McLaren to Drop New MCL-HY Hypercar on May 4, 2026
McLaren is about to break a 29-year silence at the top of endurance racing. The warp is about to come off the MCL-HY, a car meant to take back the Le Mans glory.
If you’ve been following the slow drip of teasers from McLaren over the past year, this is the moment it finally gets real. The company will reveal MCL-HY on May 4, ahead of its first track run. So let’s walk through what’s coming, what we already know, and why a brand-new prototype is somehow tied to a wet weekend in June 1995.
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What is the MCL-HY?
It’s McLaren’s LMDh Hypercar. That’s the class that fights for overall victory at Le Mans, in the FIA World Endurance Championship, and at the big IMSA races in North America. The car will officially race from the 2027 season onwards, not in 2026.
The name itself isn’t complicated. “MCL” is the prefix McLaren has used on its Formula 1 cars since 2017, including MCL35M, MCL60, MCL39, and MCL40. “HY” stands for Hypercar.
The MCL-HY is built on a Dallara chassis; the Italian constructor also supplies the spine for Cadillac’s V-Series.R, and a few other LMDh entries. McLaren designs the body and the engine, but the underlying tub is shared.
The engine is a 3-liter twin-turbo V6, designed by McLaren’s Endurance Racing technical team and built in partnership with Autotecnica Motori (ATM), a Lombardy-based specialist firm. McLaren fired it up on the dyno in January 2026 and released a short video. It sounded angry in a good way.
Bolted to that engine is the standard Bosch hybrid system — every LMDh car uses the same one, with the battery from Williams Advanced Engineering and the gearbox from Xtrac. Total power output is capped at 671 bhp, like every other Hypercar competing in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Who Will Be Driving It?
This is a partnership story. The team is officially called McLaren United AS, which is a tie-up between McLaren Racing and United Autosports — the squad co-owned by McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown and Richard Dean. United is not a rookie. They’ve won at Le Mans in LMP2 before and have been running McLaren’s GT3 cars in WEC.
The team principal is James Barclay, who joined McLaren from Jaguar’s racing operation, where he ran their Formula E program.
The driver lineup is yet to be decided. The first confirmed name is Danish driver Mikkel Jensen. He’s currently with United Autosports, competing in LMP2 races while waiting for the McLaren program to start. Reports also suggest current Cadillac racer Alex Lynn could join him. Expect more names to come in the coming months.
Why This Matters — The 1995 Ghost
You can’t talk about McLaren at Le Mans without talking about the 1995 race. That year, McLaren turned up at La Sarthe with a barely-modified version of its road car, the F1 GTR, driven by JJ Lehto, Yannick Dalmas, and Masanori Sekiya. They were up against purpose-built prototypes. It rained for 17 of the 24 hours. They won anyway. McLaren cars filled four of the top five positions on debut.
That single victory completed the Triple Crown for McLaren — wins at Monaco, the Indianapolis 500, and Le Mans. They remain the only team to have done it.
The MCL-HY is trying to write a sequel. McLaren even signaled the connection in another way: their current LMGT3 entry is run by a team called Garage 59, named after the number 59 that the winning F1 GTR carried in 1995.
The Customer Car: MCL-HY GTR
McLaren is also building a customer version of the race car. It’s called the MCL-HY GTR, and it’s part of a program called Project: Endurance.
But here’s the catch. The customer car is not the same machine as the racer. The MCL-HY GTR ditches the hybrid system entirely. It will have a 2.9-liter twin-turbo V6 producing roughly 720 hp. Yes, it will have more peak power than the race car, since it doesn’t have to comply with the BoP cap.
First customer deliveries are expected in late 2027.
What Happens Next
The May 4 reveal will show the car in a test livery, not its final racing colors. Right after that, it’s expected to head to Varano de’ Melegari, Dallara’s home circuit in Italy, for a controlled shakedown in the first week of May. From there, expect a full year of testing, simulator work, and possibly some non-points outings before the real race begins at the 2027 Qatar 1812 km WEC season opener.
