October 8, 2025 - ADAC Proposes New Electrified Race Car Platform

This is the Telemetry Transportation Daily for October 9, 2025, and I'm Sam Abuelsamid, Vice President of Market Research for Telemetry.  

Almost since the automobile was created, people have been racing them to demonstrate that they are better than competitors. Motorsports remains a key marketing tool to sell new vehicles, and in recent decades, ensuring there is some technical relationship between race and road vehicles has been crucial to getting corporate approvals. Thus, when VW Group was pushing clean diesel, they put diesel engines in Le Mans prototypes from Audi. Today, top-class sports prototypes almost all use hybrid powertrains. But the most popular class of sports cars globally is GT3, with racers loosely derived from road cars. 

The German Auto Club, or ADAC, has put out a proposal for a new racing class called XT1. Like GT3, it would feature bodies that look like road cars. But the platform is electrified. It would rely on a standard set of four electric motors putting out 1,000 horsepower, standard electronics, and a high-voltage battery. However, beyond that, manufacturers would be free to choose the rest of the powertrain to charge the battery. They could use an internal-combustion engine running on synthetic e-fuel as a range extender, a hydrogen fuel cell, or even a larger battery for purely electric operation. 

The ADAC is hoping to establish a working group by the end of this year that will formalize the full regulations during 2026, with a target of having XT1 cars racing by 2030. XT1 is a very interesting concept that gives automakers some freedom to try different ideas while still trying to manage costs and have a competitive field.