The Genesis of Genesis Magma Racing 

Alongside the freeway that splits downtown in half, there’s a billboard for a brokerage house. “Invest with us,” it says. “Life is better with money!”

No kidding. The billboard is on E 11, the longest road in the United Arab Emirates, which here in Dubai is called Sheikh Zayed Road. Dubai is the largest and richest of the Emirates, bigger and wealthier than relative pauper Abu Dhabi, located 35 miles away and the site of this weekend’s Formula 1 season finale. Sheikh Zayed is not quite packed with Rolls-Royces and Bentleys and Ferraris, though there are plenty, but it is packed with luxury cars like Lexuses and BMWs and Mercedes and Audis. What do you know? Life is better with money. And if you don’t have it, what are you doing here?

Opinions on the exact timing vary, but Dubai was officially founded in 1833 as a tiny fishing village on the coast of the Arabian Gulf. It evolved into a less-tiny fishing village over time, with about 50,000 people calling it home by 1966. Then oil was discovered just off the coast, and by 1969 Dubai was exporting it. Since then, the population has grown to about 3.8 million, an increase of 3.75 million in just 58 years. This makes the city of Dubai very young, and very wealthy. None of the skyscrapers look more than 10 years old.

Maybe that is one of the reasons that we’re in Dubai with Genesis, Hyundai Motor Company’s luxury brand. There are Hyundais in Dubai, including a few that are not beige taxi cabs. But there are quite a few Genesis products, and the company is fighting for more because Dubai is a bona fide trendsetter. The brand was founded in 2015, with the first Genesis models reaching showrooms in 2016. Genesis is battling premium brands with pedigrees that were founded a long time ago, like BMW (1916) and Audi (1909). The first Mercedes was sold in 1901.

This makes Genesis very young. None of its vehicles are more than 10 years old. Neither Dubai nor Genesis has much history to draw upon. And when it comes to motorsports, neither does Korea, a country where racing never quite caught on. Yes, there was the Korean Grand Prix Formula 1 race from 2010 to 2013, but it was essentially a disaster, with lots of empty seats and disgruntled fans, and drivers who didn’t clamor to come back to the Yeongam circuit. The Korea Super Prix, a street race in Changwon with Formula 3 cars and drivers like Lewis Hamilton and Jensen Button, launched in 1999, fizzled out by 2003.

So to Genesis, apparently all-things-are-possible Dubai seemed the ideal place to launch a racing team, teased last September: Genesis Magma Racing, which has plans to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans. In 2026 would be good. Of course, odds are that they won’t, and they know it, but none of the multinational team members are willing to admit it.

Least of all Luc Donckerwolke, president and chief creative officer for the Hyundai Motor Group. Born and raised in South America, the 59-year-old Donckerwolke was the design director for Lamborghini and Bentley before signing on with Hyundai in 2015, quitting in April 2020 as its global design director, then rejoining Hyundai in November 2020, to focus mostly on Genesis.

Not long ago—he doesn’t want to say exactly when—Donckerwolke, a massive motorsports fan, decided that to take Genesis to the next level, it must race. The global rollout of Genesis has been gradual, with the brand just now working its way across Europe. If brand recognition equals sales, and motorsports equals brand recognition, perhaps it makes sense.

Yes, Hyundai already races at the Touring Car level, preceded briefly by corporate cousin Kia, but Donckerwolke has greater ambitions for Genesis: An overall win at the most prestigious endurance race there is: Le Mans, and the Rolex 24 Hours at Daytona would be nice, too, as would a win in the Twelve Hours of Sebring. All the company has to do is design and develop and test an entry for the top class of sports car racing, and, if we’re talking about the 2024 race, beat the 23 Hypercar entries of Ferrari (which won), Toyota, Porsche, Cadillac, Lamborghini, Peugeot, Isotta, Alpine and BMW.

Donckerwolke presented his case to the upper management of Hyundai and Genesis. “I had my answer in three days,” he said, “and that included the weekend.” The answer was yes.

