Another weekend, another major race win for the Porsche 963.
After a tricky first year for the Porsche LMDh program, Porsche Penske Motorsport and its privateer teams in both IMSA and the FIA World Endurance Championship, 2024 is quickly becoming a year to remember for the storied German brand’s flagship motorsport program.
After a rather underwhelming start to life in GTP and Hypercar, towards the end of the 2023 season there were signs that the tide was turning for Porsche and its Penske factory cars. Looking back, the strong performance at the FIA WEC 6 Hours of Fuji — in which Penske led a large portion of the race — and wins in IMSA at Road America and Indianapolis were a sign of things to come.
Following an off-season that was used to regroup and prep minor electronic reliability upgrades that were made ready in time for the Rolex 24 At Daytona, the Penske operation has come out swinging. To get things started, it won the twice-around-the-clock classic in Florida before claiming a historic double podium in the WEC season opener yesterday in Qatar amid a 1-2-3 for the brand, thanks to HertzTeam JOTA’s heroics and a heartbreaking end to the race for Peugeot.
The body language of everyone involved in the program has improved dramatically. There is now real momentum and confidence that this year will see the 963 earn its stripes and add yet another successful chapter to Porsche’s storied history in sportscar racing.
So what’s behind this sudden change of form?
“It’s a combination of things,” Andre Lotterer told RACER after finally scoring his first victory with Porsche in Qatar and his first WEC win since 2015. “We learned a lot of things the hard way last year. There were adjustments we needed to make as a team. Our operation is more efficient now. We use data better, we have new members in the team, new engineers and everything felt calm and composed during the race.”
Ahead of the 1812km race, the Porsche 963 in the hands of Penske and JOTA set the pace at the Lusail International Circuit all week long. It looked encouraging from the outside, but nobody within the team was ready to get carried away. Ahead of the race, a senior team source told RACER that they genuinely expected a similar gap between the LMDh and LMH-spec cars to last season in the race.
Once the lights went out, though, this simply wasn’t the case. In fact, not only were Porsche’s 963s — including the No. 12 from JOTA — the class of the field, but the main challenge didn’t come from Toyota or Ferrari. Instead that came from Peugeot’s No. 93 9X8. The French team, which has struggled to make an impact with the radically-designed 9X8, ran out front early on and at one point in the middle of the race looked poised to take back the lead before the car’s pace fell away when the sun went down.
Even with a late scare concerning the winning Porsche’s number panel falling off after contact with a Lexus LMGT3 car, Peugeot’s race promptly fell apart, the car running out of fuel and limping home on the final lap before being disqualified after post-race technical checks. It was reminiscent in some ways to Toyota’s downfall at the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2016. Though clearly the stakes were not as high and Peugeot has the added benefit of being able to immediately shift its focus to Imola and the build-up to Le Mans, with an updated 9X8 that promises to regularly give it a fighting chance.
Reigning Le Mans winner Ferrari had looked poised to get its season off to a strong start. And it may have had a chance at victory had all three 499Ps not suffered from self-inflicted wounds, with contact and penalties destroying its race. Cadillac’s story was similar, an incident at the start leaving its V-Series.R with a mountain to climb to score a haul of points that reflected the car’s encouraging long-run pace.
Toyota was the real enigma, though. Nyck de Vries extracted a level of performance in qualifying to sneak onto the front row that the team was unable to sustain in the race. The Lusail circuit is frequently described as the most weight-sensitive circuit on the calendar and with the GR010 HYBRID running as the heaviest Hypercar (at 1089kg/2400 lbs), it clearly made a difference.
However, Porsche believes that its ability to beat the likes of Toyota and Ferrari is not simply a product of a BoP change and/or the Qatar circuit suiting the 963, although both were surely factors.
“We fell short in the WEC last year, but that win shows we can compete in both championships,” Penske managing director Jonathan Diuguid said. “We participate in a BoP championship, so that’s part of it but at the end of the day we are now doing the best we can with the situations we face. The result of that is what you saw in the race.”
When asked for an assessment of the program’s upward trajectory prior to the Qatar race, Porsche Motorsport boss Thomas Laudenbach spoke about the benefits of its “one team” setup for IMSA and WEC with Penske running both programs, which has helped improve the car more rapidly and make key decisions regarding upgrades and refinements.
“2023 had a lot of ups and downs — we did a lot of homework over the winter,” he said. “I know Daytona is IMSA, but for us, it’s all one team, one program. It’s not all about the performance level of the car; in Daytona we had all four cars make the finish without issues. This was remarkable and encouraging.
“Last year we were not in a position to win races for many reasons. There is some momentum now and Daytona was a big boost. That’s an advantage of one organization, we have Penske in Mooresville (N.C.) and (Porsche Penske) in Mannheim (Germany) running the programs.”
Team boss Roger Penske added in a media roundtable at Qatar that key hires made to the program’s leadership structure have played a part too.
“A year ago we were building Mannheim, hiring people and trying to come together with a new highly technical product with common parts coming from outside vendors that we had no control over,” he said. “Jan Lang (from Joest) has come on board now to be the managing director of the team in Mannheim, which is a step. Then we have Travis Law (hired as competition director), Jonathan Diuguid and Stefan Moser (Porsche’s LMDh technical director) now. The DNA is very positive — we have added people with lots of capability. And we can test all the time now — in the U.S. and over here — and step forward. I remember going to tracks to test, sit there for three days and run for only five hours. It’s a different routine today when we go, getting data for use in IMSA and in WEC.
“A year ago we were worrying about reliability; now we are worrying about performance.”
In short, Penske said, both the Porsche operation and his team, were “stuttering” because they “didn’t have the components” they needed.
But another element that pushed Porsche’s resources to the limit was its commitment to customers. It pushed hard to become the first LMDh manufacturer to get a customer program off the ground, delivering cars to Hertz Team JOTA, JDC-Miller and Proton Competition during the season.
“We didn’t make our life easy — coming together, building up Mannheim, everything from scratch, new car, customer cars at the same time,” Laudenbach said. “Our challenge was the biggest in the entire field and we paid the price. But on the other side, the decision we made was long-term. Maybe it doesn’t pay off in one year, but we are thinking further ahead.”
When asked by RACER whether Porsche would still opt to offer customer cars in year 1 if it could rerun the year, Laudenbach gave a revealing answer.
“If it was the same situation and we knew about the complexity of the situation, I think we would not provide customer cars in the first year,” he said. “That doesn’t mean it is the wrong decision to sell customer cars. Nevertheless, we are proud of what we achieved — no other brand put this together and provides real customer cars.”
Looking ahead, obviously the target is win number 20 at Le Mans. June is the month that will receive the most scrutiny from industry observers and Porsche’s top brass. This is nothing new and all nine Hypercar factory teams will be prioritizing Le Mans over a WEC title at this early stage of the campaign. This difference is that at Porsche, and Penske for that matter, success is expected no matter the scenario.
It’s still too early to get a read on where this WEC season will go. The new LMDh manufacturers have yet to hit their stride and Toyota and Ferrari’s Qatar performances may well be looked back on as a blip. But the signs are there that the days of Toyota running the table and LMH cars in Hypercar wielding a significant performance advantage may be over.
“We don’t come to the racetrack to fill the grid,” concluded Laudenbach. “Hopefully all the work will pay off and this year shows we made the right decisions.”