Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus and its cowboy-hatted financier and team boss Jim Glickenhaus have confirmed that the team has no intention of filing an entry to the FIA World Endurance Championship for the 2024 season. Despite having competed in the Hypercar class since its inception in 2021, finishing down the order to an increasing number of factory-backed efforts combined with a failure to find serious sponsorship conspired to put the team out to pasture. The closing date for a bid to race next year is November 20th, but Jim says he doesn’t need to wait that long, confirming to Motorsport today.
“Finding the necessary sponsorship isn’t realistic,” he said. “No, we won’t be entering—it doesn’t make sense for us.” Glickenhaus asserted.
“To be competitive we’d need to do an evo version of the car and to run two of them. That’s not viable for a privateer: the only way we could do it would be with sponsorship or if a customer wanted to run a program with our car.”
“We have a certain capacity [to build road cars] and we have sales up to that amount, but even if we could build more, racing in the WEC isn’t going to help us sell them. For our little company competing in the WEC just doesn’t make sense.”
Glickenhaus hopes to focus on building his road-going machines in the future, including its 003 and 004 sports cars, and the modern Baja Boot. It seems Jim has soured on racing these days, as at one point the team was working on homologating a GT3 car, running the 004 at the ‘Ring, racing in Baja, and running the WEC concurrently. As of this moment none of these projects are still alive, though he does hint that a return to the Nürburgring 24 is going to come in the next few years.
When the FIA WEC changed over to Hypercar rules, Glickenhaus was the only team to compete against Toyota and a grandfathered-in Alpine LMP1. The car didn’t conform to the letter of the rulebook, as it never incorporated a hybrid drive system. As a result the team attempted to get the FIA to reign in the speed of the Toyotas, and for the most part the lobbying worked. In 2022 the team was in contention for the victory at Monza when a turbocharger failure scuppered that opportunity (below).
Unfortunately for the team, it was never quite as well funded as the competing factory teams. The team arrived late to the show, not having its car ready for Spa-Francorchamps in 2021. Further funding issues pushed the team to skip out on several rounds of the championship over the years, failing to attend the Bahrain double-header in 2021, and the Bahrain and Fuji rounds in 2022 and ’23.
It’ll be nice to see the team competing again in a lower formula where the money outlay isn’t quite so heavy. Maybe the SCG 004 can find a place in GT3 if they can get it homologated, or in the SPX class at the N24 again. At one point in 2022 Glickenhaus said he’d like to see the 004 run in GT3 at Le Mans. I would also like to see this.