McLaren’s 2027 WEC project has moved another step away from moodboard and ambition and closer to something with proper intent behind it. After the MCL-HY completed its first on-track shakedown in Italy this week, the team has confirmed Belgian endurance specialist Laurens Vanthoor as the next driver signed to its new Hypercar programme.
For a manufacturer entry that only officially goes racing next season, McLaren’s early rhythm is hard to ignore: car revealed, first miles ticked off on schedule, and now a second heavyweight name added alongside Mikkel Jensen, who joined in January after four years with Peugeot’s Hypercar effort.
Vanthoor, 35, arrives with recent top-class Hypercar mileage on his CV, having raced for Porsche from 2023 to 2025 and taking three wins in that period, the latest of them coming at Austin last year. More importantly, he arrives with the sort of clarity that tends to shape a programme’s internal culture very quickly.
“I’ve made no secret that, in recent years, everything I do is geared towards an overall win at Le Mans,” Vanthoor said. “I’m not even joking when I say it keeps me awake at night.”
That line will resonate inside the McLaren camp because it speaks to what this project is really about. The marketing line is the “Triple Crown” narrative — Monaco, Indy 500, Le Mans — and McLaren is leaning into that heritage framing as it returns to the top tier of endurance racing. But the personnel choices are telling you something more practical: this is a team building its WEC credibility from the inside out, and doing it with drivers who know exactly what a modern Le Mans win requires.
Vanthoor also made clear why the move makes sense from his side, referencing the end of the Porsche Penske Motorsport WEC programme and the need to pick the next best platform for a Le Mans tilt.
“When the Porsche Penske Motorsport WEC programme ended, I had to consider which team on the grid could give me the best chance of winning,” he said. “For me, the choice was clearly McLaren Racing.”
It’s a statement that flatters McLaren, of course, but it also underlines the gravitational pull the organisation has right now across disciplines — and the expectations that come with that. Vanthoor pointed to McLaren being “at the top of their game in Formula 1 and IndyCar” and backed them to carry that standard into WEC. That’s the promise; the hard bit is turning it into lap time, reliability, operational polish and, ultimately, 24-hour execution.
The shakedown itself took place at Autodromo Riccardo Paletti, near the headquarters of chassis supplier Dallara, with the car running in an orange test livery inspired by the McLaren M6A from Bruce McLaren’s Can-Am era. Jensen drove the car for the initial outing, with McLaren development drivers Grégoire Saucy and Richard Verschoor also set to be involved in the wider test programme, along with Ben Hanley from Zak Brown’s United Autosports stable.
Jensen’s debrief sounded exactly like what you want from day one: no drama, no smoke, plenty of system work.
“We went through all our run plan: mainly system checks, making sure gearbox, engine, all the system, a lot of software on the car, was working well,” he said. “Now [we are] getting [into] more detail into how we can optimise the car.”
That last sentence is where the real work begins. A shakedown is an honesty test as much as anything — do the basics function, does the car behave predictably, are there any early “stop-the-world” issues. If you get through that cleanly, you can start the long, slightly unglamorous process of turning a new Hypercar into something that can go toe-to-toe with “world class competition”, as McLaren’s endurance boss James Barclay put it.
Barclay, the team principal for the endurance programme, was candid about the timeline and how deliberately McLaren has plotted it. The team had targeted early May for first track running and hit it, rolling out just after 9am to fire up the internal combustion engine and begin logging those crucial first kilometres.
“We wrote this date down over a year ago,” Barclay said. “A milestone moment for us as a team, a historic moment for us at McLaren returning back to the top tier of sportscar racing.”
He also framed 2026 as the heavy-lift year — the season of testing, development and team-building before the 2027 race debut, with Le Mans sitting there as the obvious centrepiece. McLaren isn’t pretending any of it will be easy, and that’s probably the most credible stance it can take right now. The Hypercar class is too deep, too sharp operationally, for anyone to bluff their way to the front on brand power alone.
Still, it’s difficult not to like the early signals. Signing Jensen and Vanthoor gives McLaren a pairing with recent Hypercar experience and a shared reputation for being straightforward, hard-working operators — the kind of drivers who can help a young programme find lap time without tearing the organisation in half.
Vanthoor, for his part, is leaving the door open to end his Porsche chapter properly. “I am fully committed to finishing our journey together with more trophies,” he said, thanking Porsche for “an incredible decade of racing”. But make no mistake: his gaze is already fixed on 2027, and on whether McLaren can give him what he admits he’s losing sleep over.
McLaren has said the MCL-HY is “the final piece of an ambition that McLaren is uniquely placed to contend for.” That’s the poetry. The prose is what matters now: more testing miles, more development, more drivers in the car, and the quiet, relentless work of building a team that can survive — and then thrive — across a full WEC campaign and the longest day in racing.
