Why Hypercars will be as big as F1: Richard Mille on the formula of dreams

Sports car racing looks set for a return to its glory days with the new Hypercar era but Richard Mille, president of the FIA Endurance Commission, has even bigger ambitions to match the success of Formula 1

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Rear view of Ferrari 499 Hypercar

Ferrari 499P will be among the WEC and Le Mans contenders next year

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It might seem strange that a watchmaker is responsible for the future of world sports car racing but Richard Mille knows plenty about stoking demand: his entire range of timepieces are sold out for the next 12 months.

The car collector, team owner and president of the FIA Endurance Commission is one of the architects of the new Hypercar regulations, tasked with growing the popularity of sports car racing.

They have already brought in a wave of new manufacturers to Le Mans and the World Endurance Championship, following the tail-end of the LMP1 period where Toyota’s barely-contested dominance made races too predictable, at least at the sharp end.

Now, as the Hypercar era is set to burst into life from 2023, Mille says that he’s planning on making endurance racing as big as F1.

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“There is no reason why endurance in the years to come will not be as successful and profitable as F1,” he states in an interview from the current issue of Motor Sport.

Mille is pursuing a similar strategy to grand prix promoter Liberty Media, by aiming squarely at a young audience, already familiar with the types of machines that line up on the World Endurance Championship grid.

Next season will see Ferrari, Porsche, Cadillac and Peugeot join Toyota and Glickenhaus as top-class contenders in the championship and at Le Mans — one of the most-anticipated races in decades.

The cars will be distinctive too, thanks to the regulations he helped craft, as president of the Endurance Commission in 2018. “This is what we wanted with the Hypercars, so you could distinguish one from the other,” said Mille. “The problem that we had with modern F1 is the cars were all made by computers: take the paint off and you are in trouble… In Hypercar, the Peugeot doesn’t look like the Porsche, which doesn’t look like the Glickenhaus, which doesn’t look like the Toyota and so on.”

Richard Mille at Le Mans

Richard Mille: president of the FIA Endurance Commission since 2018

Mille believes that the forthcoming era will attract hordes of new fans and go down in history.

“My biggest objective was to bring younger generations to the track,” he said. “Endurance was getting a bit old, the spectators were more in their forties and fifties. With Hypercar we have the tools to bring in the young generations, because on video games and in their minds these cars are their dream.

“Hypercar is closer to street cars than F1, so we have all the ingredients to bring the public to the track. You can imagine what will be the grid next year for the 100th anniversary of Le Mans, but also in 2024 and beyond.

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“It’s fantastic and a grid that never existed in the past. Like Le Mans in 1966, it will become legendary.”

But unlike the great races of previous years, cars will be restricted by a Balance of Performance system that promotes closer racing by hauling back the fastest contenders and boosting the slowest.

Mille says that this is the only way to keep costs down and ensure large grids, while also preventing one team from dominating, as Toyota has done in WEC and Mercedes did in Formula 1.

“I know many people are against it, but we would not have all these makes and factories on the track without it,” says Mille. “It is compulsory because it is the only way to cut the budget. You can spend €80m developing a car and you won’t have an advantage over somebody who spends €20m, because the BoP will penalise you.”

“We cannot save everybody,” Mille admits. “If you are too far from the window [of performance] we can do nothing. But we must be sure that we give spectators very good battles. We want to avoid promenades, as we have had in previous times in F1, with long cycles where it was once Ferrari winning, then Red Bull, then Mercedes. What people have to understand is the BoP is not about being drawn to the bottom. It is not a contradiction to performance.”

Read the full interview with Richard Mille in the December 2022 issue of Motor Sport.

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