Opinion: It’s Time for WEC to Give Us Convergence in Action

The seeds of convergence will sprout in next weekend’s FIA World Endurance Championship race at Sebring, writes Daniel Lloyd…

The FIA World Endurance Championship’s transition period – covering the end of LMP1 and the start of Hypercar – is done and dusted.

Forget your Equivalence of Technology and success handicaps, your LMP1 grandfathering and small top-category grids.

At Sebring next week, the ACO and FIA’s global series finally returns to something that merits being confidently hailed as the pinnacle of sports car racing with an 11-car Hypercar field.

It promises to give an immense payoff for those who followed the LMP1 hybrid era and then persevered through some trickier times as one regulation died and its replacement was conceived.

However, the 1000 Miles of Sebring is not only significant because of a resurgence in the number of cars vying for the overall win.

Next Friday’s contest is hugely important for that mystical concept of ‘convergence’, whereby the same cars are eligible to race in the WEC and the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.

Sebring will be the first race in which LMH and LMDh cars go up against each other and will offer the first evidence of whether convergence can be successful.

There has been a lot of work done to establish a base level of parity between the FIA and ACO-imagined LMHs – LMP1’s cheaper and more road relevant successor -- and the spec-hybrid LMDhs that were jointly conceived by the ACO and IMSA for dual-series usage.