Porsche Penske Motorsport’s 963: The Turning Point to Success in WEC and IMSA
It’s been a remarkable year for Porsche Penske Motorsport’s 963, which has overcome its initial struggles to dominate the IMSA SportsCar Championship and World Endurance Championship (WEC) grids. The turning point for the team came at Road America last year, where they finally unlocked the true speed of the car.
“After Road America, things really started to click,” says Felipe Nasr, who leads the IMSA championship with Dane Cameron. “It was truly a weekend that we could unlock the true speed of the car.”
This win marked a breakthrough for the #7 crew, and since then, the car has been on a high, consistently performing well and being on the podium with at least one car in every race except Road Atlanta.
Reasons for the 963’s Success
Urs Kuratle, Porsche’s director of LMDh factory racing, attributes their success to a “very honest victory” at Road America, which kickstarted their successful sequence of races in America. “It’s like we had a backpack on us that was filled with reliability [issues] and also with performance and operational topics as well,” admits Kuratle. “But maybe that’s the best expression I could say: It’s like the backpack was gone.”
According to Kuratle, the key factors behind the 963’s success are:
- A solid driver lineup
- A reliable car
- A team that doesn’t make mistakes
“Compared to all the competitors, we have the strongest package on that one, and that’s something we are still not 100% happy – if you ever can be happy about this – we still work on every detail to become better on all those topics.”
Continued Dominance in IMSA and WEC
This year, the #7 car has won the Daytona 24 Hours and The Six Hours at The Glen, while the sister car prevailed at Laguna Seca. Cameron and Nasr go into this year’s Road America race with a 93-point lead over Cadillac Racing’s Sebastien Bourdais and Renger van der Zande, and are 132 clear of Tandy/Jaminet.
Nasr points to their most recent victory at Watkins Glen, a race impacted by heavy rainstorms, as the best indicator yet of this team’s precision under pressure. “It was really a test of all of those elements,” the Brazilian says. “It was a super-hard race with extremely difficult conditions where we had really 50/50 of both.”
As the season enters its final stages, Porsche Penske Motorsport’s 963 is poised to continue its dominance in both WEC and IMSA, with the team leading the drivers’, teams’, and constructors’ standings in both championships.
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