United Autosports Will Race at Le Mans as McLaren’s Official 2024 GT3 Team
Wakefield-based endurance racing specialist United Autosports will again be campaigning McLaren GT3 racing cars in 2024, entering the brand-new LMGT3 class across the whole season — including the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
It’ll mark McLaren’s first return to the world’s most famous endurance event since 1998, where the longtail F1 signed off with a fourth-place finish against increasingly bespoke machinery. McLaren had previously taken a legendary overall victory in the F1 in 1995, along with third, fourth, and fifth place, despite the car not being in the top WSC category.
United, founded in 2009 by Zak Brown before his days at McLaren, initially raced with Audi R8s in various national and regional GT3 championships before adding McLaren’s MP4-12C GT3 to its garage in 2011. Moving up to LMP3 and subsequently LMP2, the Yorkshire team has raced at Le Mans every year since 2017 and has been part of the FIA World Endurance Championship since 2019.
In 2020, United’s LMP2 team achieved a triple success in capturing the class victory at the 24 Hours of Le Mans as well as winning both the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) and European Le Mans Series (ELMS) in the same class. The team’s LMP3 car also won the ELMS title the same year.
McLaren and United will team up for a two-car assault on the WEC’s new LMGT3 class, which replaces the two LMGTE categories with one more cost-effective grouping, campaigning a pair of McLaren 720S GT3 Evo machines.
As the name suggests, this is an evolution of the original McLaren 720S GT3, first introduced in 2018, featuring new aerodynamics and new suspension to improve “robustness in wheel-to-wheel contact”.
Driving squads have yet to be named, though United expects Marino Sato to move across from the LMP2 car and has signed Gregoire Saucy from ART Grand Prix’s Formula 3 line-up.
The cars will wear the numbers #59 and #95 across the eight-round 2024 season — referencing the number on the Le Mans-winning McLaren F1, and the year in which it achieved the victory.
