One of the great disappointments of the 1000 Miglia di Sebring was certainly Porsche, making its debut with its new LMDh in the FIA World Endurance Championship.
After running a race for the first time at the IMSA 24h of Daytona, the 963s managed by Team Penske faced off against their rivals in the Hypercar Class, with decidedly less satisfactory results.
While at Daytona part of the result was decided by technical problems, at Sebring the prototypes #5 and #6 of the German manufacturer didn’t have any particular technical problems, but the wheelbase was not what they had more or less promised in the Prologue tests.
Qualifying did not go beyond the sixth and seventh time, while in the race there were only brief initial battles against the Cadillac, then both vehicles lost ground having to settle for fifth and sixth place in their category, behind the two Toyotas. of Ferrari and precisely of the V-Series.R.
Clearly it was not this first outing that could determine the real values on the pitch, but whoever returns home from Florida with something to review is certainly the German-American team, which in Portimao is called to take a step forward to be in the game.
#5 Porsche Penske Motorsport Porsche 963: Dane Cameron, Michael Christensen, Frédéric Makowiecki
Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images
“In Qualifying it was clear that we lacked pace and the times confirmed this – admits the team’s CEO, Jonathan Diuguid – The positive thing is that the team worked well, the race pace seemed better on paper and we had to focus on the strategy and avoiding mistakes. We succeeded and we didn’t take penalties, even if there were some minor setbacks”.
“I think we suffered a little too much on the pace and we’ll have to work on it, but in general it was a good day in which we finished the race with both cars and a lot of things to understand, especially on tire management. We collected valuable data under different conditions that we didn’t have before the event.”
#5 Porsche Penske Motorsport Porsche 963: Dane Cameron, Michael Christensen, Frédéric Makowiecki
Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images
Urs Kuratle, LMDh program manager, adds: “Congratulations to the team! They had an extremely difficult week with the Prologue and preparation days behind them, but they remained calm throughout the race and made no mistakes during the pit stops. makes me proud to have been a part of it”.
“Coming to the track, we are absolutely not satisfied with our performance. The fact is that we are not squeezing the maximum out of our 963 and we are convinced that the car is better than what we have shown. One aspect is braking, we know for sure that we have to improve in that area. But we can’t take advantage of the full package of the car yet and that’s especially true for Qualifying.”
“We thought our race performance would be better, but even then we still have some work to do. With fifth and sixth places, the result is still not what we wanted. However, it was a good start to a new was for us in the WEC. Congratulations to Toyota, Ferrari and Cadillac. With the crew here we will certainly make up ground, the team has enormous potential. We have faith in the drivers and we have the means to recover.”
#6 Porsche Penske Motorsport Porsche 963: Nick Tandy, Mathieu Jaminet, Dane Cameron
Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images
Thomas Laudenbach, Vice President of Porsche Motorsport, adds: “The whole team and our drivers did their best and fought to the end. Our new FIA WEC team deserves great respect. We did the best we could with what we had and there has been significant progress since Daytona.”
“The reliability of our 963s was not a problem this weekend. However, it became clear that we still have to catch up in many areas. Compared to the competition, we lack performance. We need to work on this systematically and intensively in the next weeks”.
#5 Porsche Penske Motorsport Porsche 963: Dane Cameron, Michael Christensen, Frédéric Makowiecki
Photo by: Porsche Motorsport
Christian Eifrig, technical manager of the project, admitted: “Let’s be honest, we didn’t get the result on the track that we hoped for, but there are some positive aspects: if you consider the reliability problems of Daytona in January and compare them with the 16 hours with virtually no problems at Sebring, you can tell that a lot of our hard work has paid off.”
“Another good thing is that there isn’t a major issue hampering our performance, we just need to keep working on the car and set-up, and figure out how to get the most out of it. With the 12h IMSA we hope to gather more experience and better data that we can bring to Europe to continue our testing program ahead of Portimao and Long Beach.”
From the track, here is the thought of Laurens Vanthoor after driving his #6 Porsche: “It wasn’t an easy race for us. Initially we tried to fight against the Cadillac. Sometimes it worked, but in the end they were too strong for us At the moment it’s the best we can do. Now we need to understand where we lack speed and work hard to improve.”
