Le Mans
The inception of the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) is certainly one of the most significant achievements in the history of the Automobile Club de l'Ouest.. From 1953 to 1992, the World Sportscar Championship served as the reigning competition, featuring highly prestigious events like the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Renowned carmakers such as Porsche, Ferrari, Jaguar, and Mercedes-Benz distinguished themselves across four decades before the series lost steam in the early 1990s, leaving global endurance racing without a unifying championship.
In the wake of ending that competition, the ACO worked to consolidate endurance racing and reorganise the discipline. This process began in the late 1990s with the American Le Mans Series co-founded by Don Panoz. In 1998, the American entrepreneur and owner of the Road Atlanta circuit held the first running of Petit Le Mans, a 10-hour race in the spirit of Le Mans. Panoz signed an agreement with the ACO the following year to adopt its technical regulations, officially giving rise to the American Le Mans Series. It was a win-win: teams competing in the ALMS received automatic invitations to the 24 Hours, and the ACO exported its expertise and acclaim across the Atlantic.
This momentum subsequently spread across the globe. The Le Mans Endurance Series emerged in 2004 (renamed the Le Mans Series in 2006) as the Asian Le Mans Series gradually took shape in the East during the latter part of the decade. Although contested under the ACO banner and regulations, each of these series operated independently with no genuine sporting link between the continents. The ACO had long dreamed of uniting these separate championships into a truly international competition.
It would take until 2010 for a world championship to get off the ground, namely the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup (ILMC). Announced in June 2009 and confirmed in December, this cup — initially restricted to the LMP1 class — aimed to crown the best teams across multiple continents. The inaugural season, deliberately limited to three rounds (the 1000 km of Silverstone, Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta and the 1000 km of Zhuhai in China), served as a dress rehearsal for a future extended calendar. Peugeot, then the benchmark for French endurance racing with its 908, won the first two runnings back-to-back in 2010 and 2011.
The the 24 Hours of Le Mans, 12 Hours of Sebring, 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps and 6 Hours of Imola were added to the 2011 season. The championship was taking shape, but motorsport's top authorities wanted more: a genuine world championship, recognised and overseen by the FIA itself. The following year, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile and the ACO launched the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) thriving to this day. The new calendar, unveiled in late 2011 during the 6 Hours of Zhuhai, featured eight rounds held across three continents ranging from the 12 Hours of Sebring to the 6 Hours of Fuji, and including, of course, the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
The FIA WEC restored a clear sense of direction to global endurance racing just as the carmakers competing in the top class (LMP1 at the time) were introducing a breakthrough innovation to the sport. Audi, already a fixture at Le Mans since 1999 and a 10-time winner of the race, took the bold step of making its R18 — unveiled for the 2011 season — a hybrid. This gave rise to the R18 e-tron quattro, a name shared by all the Ingolstadt-based team's cars until the marque withdrew at the end of 2016.
Peugeot, despite being the two-time defending ILMC champion and the natural favourite to challenge Audi, announced the outright cancellation of its endurance racing programme in early 2012, citing the difficult economic climate in Europe, even though a hybrid version of the 908 was already ready. The news, which broke on the very day entries for the season closed, caught the entire paddock off guard. However, Toyota — a pioneer in road-going hybrid technology with its Prius — stepped up to the challenge and entered its own TS030 Hybrid.
For the 80th edition of the 24 Hours, the ACO offered the public a race for victory featuring exclusively hybrid technology, highlighting its innovative roots. On 31 May 2012 just weeks before the race, Pierre Fillon became the eighth president in the history of the Automobile Club de l'Ouest, succeeding Jean-Claude Plassart. Under Fillon's leadership, a genuine renewal of the discipline began to take shape.
The race itself was one for the books. After putting up a relentless defense against the Audis, the Toyota TS030 Hybrids were dealt two major blows: Anthony Davidson's car went airborne following contact with a GTE-class Ferrari in a spectacular crash that left the British driver with two fractured vertebrae. The second Japanese car was also forced to retire after colliding with the Nissan DeltaWing. Audi ultimately claimed all three steps on the podium, with the R18 e-tron quattro driven by Marcel Fässler, André Lotterer, and Benoît Tréluyer finishing ahead of its sister car and an R18 Ultra powered by a conventional internal combustion engine. It was a historic victory in more ways than one, marking the very first time a hybrid prototype had won the 24 Hours of Le Mans overall.
Harkening back to the mid-1970s, Le Mans had once again become the stage for a phenomenal clash between two marques vying to establish a new technology: turbocharging in the earlier era, and electric power at the dawn of the 2010s. Since then, every win at the 24 Hours has been secured by hybrid prototypes — Audi until 2016, followed by Porsche, Toyota and more recently Ferrari with the 499P — representing an unbroken streak that, with Toyota’s success with the TR010 Hybrid in the 2026 race, brings the total number of consecutive wins for hybrid powertrains to 15. Don't forget, Formula 1 did not introduce engine hybridisation until two years later, in 2014.
Other major manufacturers were unable to resist the allure of reaching legendary status. They were determined to seize the opportunity to test their hybrid technologies becoming widespread across the world's vehicle fleets. Porsche, Nissan, and then Toyota (the latter holding the top spot at the close of the LMP1 era) followed one another in a championship that grew increasingly competitive and packed, leading up to the arrival of the Hypercar generation featuring Ferrari, Peugeot, Cadillac, BMW, Alpine, Aston Martin and Genesis.
The FIA WEC now features captivating rounds for fans throughout the year: from the winding roads of the Belgian Ardennes at the TotalEnergies 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps to the unforgiving 6 Hours of Monza in Italy, as well as other iconic circuits like Imola and Fuji. In terms of both competition and innovation, the ACO and the FIA have cemented a resounding success in the culmination of nearly two decades of effort, spanning from the early days of the ALMS to the establishment of a true world championship.
