Caterham is continuing its aggressive expansion to become a serious player in both motorsport and the production car world. In addition to its continued participation in GP2 and Formula One racing, the British firm has now confirmed its entry for this year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans.

This will be Caterham’s debut at the classic endurance race, with the automaker keen to further elevate its position as a global authority in performance car development ahead of the launch of its new road car due in 2016.

Interestingly, Caterham’s road car partner, Renault Alpine, has also chosen Le Mans to demonstrate its performance potential.

Caterham will run the #41 Zytek Z11SN-Nissan in the LMP2 category, with Caterham’s F1 reserve driver and GP2 star, Alexander Rossi, joining up with Tom Kimber-Smith and Lotus F1 Team part owner Eric Lux in the driver lineup.

Though its LMP2 prototype is based on the design of an existing team, in this case Greaves Motorsport, a crew of Caterham engineers, technicians and data analysts will work extensively on the car.

“While there won’t be any specification changes we can apply to the car for this year’s Le Mans 24 Hours, because the car is homologated for the whole season, we will be looking in more detail at how our various areas of expertise across both Caterham Technology & Innovation and Caterham Composites can be applied to a customer sports prototype program in future,” Caterham Technology CEO Mike Gascoyne said in a statement.

The sports prototype he is referring to is the SP/300.R that was first revealed in 2011. Caterham is continuing development on the customer race car and is investigating the viability of producing a customer sports prototype package in the future.

The Caterham Motorsport #41 LMP2 prototype will make its track debut at the official Le Mans test session this weekend.

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