WEC: The Glickenhaus Racing team leaves the championship

In 2024, the private American team Glickenhaus Racing, which spent three seasons in the WEC, will not return to the World Endurance Championship.

The owner, James Glickenhaus, confirmed this in an interview with Sportscar365, explaining the decision for both economic and sporting reasons. In general, Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus is a small sports car company from New York, and according to the information on the website, the SCG004S model, intended for regular roads, is still in production. The same cannot be said about the SCG007 hypercars for WEC.

The Glickenhaus sports prototypes took part in the WEC for the first time at the 8 Hours of Portimao in June 2021, and also took part in the legendary Le Mans supermarathon three times, reaching the finish in all three cases. although of course it was difficult for them to compete with cars from factory teams.

The last race in the team’s history was July’s WEC stage in Monza, and the team no longer competed in the 6 Hours of Fuji. But in Italy, the team of experienced professionals Nathanael Berton, Olivier Pla and Roman Dumas finished eighth.

“Everything is very simple. When we started, we were told that we had to build a car that had to meet certain technical requirements and characteristics, and we did that,” says James Glickenhaus. – The idea was that, regardless of the further course of the event, would have equal opportunities as the others throughout the validity of the Hypercar class rules.

We have made a lot of efforts, spent a lot of money, done everything we could, but we believe that there will not be fair and equal competition in the future, so there is no point in continuing.”

One of the team’s best performances remains the 3rd place at Le Mans, achieved in 2022 by Ryan Briscoe, Richard Westbrook and Frank Mallieu. By the way, the second Glickehhaus crew finished fourth, and the team then lost only to Toyota’s factory hypercars, although it lost to them by more than five laps. But this was before other strong factory teams came to the WEC: Ferrari, Porsche, Cadillac and Peugeot.

“We are very proud of our success,” said Glickenhaus. – We had six starts at Le Mans (the team entered two cars each year) and we finished on all six occasions. We finished on the podium at Le Mans, the first time in more than half a century that an American team finished in the top three there.

This year we were ahead of the cars from Porsche and Peugeot, and I want to say that this is an impressive achievement. I think the fans appreciated what we did. But it was no longer possible to continue competing in the WEC and count on fairness. We are not interested in simply being cannon fodder for the factory teams of major car manufacturers, who have a lot more money than us and can afford to do what they want.

There’s just no point in continuing. Frankly, I don’t understand how a car built by a private team can beat Porsche at Le Mans.”

By the way, Glickenhaus once even hinted at interest in Sebastian Vettel, but now there is no point in guessing whether he was joking then or speaking more or less seriously.