The championship was first run in 2012 as a replacement for the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup, following much of the same format and featuring eight endurance races across the world, including the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The original class structure comprised four categories: LMP1 and LMP2 sports prototypes, alongside GTE grand tourers subdivided into GTE Pro for teams with fully professional driver line-ups and GTE Am for teams combining amateur and professional drivers.
Manufacturer interest in the LMP1 class declined sharply after the 2017 season, prompting the FIA to commission a regulatory study into the future of the championship's top category. The resulting framework, known as Le Mans Hypercar (LMH), moved away from Le Mans Prototype entries and reduced reliance on hybrid technologies. The proposal cited production-flagship halo models as the type of car the new regulations intended to attract. The Hypercar class made its debut in the 2021 season with LMH entries from Alpine, Glickenhaus, and Toyota. From 2023, cars built to LMDh regulations — a jointly developed ACO and IMSA specification — became eligible to compete in the Hypercar class alongside LMH machinery.
In 2021 the ACO announced the withdrawal from its two LMGTE categories following a rapid decline in manufacturer support. The 2022 season was the final year for LMGTE Pro. From 2024, LMGTE Am was replaced by a GT3-based category described as a "GT3 Premium," featuring a cost-capped body kit conversion from standard GT3 machinery and excluding official manufacturer entries to keep the class customer-focused. According to FIA Endurance Commission president Richard Mille, the intention was a category aimed squarely at customer teams rather than factory programmes.
The 2024 season was the first in the championship's history without LMP2 cars on the full-season grid, displaced by increased demand for Hypercar and LMGT3 entries. LMP2 retained a minimum of fifteen reserved slots at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, preserving the category's presence at the event where it first established itself.
The current championship structure features sports prototypes in the Hypercar class competing under either LMH or LMDh regulations, and production-derived grand tourers in the LM GT3 category. Two world championship titles are contested as of 2026: the Hypercar World Endurance Drivers' Championship and the Hypercar World Endurance Manufacturers' Championship. Additional cups and trophies are awarded to drivers and private teams in supporting categories.
The LMH path, conceived to attract manufacturers willing to build exotic high-performance production-road-car analogues, and the LMDh path, conceived jointly with IMSA to create a shared technical platform unifying the top classes of the WEC and the IMSA SportsCar Championship, converge on the Hypercar grid. This convergence was designed to enable manufacturers to homologate a single car for competition at the highest level on both sides of the Atlantic.
Races span a broad range of durations. The calendar typically includes events of six, eight, and ten hours, with the 24 Hours of Le Mans as the centrepiece of the season. Points are awarded to the top ten finishers in each race on a sliding scale, with cars classified eleventh or lower receiving half a point. For eight- and ten-hour races, points are worth approximately 1.5 times the standard allocation; for the 24 Hours of Le Mans they are worth approximately twice the standard scale, reflecting the greater duration and prestige of that event. This weighted structure means that success at Le Mans can substantially reshape the drivers' and manufacturers' standings across the full season.
Contemporary drivers have described WEC races as featuring closely contested on-track racing throughout the duration of an event, with sustained overtaking and aggressive racing at all stages rather than the processional periods that longer races sometimes produce. The championship's consistent delivery of multi-class endurance racing at circuits across multiple continents — anchored by the 24 Hours of Le Mans — has established it as one of the premier arenas in international sports car racing, effectively continuing the World Sportscar Championship tradition that was dormant for nearly two decades between 1992 and 2012.
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