Genesis Magma Racing aims to use experience on return to Barcelona

Genesis Magma Racing will be back on familiar ground at the 6 Hours of Barcelona as the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) returns to Europe for the final leg of the 2026 season. The team’s experience at the venue gives them a strong platform to build from, as they aim to continue the positive momentum after recent strong performances.

Home advantage and testing experience give team boost

For Dani Juncadella, part of the driver line-up for the #19 GMR-001 Hypercar, the trip to Barcelona is a home race. Dani, who delivered one of his strongest stints of the season to start the race at the 6 Hours of Fuji, was born in and still lives in the city. The circuit was also where Dani’s journey with Genesis Magma Racing began. Alongside Jamie Chadwick, and Mathys Jaubert, now a driver the #17 GMR-001 Hypercar, he was part of the Genesis Magma Racing Trajectory team that took on the European Le Mans Series in 2025, giving the team its first on-track action in preparation for a WEC debut.

Barcelona hosted the opening round of the season, where the three Trajectory drivers shocked the paddock by winning the LMP2 class in their first race together with little, or no, previous Prototype experience.

Less than 12 months ago, the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya was also the site of a crucial test for the GMR-001 Hypercar. The site of some of the last running before the car was homologated for its debut racing season, the test saw the team pass a crucial reliability milestone with 8,000km on a single G8MR 3.2l V8 engine. The accomplishment set up the team well for the racing season and laid the foundation for the excellent reliability that has been the foundation of Genesis Magma Racing’s strong performances this year.

For the 6 Hours of Barcelona, the team’s main goal will be to add operational strength to that reliability, and the pace of the GMR-001 Hypercar shown throughout this season. In recent races, the team has felt that small mistakes, both in pitlane and on track, have prevented the drivers from collecting the results that the pace of the car, and the overall performance of the team, deserves.

Genesis Magma Racing enjoyed their best starting positions at the 6 Hours of Fuji, and one of the strongest performances so far in the race, with the #19 GMR-001 Hypercar holding a spot in the top five for much of the race, before dropping from the points in the final hour. Recognising the work to do to score a result that matches the team’s potential and ambition, the weeks since the 6 Hours of Fuji have been spent analysing data from the race in Japan, identifying areas where the small, but crucial, improvements that can be made to lift the GMR-001 Hypercar further up the order. 

Genesis Magma Racing Team Management Quotes

Gabriele Tarquini, Genesis Magma Racing Sporting Director said:

We need to bring together all the positives we have seen during the season. Watching the performance of the GMR-001 Hypercar, we are close to the pace. In Fuji, we again showed good pace. We now need to make small improvements, because it's clear that we haven’t executed the recent races as well as the performance of the car deserves, so we need to improve. But it's not something big that needs to change; we just need to better manage the different key moments during the race. They are easy mistakes, because when you are trying to go as fast as possible, you can make a small mistake. I know as a driver. It's a question of putting oil on the different gears already turning in the team. That's the way to go.

Justin Taylor, Genesis Magma Racing Chief Engineer said: “We've had two opportunities to test at Barcelona: in December 2025 and most recently August of this year. While the conditions between those sessions were quite different from what we will have for the race, both gave us information we can draw on. That said, testing and racing are different things and we're cautious about reading too much into findings from testing. Tyre wear will be a defining factor across the weekend. Barcelona is very demanding on the left sides due to the high speed right handers. Managing tyre saving versus pace to get the best average times over a full stint is a challenge we're still working to understand. We've made genuine progress, which we want to build on in Barcelona, but we remain realistic that there's still a lot of work to do, and this circuit, along with our competition, will tell us clearly where we stand.”

Driver Quote - #17 GMR-001 Hypercar

Mathys Jaubert said: “Barcelona is a circuit I know quite well. I’ve done a lot of laps there, especially last year, when we took our first LMP2 victory. The tests we did there, both last December and this summer, will also help us a lot with the setup direction we can start from. Racing is very different, and we will have differing conditions for the weekend, but the running will help with our understanding of the specific characteristics of the circuit, and the tyre degradation that we expect to be big part of strategy. Combining the experience we’ve gained throughout the season with those tests, I think we arrive in Barcelona better prepared than at the other rounds. I’m really looking forward to getting back on track and seeing what the car is really capable of there.”

Driver Quote - #19 GMR-001 Hypercar

Dani Juncadella said: “It means a lot for me to be racing the GMR-001 Hypercar at home in Barcelona. It’s very special and quite unexpected because of the calendar changes. It’s always special to have family and friends at the track. It does add some pressure, but it’s a very beautiful pressure – it gives me an extra boost. It’s the first time that WEC will be racing in Spain and Barcelona, so I’m sure there will be some new fans to the series who will get to see the racing up close, and I’m looking forward to being a big part of that. It’s going to be a challenge for everybody on a new track. We have some experience, but it’s not the same when you are racing. The track has a few things that can make the racing exciting – it’s always a high degradation circuit, which will create some different strategies and give us some opportunities to show we’ve learnt from the previous rounds.”