The Blancpain Ultracar Sports Club returns for its second outing of the year in sunny southern France on June 25/26 when a selection of the world’s fastest and rarest supercars will be driven in anger around Circuit Paul Ricard.

Fans gathering for the Blancpain GT Series’ six-hour Endurance Cup race are in for an additional treat, especially if the first Blancpain Ultracar Sports Club meeting of 2016 was anything to go by. Aston Martin’s Vulcan, the Pagani Huayra Tempesta and McLaren P1 GTR – including the world’s only road-legal example – were just some of the exotic machinery on show at Brands Hatch in May.

Now a similar roster is being assembled for Paul Ricard, which hosted the maiden Blancpain Ultracar Sports Club event last year.

McLaren’s hybrid game-changer is back in both its track-focused P1 GTR and ‘standard’ P1 guises, while the latter’s glorious road-going nemesis, the Ferrari LaFerrari, will also be strutting its stuff in southern France.

But perhaps the biggest confirmed signing so far is the Pagani Zonda R. Limited to just 15 examples, this unregulated 750bhp V12 monster represents the penultimate chapter in the Zonda’s celebrated history. Indeed, its huge rear wing and diffuser, revised styling, air intakes and slick Pirelli tyres emphasise the ballistic performance only accessible once unleashed on track, just as it will be at Paul Ricard.

Italy’s celebrated hypercar manufacturer pitting its most extreme model against McLaren’s equally impressive expression of unregulated performance certainly represents a mouthwatering prospect!

Once again only the world’s rarest and fastest road-going, track-only and technologically advanced cars will be considered. The chances of ever encountering these examples, let alone seeing them pushed hard around the regulated confines of a race circuit, is incredibly unlikely. Indeed, it is a spectacle unique to the Blancpain Ultracar Sports Club.

Paul Ricard’s complete Blancpain Ultracar Sports Club entry list will be issued in the coming weeks.