There Will Be 4 Corvettes at Le Mans, 2 at Pikes Peak This Year

F1 won’t be the only international series featuring GM products this year. There will be four Chevrolet Corvette Z06 LMGT3.Rs battling it out at Le Mans June 13-14 against the best GT3s from all over the world. This year’s LMGT3 class will have 25 cars, 21 of them aiming to beat the ‘Vettes, including Ferrari 296s, Aston Martin Vantages, McLaren 720Ses, Mercedes-AMGs, a Lexus RC F, a Porsche 911 GT3 R, and even a German-entered Ford Mustang.

Should be quite a class and quite a year.

And don’t forget the three Cadillac V-Series.R entries in the front-running Hypercar class.

“General Motors has the broadest and most diverse motorsports presence of any automaker in the world,” General Motors President Mark Reuss said. “Fielding seven cars at Le Mans reflects not only our competitive ambition, but our relentless drive to advance endurance, innovation and performance on a global stage.”

It’ll be the first time there will be four entries from the official Corvette Racing program at Le Sarthe. But it’s not the first time there have been four Corvettes on the grid. Back in 1960, a quartet of Corvettes took to the field, and one of them won the GT class with the great John Fitch and Bob Grossman at the wheel. Four Corvettes also appeared at the 2016 race, but only two factory cars from Corvette Racing in the GTE Pro class.

TF Sport, Corvette Racing’s full-season representative in the FIA WEC, will be present for the third year in a row with its Corvette Z06 GT3.Rs—the No. 33 of Nicky Catsburg, Jonny Edgar, and Ben Keating, plus the No. 34 of Charlie Eastwood, Salih Yoluc, and Peter Dempsey—that also will contest the full-season championship.

The team will also take up its automatic invitation from winning last year’s European Le Mans Series with another Corvette, which will sport the No. 2 for Le Mans.

From North America, 13 Autosport will take to the Le Mans grid with its No. 13 Corvette. Under the AWA banner in 2025, 13 Autosport owner/driver Orey Fidani won his second straight Bob Akin Award in the IMSA WeatherTech Championship to earn 13 Autosport a return trip to Le Mans this year. Fidani will team with IMSA teammates Matt Bell and Lars Kern.

GM wants to point out that the Corvette Z06 GT3.R starts with the same production aluminum chassis frame as the road-going Z06. Similar carbon-fiber splitters for front downforce, and the surface area from the top of the windshield to the rear of the Z06 remained intact on the Z06 GT3.R. That includes side air ducts behind the doors—directly inspired by the Z06 production road car—that help to cool the engine, transaxle and rear brakes.

The similarities carry over to the hand-built 5.5-liter, flat-plane crankshaft V8 engine in the Z06 GT3.R. Both original from the Bowling Green factory with the racing version sharing 80 percent of the production content from the Z06, GM says.

The 2026 24 Hours of Le Mans is scheduled for June 13-14 and will be the fourth round of the FIA World Endurance Championship.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the Earth, Pikes Peak will see two Corvettes, IndyCar racer JR Hildebrand driving a 2026 model and Appalachian Hillclimb specialist Tracy Gaudu in a 2008 Z06.

Despite his wide-ranging racing resume, Hildebrand is still in awe of the mountain.

“Getting there, spending race week with all the other competitors, seeing what everybody else is doing, really seeing the variety of what’s up on the mountain every year—but doing so by being among that community—it really punches you in the face,” Hildebrand said last year, when he drove Kyle Petty’s Pontiac NASCAR Cup car up the mountain. “(You) see how wide that void is, the number of different ways that people are showing up with their teams and crews and cars, from multi-million dollar factory prototypes like Volkswagen and Ford to homegrown builds and programs run out of people’s garages.”

Hildebrand once tried to make a Dallara IndyCar work on the hill, but also has driven a Porsche GT4, among other entries.

“I’m coming from the world of mainstream motorsport, where everything has just become increasingly more strict and constrained in terms of what you’re allowed to do. I think the fact that Pikes Peak stands in stark contrast to that is what really made it feel like it mattered to me, when I did it the first time around in 2018.”

Tracy Gaudu started racing in Hillclimb events in her native Tennessee, including the Appalachian Hillclimb Series and the Mt. Washington Hillclimb. She ran her first Pikes Peak last year, in the same Corvette.

“I knew that I loved to hillclimb after my first one in Pineville, Kentucky, but didn’t take the leap in applying for Pikes Peak until this year,” she said of her rookie race. “Each year, I’d watch the live feed on YouTube and could imagine my car in Colorado on the start line.”

The 104th running of the Pikes Peak International Hillclimb takes place June 21.