The two tiny letters that drove Genesis onto the starting grid

It was announced last September that automotive giant Hyundai’s premium brand Genesis would enter endurance racing in 2026 – its first foray into motorsport – with full confirmation of what that would entail following in early December.

Genesis Magma Racing will duly field a brace of GMR-001 prototypes in FIA WEC’s top-tier from next season onwards – although as Donckerwolke reveals, the project did not get underway in the most orthodox of manners…

“We first discussed this all when Cyril [Abiteboul – Hyundai Motorsport President] started in the [Genesis] group, more than a year-and-a-half ago,” the Belgian told fiawec.com. “I invited him to come to our wonderful design centre in Frankfurt, and basically told him, ‘I know you’re not supposed to make a programme for Genesis at the moment, but that would be my wish – that we race in FIA WEC and at Le Mans with Genesis’.  

“We were working a bit in the skunkworks at the time, and last year, I had a meeting scheduled with the chairman in Korea following a design presentation. We had prepared the whole draft about how much the project would cost, but then at the last minute, the chairman was unable to attend. 

“That was on the Friday. I was due to fly back at midnight, so I had to write an email instead. When you ask for an investment, normally you have to explain things better than just by email, but I didn’t have any choice. Time was critical, so I sent the email and then flew back to Europe. 

“At the same time, I said to Samir [Sadikhov – Genesis Senior Exterior Designer], ‘on Monday, you take the first flight to the south of France to go to Paul Ricard, and you start working on the project’. I didn’t know if I would have to call him back and say, ‘forget it, we don’t have a green light’, but he had to start before we received the green light because time was so critical. There was no other way.  

“I spent probably the worst weekend of my life waiting. Fortunately, I had enough going on to keep me distracted on the Monday and Tuesday, and on the Wednesday morning, I got an answer to my email from our chairman simply saying, ‘OK’. That was it. And then everybody who was in copy asked me, ‘OK to what?!’ I said, ‘we’re going endurance racing’. It was just two letters, and basically that was the green light for starting the FIA WEC and Le Mans project.

“You have to realise, that never happens anywhere! In every company where I have worked before, it takes years, and it is certainly not the chief designer who submits the request to the chairman to go racing! But that’s how the whole story started, in quite an unconventional way, and then we began structuring the team...”

One of the factors that played in his favour, admits Donckerwolke, was the creative freedom of FIA WEC’s popular Hypercar regulations – introduced four years ago and due to remain in force until at least the end of 2029 – which align perfectly with Genesis’ current design philosophy and DNA.

“The Genesis cars that we see on the road are first-generation,” he remarked. “The second-generation, which we are working on now, are much more organic, much more muscular and softer than today’s, let’s say, relatively constructed architecture. That is basically the formal language that has been applied to the GMR-001. 

“Compared to some of our competitors who have gone in the stealth direction – really geometric and angular and kind of faceted – we wanted to go a completely different way. We decided to pursue a softer formal language, because we all love the cars from the sixties – the Ferrari 330 P3 and P4, the Porsche 911, the Ford GT – that had this more aerodynamic look. So actually, this project came at just the right time...”

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