New team, big dreams: Genesis Magma looking to put its stamp on WEC at Fuji

Genesis Magma Racing’s first visit to Fuji Speedway this weekend comes at an interesting time for its Hypercar program, following its season-best seventh-place finish at COTA last time out with the No. 17 GMR-001.

While not a true home race for the South Korean brand, a trip to Asia brings additional fanfare and opportunity. Sunday’s six hours is the only race on the calendar in a sensible time zone for its growing domestic fanbase, making it a perfect weekend to push for cut through with casual and curious racing fans in its home market.

To make the most of the occasion, Genesis is welcoming VIP customers from South Korea at the circuit during the event, and hosting a motorsport festival near the capital city, Seoul. Fans in Korea will be able to get up close to the weathered No. 19 chassis which finished the Le Mans 24 Hours on the brand’s first attempt back in June, and watch the race on a big screen at the Starfield Hanam shopping complex. 

But the team will be keen to avoid any distractions and remain focused entirely on the on-track action. Right now, with the end of its first season in sight, it is currently making the important transition from an upstart brand with high aspirations in the FIA WEC to a regular contender ready to fight for podiums, wins and perhaps even titles in the next year or two.

It will be another particularly intense weekend, with no data from previous visits to the fabled Gotemba circuit to draw on. The weather forecast at the time of writing also looks grim, with rain expected across all three days of track action, adding another variable for the team to work through.

Nevertheless, there are reasons for optimism after five head-turning outings to kick off its maiden Hypercar voyage.

“It’s been a good season so far really,” Andre Lotterer, who shares the No. 17 with Pipo Derani and Mathys Jaubert, tells RACER. “We have the excuse that we are a new team, and every time you do a little bit well, people are like: ‘Wow, it’s good for their first year’. But this season has served as proof of the feeling that I had when I drove the car for the first time. I could feel the potential.

“Even though it’s all new, and we are starting as a new team, in my first laps the car felt correct; it was responsive, and I could tell we had a good base to work around. But we still have a lot of areas to work on, and weekends like this give us another chance to take a step. 

“You can push to get the car into the performance window; that’s one thing, but then to extract the last little things is so difficult. We’ve done well at setting up the car and learning, even though there are restrictions on most development work with these rules. We’ve come a long way, because we’ve challenged ourselves by working on complex software (which is open development). 

“We are approaching every race the same way, because it’s a learning year and our first time at most of the tracks. Fuji is a difficult circuit to set a car up for, because there are big differences between the first two sectors and the last sector. And the weather can be very mixed, so hopefully we do get some dry running.”

Despite the team heading into the weekend without a baseline, a marker of how things are progressing is that Lotterer feels it’s realistic for the team to target a points finish for both cars.

“Bigger and better results are possible,” Lotterer adds. “I think COTA was good, but there was more in there, as I spun while trying to get P3. I don’t know if I could have held it for the whole race, but there’s a question mark.

“Every new team has work to do. And operationally we still have to improve, but it will take time. We’ve gone from targeting just getting to the finish of the races at the start of the season and at Le Mans, to actually being in the fight. To leave disappointed because the race results were not good enough is a sign that we’re ambitious, want to do better and are heading in the right direction.”

This weekend in particular represents a nice opportunity for the sister car to get off the mark. While the No. 17 crew have two points scores in the bank, the drivers in No. 19 have finished every race and collected vast amounts of valuable data in the process; a top 10 result has eluded them.

Paul Loup Chatin, who was part of Alpine’s famous victory at Fuji last year in the WEC’s 100th race, hopes this weekend will be one where he and his co-drivers, Mathieu Jaminet and Daniel Juncadella, can leave a mark.

“Fuji is a track I have very good memories of, especially after winning there last year, so I’m really looking forward to coming back to Japan and to see the potential of our GMR-001 Hypercar at the track. Fuji is challenging because you need a good compromise between straight-line speed and performance in the corners,” he says.

“Our target is clear: we want to score our first points with car No. 19. We know the potential is there, and we have made good progress since the beginning of the season. The key will be to put everything together over the whole weekend and have a clean, consistent race.”