Genesis has made no secret of its ambitions on and off the racetrack, so are we on the verge of a V8-powered coupe that could not only take the fight to the Mercedes-AMG GT and Lexus LC500 but also the Ford Mustang and Toyota Supra on the track?
The Hyundai-owned luxury brand is preparing to enter the World Endurance Championship with its first racing car, the just-revealed GMR-001 LMDh prototype. The company recently confirmed the engine details, a twin-turbo V8 based on its Hyundai World Rally Car entry, and announced it has begun testing.
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The project is being overseen by Hyundai Motorsport’s Head of Powertrain Julien Moncet and Australia’s own, Rob Benson, with the former HMO Customer Racing team boss and former V8 Supercars engine guru the South Korean brand’s new Engine Workshop Leader. Hyundai Motorsport Technical Director François-Xavier Demaison is also heavily involved in the project, given his years of experience with the turbocharged four-cylinder power unit.
“The inline-four engine is a very, very sophisticated, very efficient engine,” Demaison said. “It’s a proper race engine, so it’s a very good base for developing an engine for WEC. Rallying is a sort of endurance race, so for an engine to the 24 Hours of Le Mans, it’s a good place to start from.”
Demaison explained that while Genesis was rushed with the timeframe of the program, confirming it in late 2024 with plans to be on the grid for the 2026 season, the Hyundai WRC engine made the ideal starting point to speed up to development of a WEC capable engine.
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“With the time we had available to develop the engine, we immediately knew we did not have enough time to completely design a new engine from scratch. For the main part of an engine, you need a long time to design, validate, and of course, to produce. Every part needs to be tested over many kilometers, and the inline-four engine from our World Rally Championship car has already been well proven. It became the logical step to carry over as many parts as possible from the four-cylinder engine.”
So what does this have to do with a potential road car project? After all, Hyundai never put its WRC engine in a road car. Well, Genesis Chief Creative Officer Luc Donkerwolke has made no secret that his goal of the LMDh project is to inspire the road car engineers to start thinking more like their racing counterparts, saying racing brings “another type of attitude” to a company.
“Motorsport, you know, normally when you work on production vehicles, you do what is allowed to do,” Donkerwolke said. “In motorsport you don’t do what is allowed to do, you do what is not forbidden. And this is a big change of mentality that we want to introduce, also a research and development mentality. So that is very important.”
Crucially, he dropped a hint that Genesis could look to crossover technology from race to road, and specifically mentioned engines. Which opens the door for Genesis to potentially developed a production-ready version of the twin-turbo V8 hybrid powertrain that will motivate the GMR-001.
“I expect a lot of lessons learned and we already are actually working on programs which are common for some technical parts, vehicle parts of the vehicle, like engines and the next developments of the vehicle already, which are being developed simultaneously with some other projects that we do,” Donkerwolke said.
“So there’s a lot of synergies that are going to come from motorsport into the production vehicles. So that there is no such thing as a decoupled motorsport venture from the brand itself.”
With plans for a new coupe all-but-confirmed, Genesis could look to strengthen its performance image with a V8-powered hero model with its new-found racing knowledge.
Should Genesis build a V8 sports car? Or is this too old-fashioned for 2025?
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