Honda warming to idea of Acura FIA WEC Hypercar entry and customer programs

Could we see the Acura ARX-06 competing in the hands of private teams and/or in the FIA World Endurance Championship’s Hypercar class in the future?

Honda’s new-look two-car IMSA GTP effort in lockstep with Meyer Shank Racing made its debut at last month’s Rolex 24 At Daytona. The likelihood of an ARX-06 entering the WEC seemed slim when RACER asked HRC US President David Salters about it a year ago, but now it appears that its position on Hypercars is starting to shift.

“First, you’ve got to balance LMH and LMDh, which seems to be happening,” Salters told RACER 12 months ago when asked if it was viable for Honda to enter the FIA WEC. “You have to make sure you can compete, then it has to make business and budgetary sense to Honda. Sometimes they line up, sometimes they don’t. If in the future they could, we could be interested.

“There is already a rude reality of priorities in the company, and you’d imagine that at the moment, F1 is pretty high priority. We already do global motorsport at the highest level, and we sort of dominate!”

A year later, though, it appears Honda is taking a closer look at the WEC’s top class, which currently features 18 cars and is poised to swell to more than 20 in the next two years when Genesis, Ford and – as RACER expects – McLaren join in. Salters confirmed that an active evaluation is ongoing.

“Are we interested? Yes, we have an amazing car. The series is growing. Le Mans is Le Mans. Of course, we’re interested,” Salters said. “We’ve just got to figure out, does it make sense to Honda? And then the economics of it, all that sort of stuff.

“So we are interested, and we are working on it in the background, shall we say. But like all these things, it has to make sense looking forward.

“WEC is doing an amazing job. The series is in very rude health. Super rude health. We have a car that I think will be good. As we’ve always said, we keep evaluating it, and we are seriously evaluating it, and we see how it makes sense, and does it fit.

“Aside from that, I think IMSA is doing a really, really good job. This is growing here. And when I look over the ocean, ACO/ WEC is doing a really, really good job. The proof is in the pudding. It’s growing!”

As for the appetite from HRC US to offer customer ARX-06s, there’s interest in this area, too. If there’s one element of the current convergence era that’s failed to take off, it’s in the customer ranks, in part due to cost and the availability of cars.

So far, Porsche is the only brand that has offered true customer cars to private teams with its 963 platform. But to this point just three teams have found a way to make the sums work, and with JOTA headed to Cadillac to run its WEC factory team this year, just JDC-Miller and Proton remain in 2025.

Interestingly, though, there appears to be movement from some of the manufacturers involved in Hypercar and GTP to find a way to make customer programs work in the future. Lamborghini, for instance, is planning a customer-focused future for its SC63 project, and Salters has now confirmed to RACER that HRC US is now interested in supplying cars, should a credible party come forward.

“I think the cars are very complex, so it could have been a lot at the start for someone to get hold of a customer’s car and just use it,” he explained. “I think we’re all getting smarter on how we could do that. That may be something that was prohibitive and now is OK, but then there have to be discussions about how we get the cost more under control.

“I’d quite like to have a couple of customers, and we support them, but it needs to be customer stuff. They also need to find the business case that works, because it has to be sustainable in that sense too. I have a budget. My peers have budgets. We can’t just give out cash or cars.

“There’s active discussion on how to make it cheaper. We need to carry on with the active discussion. It needs to become sustainable, but I’m not opposed to customers. I’d love some, but it’s got to be done the right way.

“We are open to customers. We’ve had some interesting conversations. We’re very happy to have more, but it needs to be done on an economically sustainable business basis. But also we want our customers to be able to win.

“It’s an Acura. I don’t care which Acura wins — the No. 60, the No. 93, or a customer. It’s Acura and having more out there in endurance racing is a good thing.”