The beautiful thing about Le Mans Ultimate being the official game for the World Endurance Championship is you, the people, get to recreate the entire 2023 championship in all its glory.
You get to choose your career path and race for the worlds best endurance teams from the Hypercar, GTE, or LMP2 classes that competed across the world in all seven of the circuits from the 2023 calendar, and there is no other sim racing title that currently offers this unique combination together with the most up to date and realistic versions of cars and tracks.
This guide will run through all of the different intricacies that Le Mans Ultimate provides for you in the Race Weekend, from session settings, event lengths, advanced options, the weather system and more, so you can hit the track and power your way to victory lane.
Race Weekend Creation
To create your WEC Race Weekend, you are greeted with 4 main categories to navigate through:
- Circuit selection
- Car class selection
- Car selection
- Event settings
Complete these 4 stages and you’ll be ready to start your race weekend, enter the garage, hit the race track for the first time and begin your campaign to becoming the 2023 World Endurance Champion.
Circuit Selection
You begin by choosing your circuit that lays the foundation to your race weekend. You can choose from any of the venues that were present on the 2023 calendar including:
- Sebring
- Portimao
- Spa Francorchamps
- Le Mans
- Monza
- Fuji Speedway
- Bahrain
What makes the circuit selection unique to your Race Weekend is the race lengths you can choose to use, along with your practice sessions and qualifying sessions. It’s very specific in the fact you can replicate the exact races, so for example you can do the 1000 miles of Sebring which is an 8 hour event, you can do the 6 hours of Spa, or you can choose to do the full 24 hours of Le Mans, but the race lengths remain unique to the circuits. So you can’t do a 24 hours of Spa event as it doesn’t apply to the World Endurance Chamopionships.
This table below shows you how long or short you can configure your sessions based on the circuit.
| Circuit | Practice (session in minutes) | Qualifying (session minutes) | Race |
| Sebring | Short: 15m – Long 120m | Short 5m – Long 20m | Short 24m – Long 8h |
| Portimao | Short: 15m – Long 120m | Short 5m – Long 20m | Short 18m – Long 6h |
| Spa | Short: 15m – Long 120m | Short 5m – Long 20m | Short 18m – Long 6h |
| Le Mans | Short: 15m – Long 120m | Short 5m – Long 20m | Short 72m – Long 24h |
| Monza | Short: 15m – Long 120m | Short 5m – Long 20m | Short 18m – Long 6h |
| Fuji | Short: 15m – Long 120m | Short 5m – Long 20m | Short 18m – Long 6h |
| Bahrain | Short: 15m – Long 120m | Short 5m – Long 20m | Short 24m – Long 8h |
Car Class & Car Selection
Next you must select the car class and car you wish to race in your Race Weekend event. You have 12 different cars to choose from across 3 classes, with over 100 different and official livery options available.
Hypercar
The ‘HY’ category debuted in the World Endurance Championship in 2021 after they phased out the LMP1 class. But it wasnt until this season where its ruleset really came of age, attracting a raft of manufacturers, you can choose from 7 different LMDh and LMH cars in Le Mans Ultimate to tackle your Race Weekend:
- Toyota GR010 Hybrid LMH
- Ferrari 499P LMH
- Porsche 963 LMDh
- Cadillac V-Series.R LMDh
- Peugeot 9X8 LMH
- Glickenhaus SCG 007 LMH
- Vanwall Vandervell 680 LMH
LMP2
The ‘P2’ category has been a staple of the World Endurance Championships since the inception of the championship in 2012. It is a closed cockpit car, destined only to teams independent of manufacturers and/or engine suppliers. 2023 was the final year the LMP2 car will be raced in WEC as it is phased out of competition. Whilst there is only one LMP2 car in Le Mans Ultimate, you have 36 livery options from 17 different teams.
- LMP2 Oreca 07
GTE
The ‘LMGTE AM’ category consists of production based race cars. Whilst being the slowest class used in the World Endurance Championships, it has probably seen the most competitive drivers and teams join the grid to battle it out through the 11 years it has been used in WEC. Just like the LMP2 cars, the GTE machines are no longer used after 2023. There are 4 different GTE cars to use in Le Mans Ultimate for your Race Weekend:
- Aston Martin Vantage AMR
- Corvette C8.R GTE
- Ferrari 488 GTE Evo
- Porsche 911 RSR-19
Event Settings
In your event settings you have two ways to go about things. A quick options setup and an advanced options setup. Let’s explore both options for you so you can decide the best way to approach your Race Weekend.
The Quick Option
The quick option will see you get on track with minimal adjustments needed. You will see the session settings, the classes competing, and some other miscellaneous settings like ruleset, tyre wear and fuel usage.
You can quickly choose the length type for your practice, qualifying and race sessions with a predetermined weather pattern for each. You can flick between a strict, relaxed or default ruleset and you can apply a multiplier to your tyre wear and fuel usage, or choose to keep it realistic.
Once that is set, you can start your race weekend. Simple.
The Advanced Option
The advaced option to setting up your event settings for your Race Weekend allows you to do everything from the quick options and so much more and it’s split into 4 sub categories for you to fully personalise your events.
- Difficulty
- Sessions
- Weather
- Advanced
Difficulty
In the difficulty section you can adjust your opponent strength and damage simulation. Along with your tyre wear and fuel usage. You also have extra assists available for you to adjust should you need to, these include your driving line, steering help, brake help, shifting, stability control and ABS.
For the most realistic approach you want your damage model set to 100%, all your assists set to off, with your fuel and tyres set to realistic.
Sessions
The session section lets you further adjust options for all of your sessions during the weekend on top of what you may have already set them to from the quick options. A tip we tell you about in our starter guide to LMU is always putting your starting grip levels to saturated, this ensures the best grip levels on the race track.
You can also address the start time of the events, the wetness of the surface, the time scale multiplier of each session, road surface temperatures and more. Another little tip if you want to avoid traffic during the practice session is the ability to make it a private session, this can only be applied to practice however.
Weather
The weather section lets you dictate the exact weather conditions of the entire weekend that will effect your practice, qualifying and race sessions.
Le Mans Ultimate comes equipped with 3 weather presets already installed for you to use with a sunny, cloudy and rainy option for each session. There is a fourth option and that is a fully custom weather setup which uses a 5 stage weather system.
This allows you to get adventurous with the weather you can experience over the course of a weekend. During the race for example, you can set it up so it starts dry, turns cloudy, rains in the middle of the race, returns to cloudy and completely clears up for the finish.
Each stage will show you what the sky is doing, what the chance of rain is and what the air temperature will be.
Advanced
Finally, you have the finer details to your options to cycle through which include some of the quick option points like flag rules, but you can dive deeper into the options and decide how aggressive you want track limits to be, or how likely mechanical failures can occur during the course of a weekend.
Time To Hit The Track
Now all of the above has been explained to you, you can successfully create your World Endurance Championship Race Weekend with confidence.
All that is left for you to do is get out on track and witness the masterpiece you have put together. You can now begin your campaign to become the 2023 WEC champion.
You have one more question to ask however as you may still be thinking, but how am I going to do an 8 hour race solo? Le Mans Ultimate has you covered here also, because you and the AI become one, become partners, become team mates.
Hidden deep within your keyboard bindings you can let the AI take control of the car at any stage in the race by simply pessing the ‘I’ key. When you do this the AI control your car and continue to race for you whilst you take a break, when you are ready to get back behind the wheel simply hit the ‘I’ key again and a 3 second countdown will begin.
