Genesis Magma Racing drivers look ahead to team’s first FIA WEC season

For the team’s debut season in the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC), Genesis Magma Racing have assembled a driver line-up that combines championship winning experience, development expertise and the ambition of youth. However, all involved recognise the scale of the challenge ahead of the team.

Driver line-ups balance experience and ambition

Though satisfied with the outcomes of the on-track testing and development, the team are aware that the proof of the progress made will only come with the first competitive sessions of the 2026 season. The efforts of Genesis as a manufacturer and work the team have completed have secured a place on the grid of the 6 Hours of Imola. However, on track, Genesis Magma Racing have to earn the right to truly compete with the more experienced teams and manufacturers they wish to count among their rivals.

“We have focused on the things we can control,” said Genesis Magma Racing Sporting Director Gabriele Tarquini. “In engineering, that’s the reliability and performance of the car, in team management, it’s the processes and for me, it’s the driver line-ups.”

He explained: “Each of our drivers brings something different, and that’s exactly what makes a strong endurance line-up. We have drivers whose extensive Hypercar experience has been extremely valuable in developing the car, and others who, with the enthusiasm of rookies, will help us overcome the difficulties we will certainly face during our first season. But beyond individual strengths, what really matters is how they work together. Endurance racing is about trust, communication, and shared responsibility for the result.”

The relationship between the drivers has been critical in assembling the three-driver line-ups for each of the team’s GMR-001 Hypercar. Most notably, when named as the team’s first two drivers in December 2024, André Lotterer and Pipo Derani were expected to drive different cars in competition. However, as the team saw how well they worked together during the earliest stages of testing, it became clear that the strongest option for the team was to pair the two in the #17 GMR-001 Hypercar, where their combined experience is complimented by Hypercar debutant and Genesis Magma Racing Trajectory Programme graduate Mathys Jaubert.

The sister #19 car will be shared by Daniel Juncadella, who drove alongside Jaubert in the European Le Mans Series last year, Mathieu Jaminet and Paul-Loup Chatin. All three start new challenges in their careers with Genesis Magma Racing, aiming to add to successes including IMSA titles – Jaminet – GT racing success – Juncadella – and a FIA WEC race win in a car built around the same ORECA spine as the GMR-001 Hypercar – Chatin at the 2025 6 Hours of Fuji. 

Driver quotes - #17 GMR-001 Hypercar

Luis Felipe ‘Pipo’ Derani

Pipo Derani said: “Our first goal for the season has to be for us to become a proper team. There are so many great people in the team. What we’ve already done is a massive achievement, like climbing Mount Everest, only higher, and now we get to live what one-and-a-half-years ago was a dream. Now we have to polish everything – have the pitstops done right, people knowing exactly what they need to do. The reality is we need to create small targets for ourselves. For the first race we can hopefully make as few mistakes as possible and finish the race, the second race finish a little better results-wise and slowly push the targets further and further towards the front. The mentality I’m taking into the season is to tick those boxes bit by bit. I think if we do that, we will eventually be surprised with where we can get.”

Mathys Jaubert

Mathys Jaubert said: “For me, honestly, my first target is to make a good year, as I did in 2025 in the European Le Mans Series. If I can go without mistakes, with good performance in all my stints, then I will be proud of what I have done at the end of the year. This is my main target, and the most important thing for the team. I think a good aim for us to finishing in the top five at one race this – for the first year of the team, that would be very strong. For me, personally, my ambition would be the best rookie in the WEC. That’s always the first aim to be best of the group like you. But, for that you need to have good team-mates, and good car and a good team around you.”

André Lotterer

André Lotterer said: “For most of us who have been in the sport a long time, the ultimate goal is to win and until then you're not too happy. The dynamic is obviously different when you join as a new manufacturer against teams that have been racing for years. So, you have a humble approach. It would be amazing to finish our first race without problems and issues and accumulate maximum experience, would be a very great achievement. But as we know, and as all ambitious people in motorsport, we are very competitive. So, for sure, we will do our best to be as competitive as possible. The car has run without problems in testing and life has been pretty good. But in the racing scenario, it can be different. We will definitely face things that we try to simulate, try to expect, but they will come. And let's see how we can manage them and tackle them. And that is how we will be challenged.”

Driver quotes and profiles - #19 GMR-001 Hypercar

Paul-Loup Chatin

Paul-Loup Chatin said: “I’m really looking forward to being part of the Genesis brand, building the reputation of the brand in Europe. That’s part of the goal for Genesis Magma Racing, and if we are good on track then that will be good for the brand. It will be super cool to see the benefit of what we do on track in the wider market. As a race team, we want to progress during the season. What I don't want to see is a decent first race and a decent last race. I’d actually prefer to have a difficult race in Imola and then a good Bahrain weekend at the end of the year. I don't know where we'll start compared to the other teams. We'll know soon, but at the moment I still don't know where we are exactly in terms of performance. We dream about it, but it would be not realistic to say we'll arrive, and we'll be straight away fast and reliable.”

Mathieu Jaminet

Mathieu Jaminet said: “The GMR-001 Hypercar is very different from the Porsche I’ve driven before. It’s quite surprising, knowing how tight the LMDh regulations are, that two cars can feel so different, but at the end of the day they all make more or less the same lap time, even if it’s different ways. There are definitely some strengths in the GMR-001 Hypercar, even though we are still very early in the Genesis Magma Racing project. On the other hand, there are some weaker points, and this is where I try to bring my experience to the engineers having developed a previous car before and raced it for a couple of years, to work to create a winning racecar. I think a realistic target is progression - that the car gets reliable over the year, that we start to gain performance and slowly catch up to the front and really see progression from race one to race number eight.”

Daniel Juncadella

Daniel Juncadella said: “There's many different things playing into a result that we, or at least me as a driver, cannot control. We need to focus on what we control and that's why we’ve worked during testing on being better every day on the aspects that can just gain you performance, whether it is, reliability, drivability or lap time. It could be, at the end of the season, we look back and even if we haven't scored a good result. We could probably say, ‘OK, here we had a chance and something happened’. But if you give yourself opportunities to score big results, that's already something you can be proud of. If we're in a position to fight for a strong result already in your first year, I think that's something we can be satisfied with.”