Stop pinching yourself: Porsche is back

My arms should have been black and blue for a few years now. The reason? I've been pinching myself ever since Porsche announced its return to front-line sportscar racing back in June 2011.

It has been my dream for more than a decade to see the great marque back where it belongs at the top of the sportscar tree. So when it was finally confirmed that Porsche would again be competing for outright honours at the Le Mans 24 Hours from 2014, I couldn't quite convince myself that I wasn't still somehow dreaming.

Photographs of the German manufacturer's World Endurance Championship challenger released last June didn't remove my doubts. Nor did a first glimpse of what has become the 919 Hybrid at Porsche's Night of Champions last December, but then I did only catch sight of the thing through a cloud of dry ice and subsequently a sheet of perspex. (I'm not sure why Porsche felt compelled to build a little box for it.)

Even seeing the car on track during a trip to Bahrain earlier this year didn't entirely convince me that my long wait was over. And I have to admit that there's a grubby finger mark somewhere on one of the cars courtesy of my doubts: I felt compelled to touch the 919 on display at the Geneva Motor Show last month - just to make sure it was real.

Porsche's 1998 win was its last shot at outright Le Mans success © LAT

I hope you can understand my problem. Porsche was pretty much an ever-present challenger at the 24 Hours during my years as an avid AUTOSPORT reader from the late 1970s on - and still was through my early years as a motorsport journalist in 1990s. If you'd told me back then that one day Porsche would be absent from the front of the grid at Le Mans for 15 years, I'd have laughed in your face.

That would've also been my reaction if the same suggestion had been made on the night of a much earlier prizegiving at Weissach: the one in December 1998, when Porsche shocked the world - and at least one of its drivers who arrived late and missed a briefing of employees - by telling us that it wouldn't be defending its Le Mans crown. But then it did promise us that evening that it would only be away for a year and would be back in 2000.

Porsche got a long way down the road towards honouring that pledge. It built a car - and a brand-new engine - and tested it, but ultimately canned the project before what was known as the LMP2000 had made it outside the gates of Weissach.

Even though Porsche told us that it wouldn't be going racing with this car, to focus resources on the development of SUVs - 'Oh the sacrilege', we cried - I never thought that my hair would be greying and my eyesight waning by the time I witnessed Porsche challenging for Le Mans victory number 17.

But then there were some major false dawns along the way, and not just the LMP2000. Porsche did drop some fairly big hints in the early Noughties that it planned a racing future for the Carrera GT, a supercar car born out of the LMP2000 programme. That plan, too, was quietly forgotten.

The LMP2 Porsche won Sebring in 2008, but it wasn't quite the same © LAT

Then came the RS Spyder LMP2, which did, of course, battle for outright sportscar glory. Only not where it mattered - its giant-killing antics were confined to the American Le Mans Series.

Nothing wrong with that, of course. It's just that a P2 car was never going to be an outright contender at Le Mans.

So it's taken until now, well into the second decade of the new millennium, for Porsche to return to its rightful place. And it's taken yours truly the better part of three years to believe it's really going to happen.

That nagging doubt - the voice saying, 'Can this be real?' - has now finally been banished from the darkest depths of my psyche. The clincher was seeing the 919 on track, at the same time as the rival machinery from Audi and Toyota with which it will be battling in this year's WEC, during last week's official test at Paul Ricard.

It was nothing to do with the 919's pace (possibly impressive), nor its reliability (definitely impressive). It was more the fact that there were two cars there at Ricard, in full livery and run by a properly functioning race team.

Porsche's return has finally become real for me. Roll on Silverstone - and the Le Mans 24 Hours.