Ligier’s new club racing range set for Le Mans reveal, and standalone events are planned for the future

Ligier expects to begin testing of its new club racing car range in April, with an official launch of the new models scheduled to coincide with the Le Mans 24 Hours in June.

Ligier recently acquired the services of former Radical Cars co-founder Phil Abbott to spearhead design of a range of new entry level track machines.

The plans centre on two fresh designs, which are due to feature carbon fibre chassis and power outputs of around 200 and 400bhp respectively.

Ligier is well down the line with the design, and its sales and marketing manager Christophe Profit said the cars were close to hitting the track.

“We’re basing the designs on the chassis of our current CN car [JS 53 EVO] and an LMP3 variant [the JS P3], so the new cars are based on very proven foundations,” Profit said. “We want to start testing in April and the most natural place to launch them is at Le Mans, where sportscar interest is at its highest. They will then be on sale.”

Ligier is also planning to run a series of customer race day events and Profit said early interest was strong enough that the company had looked into booking track time for this year.

“We’d like to run Ligier-only race days and we’re looking around Europe and in the UK too – we will go where our customers are,” Profit added. “We want to bring new people into prototype racing and if we can do this with the new club cars we can bring those drivers up through the CN, LMP3 and into LMP2 one day.”