Our commitment in Endurance Motorcycle Racing

ELF and Endurance

Like the Superbike World Championship, the Endurance World Championship (EWC) offers the chemists and engineers of TotalEnergies Additives & Fuel Solutions different fields of experimentation to those of the Grand Prix. In this discipline, where the ELF brand was World Champion in 2016 with the Kawasaki SRC team, the constraints are very different in terms of fuel and lubricant products. On the lubricant side, they are equally specific due to the use of production-derived engines. Endurance is more about consistency and reliability than pure performance. Even though these are still competition engines that have been pushed to the limit, we have to take their special characteristics into account in order to offer suitable fuels and lubricants," says Thomas Fritsch. For endurance racing in particular, where reliability constraints are extreme, we offer products from the ELF HTX range with suitable and perfectly controlled viscosities. These products also reduce consumption, which is very important in 24-hour events. As far as fuel is concerned, we offer a product that works equally well with both in-line and V engines, and with any type of injection system, as each manufacturer has made different technological choices".

This year, ELF is the official fuel supplier of the Endurance World Championship. For the EWC category it is the ELF Moto2 FIM fuel with an octane rating of 102. The bikes entered in the Superstock and Production classes will use 98 octanes unleaded.

After numerous victories with Kawasaki, the ELF brand is joining forces this year with the KM99 team through the ELF Marc VDS Racing organization, which is already present in Moto2 and World Superbike. With Randy de Puniet, Jeremy Guarnoni and Florian Marino, the Belgian team finished the 2024 EWC (Endurance World Championship) in fourth place, the best privateer team. Finishing second in the Bol d'Or, the last race of the season, KM99 is looking forward to 2025 with the ambition of regularly finishing on the podium and now competing for the World Championship title.

The stakes

Once again this year, the Endurance World Championship (EWC) comprises four events. As tradition dictates, it kicks off in mid-April at Le Mans, on the Bugatti circuit. The EWC teams then travel to Belgium, to the legendary Spa-Francorchamps circuit, which returned to the EWC calendar in 2023. Since last year, the Belgian event has been run over 8 hours rather than two clock laps. Then it's on to Japan and Suzuka for another 8-hour race in July, followed by the final round at the Bol d'Or on the Paul Ricard circuit in September, for a final 24-hour event. After YART in 2023, it was the Yoshimura SERT team that reclaimed the world championship crown last year. The Franco-Japanese structure beat the Yamaha of Mandy Kainz, the BMW Motorrad World Endurance team and the riders of the KM99 ELF Marc VDS Racing team. These four teams will once again be battling it out for the world crown this year, with the FCC TSR Honda team certainly having a catastrophic season in 2024. While Suzuki and KM99 are keeping the same riders, there are a few changes among the other teams. For YART, Jason O'Halloran takes over from Niccolo Canepa, who has retired. For BMW, Steven Odendaal takes Mykhalchyk's place, while Corentin Perolari and Taiga Hada team up with Alan Techer for FCC TSR Honda France.

Update in April 2025