“I’m not exaggerating. That would have never happened with any other company.” It didn’t hurt that his email “was very detailed about what this is going to cost us.” How much? No one is saying, but an educated guess would be $100 million just to get the project off the ground.

So with that, Genesis Magma Racing was born, borrowing its middle name from a project launched at the New York Auto Show last March to build a Magma version of most every vehicle in the Genesis lineup.

What’s Magma? Think Mercedes AMG and BMW M-brand, but inclined toward more modest luxury performance than, say, the $223,000, 831-horsepower Mercedes-AMG GT 63 S E Performance we tested last month.

Please indulge us in a quick trip down a rabbit hole: Why Magma? Is there really molten rock, or are there perhaps even volcanoes, in South Korea? Actually, yes. According to the Smithsonian, South Korea has three official volcanoes of the Holocene variety, meaning they have erupted during the Holocene period, which began after the last ice age some 11,650 years ago, give or take a year or two. Last eruption reported: The year 1007.

And magma glows orange, which is why Magma concept cars, such as the Gran Turismo concept shown a year ago as the X Gran Berlinetta, are painted orange. There was not one but two X Gran Berlinettas at the Genesis Magma Racing presentation at the Armani Hotel (yes, that Armani) next door to the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. Do you see any similarities between the half-scale model of the race car, called the GMR-001 and styled by Genesis Design Europe, that was rolled out on a table during the presentation, and the X Gran Berlinetta? Yes, one is Magma orange, and one has orange trim, but is otherwise black. Close enough.

The presentation at the Armani featured Formula 1 legend and six-time Le Mans winner Jacky Icyx—who is 79 but you wouldn’t know it—who was hired by Donckerwolke to be a Genesis Official Brand Partner. If you do the math between the February hiring of Icyx, and look back at the December, 2022 hiring of Cyril Abiteboul, former head of Renault’s Formula 1 team until forced out when it became Alpine, it was clear something has been brewing beneath the surface with Hyundai and Genesis for a little while now.  Abiteboul, who played one of the villains on Netflix’s Drive to Survive during his period at Renault, has been clearly underemployed as team principal for Hyundai’s World Rally Championship effort. And why bring on a racer like Icyx unless you’re really going racing? Abiteboul will now be team principal for Genesis Magma Racing: Drivers and crew, send your resumes to him.

Which is probably not how Genesis Magma Racing hired its first two drivers, Andre Lotterer, 43, and Pipo Derani, 31. They will be developing the GMR-001 race car in 2025, and will be driving it in 2026, when it debuts as a two-car, full-season entry in the FIA World Endurance Championship, and that full season includes the 24 Hours of Le Mans in June.

Then in 2027, beginning with the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona in January, Genesis Magma will enter the IMSA series in the U.S., again with a two-car team, in pursuit of a win at both the Rolex 24 and the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring. And those two cars are expected to race at Le Mans, too.

Derani has won the Rolex 24 and has four overall victories at Sebring, while Lotterer has three Le Mans wins and is a two-time WEC world champion. After his 2026 season in WEC with Lotterer, Derani is expected to return to IMSA to drive the Genesis in U.S. races.

Though he is from Brazil, Pipo Derani is practically an honorary American driver: He came to the U.S. in 2016 to drive in the endurance races for Extreme Speed Motorsports’ LMP2 car, and promptly took class wins in both the Rolex 24 and 12 Hours of Sebring. In 2018 he became a full-time driver for Extreme Speed, then Tequila Patron, then found some stability in 2020 after signing on with the Whelen Engineering team to drive the last-generation Cadillac DPi car. In 2023, IMSA dropped the DPi car specs, which were not legal to race at Le Mans, for a completely redesigned top-tier GTP car that is. Derani and his team won that first IMSA championship for Cadillac’s new GTP car. Derani left Whelen Engineering at the end of the 2024 season to sign with Genesis Magma.

