running Porsches next year.