Glickenhaus confirms WEC ‘hypercar’ class entry

SCG’s boss tells PH he wants to win at Le Mans with a new 007 hypercar slated for a 25-car production run

Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus is bidding to become a major motorsport player by ramping up its track presence and racing to win in the WEC’s new top hypercar class. The American firm, headed by founder James Glickenhaus, has confirmed plans to enter up to three cars into the category, which will supersede today’s LMP1 class from 2020, creating an all-new 007 model in the process that will also be offered in road-legal form.

Glickenhaus boss told PH that the racing 007 could use a General Motors-sourced engine coupled with hybrid electric power to drive the front axle, as per the class’s regulations. He said a planned run of 25 road versions would be largely identical, in order to “take racing back to the old days”, where teams ran racing cars that could be driven on the road.

“We’ll build our road legal hypercar with the same engine architecture as the racer so it would use the same block,” he said, before joking that the two versions would be so closely related that “the dream is to finish at Le Mans, change the wheels and tyres and drive the racing car to Paris for dinner!

“Glickenhaus admitted that the road car would probably have to trade the racing car’s KERS hybrid system for a plug-in alternative. But he said this would enable the road car to run in pure electric mode and therefore “be driven in the centre of cities in the future.”

To create its new model, SCG intends to build on the proven base of its 003C racer, which has won its class at the Nurburgring 24 Hours twice. Glickenhaus said “we’ve shown at the ‘Ring [with the 003] that we build capable cars. We have the fastest car there – we have the most ballast and the least horsepower”.

With the tighter regulations of the new WEC category (click here for more on them), which look set to also enforce a 20 million euro budget cap, SCG believes it can take on far more established manufacturers from the get-go. Glickenhaus said SCG’s newly formed Glickenhaus North American Racing team “will be going for the win” at Le Mans and that it already has financial backing in place to ensure the project goes ahead.

There’s more, too. The WEC campaign will form only a portion of SCG’s racing ambitions, adding to the existing strategy to supply GT3 and GT4 cars to privateer racing teams. “We’ll have factory racing and also racing cars with customers racing all over the world, such as 004C, 006C GT3 and GT4,” explained Glickenhaus. He also confirmed intentions to maintain a front-running SCG presence on the Nurburgring’s VLN and 24-hour race grids.

All this comes as part of Glickenhaus’s dream to use age-old ‘win on Sunday, sell on Monday’ formula,. SCG was granted permission to build up to 325 cars a year on US soil that are exempt from crash regulations and don’t need features such as airbags. But newly announced plans to purchase the buildings of a small airport in Danbury, Connecticut, could provide the company with the capacity to produce 750 cars per year. Glickenhaus confirmed SCG would “therefore be embarking to make some of [its] models fully crash legal”.

“It’s a step by step process, but with so much going on we’re moving towards making SCG a real car company,” he said.

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