“It’s an amazing and rare opportunity,” Derani told Hagerty, “because you get to leave your fingerprints on the car.” He helped develop that Cadillac GTP, “and hopefully I can use that experience and improve in some areas that we didn’t do so well in over there. On a personal level, to have this opportunity is fantastic. I hope together with Andre we’re going to find that common ground on what is good from my side, and what is good from his, and take that to this new project that we’re now a part of.” Derani may run some LMP2 races in 2025 that don’t conflict with his testing responsibilities at Genesis, then dive in full-time in 2026 with the WEC.

If the WEC’s 2026 calendar is like the one for 2025, that season will start in February, which gives the Genesis Magma Racing team and its two lead drivers a little over a year to develop the GMR-001. That’s a profoundly tight schedule. To at least prepare for the on-track machinations, Genesis will race in 2025, sort of, by contracting with IDEC Sport, a French race team currently competing in the LMP2 class in the European Le Mans Series, one step down from the top class that Genesis will join in 2026. IDEC has raced in the 24 Hours of Le Mans since 2017, with a best finish of third in class this year. 

Genesis has hired a young and admittedly interesting lineup of drivers for the IDEC car next season: There’s Logan Sargeant, the 23-year-old Floridian who made 36 starts for the Williams F1 team until he was dropped earlier this year with nine races left, replaced by Franco Colapinto. The other IDEC drivers are Jamie Chadwick, 26, who raced in Indy NXT, the development series for IndyCar, and is three-time champion of the now-defunct W Series. And there’s Mathys Jaubert, 19, who has raced mostly Porsches. They would be wise to treat 2025 as a season-long audition to move up to the big league in 2026 or 2027; after all, Magma will need six more full-time drivers if you count both the WEC and IMSA teams, plus four more drivers for the endurance races.

Since LMP2 cars all use a spec Oreca chassis and spec British-built Gibson V-8 engine, information the attending Genesis engineers and crew can gather from IDEC won’t directly translate to the new GMR-001, which will use a different Oreca chassis similar to the ones used by the Acura IMSA teams and the Alpine WEC teams. The GMR-001’s power will come from a twin-turbocharged, 3.2-liter V-8 that shares some technology with the proven turbo four-cylinder that Hyundai uses in World Rally. Frankly, engines are less important in WEC and IMSA than you’d think: They all make the maximum-allowed horsepower, and then some. It’s reliability that matters.

Prominent in the decision to start the program with the WEC instead of IMSA is the fact that much of the engineering work on the car will be done at Hyundai design and engineering centers in Germany and France. The Genesis Magma Racing team that competes in the WEC will be operated by Genesis itself, while the American IMSA team will be run by a partner. Rumors have suggested that partner may be Chip Ganassi Racing, which ended its partnership with Cadillac at the end of the 2024 season. Asked by Hagerty if a deal has already been made with Ganassi, Abiteboul insisted that it hasn’t.

Despite the European connection, Genesis’ AMR-001 will essentially be built to IMSA specifications, making it an LMDh, short for Le Mans Daytona hybrid, as opposed to WEC Hypercar specs. Both are eligible for the two series, and both are equalized by the Balance of Performance specifications employed. Go too fast and you may be penalized by having to carry more weight, or less fuel, requiring more pit stops. Go too slow and you may get some help from aerodynamic tweaks or turbocharger adjustments. With a total of 19 manufacturers to balance out—20 with Genesis—IMSA does a remarkable job of leveling the playing field in its various series by using the BoP.

So that’s the story of why we came to Dubai, to witness the birth of a new race team that wants to win. You get the feeling that the Genesis team kind of doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, but it’ll learn quickly.

And if spending money to hire people who do know endurance racing will help, then that will happen. After all, life is better with money. 

No one at Genesis is saying it will be easy, but Luc Donckerwolke really wants to win one for the home team. “The motorsport culture is not present in Korea,” he said. “And I desperately want to change that.”