How Porsche's Daytona hiccups evoked the premiere of its Group C king

Porsche has made no bones about its new 963 prototype being the heir to its ultra-successful 962 of the 1980s and 1990s, with its plans involving a factory team and customer cars on both sides of the Atlantic. So far, it’s proving to be a tribute act in more ways than one.

To remind you, the 962 itself was a successor to the 956, designed to fit IMSA’s GTP demands with a longer wheelbase, extended by 12cm at the front so the driver’s feet were behind the front axle. A steel roll cage, instead of aluminium, and a single-turbo engine, rather than the pair that the 956 boasted, were also required.

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The 962 made its debut in the Daytona 24 Hours in 1984, with Mario and Michael Andretti driving a factory-fielded car. It qualified on pole position in Mario’s hands – by two seconds thanks to qualifying tyres and blanking off its underside air intake! – and led the 83-car field initially, until retiring after 127 laps with gearbox failure. It turned out that mounting the turbo atop the gearbox “cooked” the synchronisers, according to Mario.

“The turbo created so much heat, and they underestimated that,” says Andretti Sr. “So that was a shame, because I think Mike and I could have probably walked that race.”

Fast forward to 2023. The 963 made its debut in the Daytona 24 Hours, with two entries fielded by the factory Porsche Penske Motorsport team. The #7 car just missed pole position by 0.083s (but set a faster theoretical lap in qualifying), while the #6 sister car was leading at the 16th-hour mark until Nick Tandy spun off at The Kink after a clash with a slower competitor, which cost three laps for repairs.

Tandy then charged back into contention, including a storming stint where he passed all the GTP cars ahead of him – including the race-winning Meyer Shank Racing Acura in IndyCar star Simon Pagenaud’s hands – to get within one lap of the leader. But it was taken out of the race by, you’ve guessed it, a gearbox failure. At least the cause wasn’t heat from the turbo this time, since they are mounted well away, tidily nestled between the vee of the 4.6-litre V8 engine.

Andretti believes Porsche 962 would have won easily on its debut in 1984 without reliability glitch at Daytona

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Between them, the Porsches led for 41 laps, but the sense of disappointment is palpable as project director Urs Kuratle speaks soon after flagfall.

“People are checking data right now, everybody is obviously tired and we don’t know the root cause of it yet,” he sighs.

After the race, when Autosport does some digging in the paddock, a source reveals that the problem with the gearbox in question was that its “insides can see the sunshine”.

Kuratle adds: “It was a hard decision to make to retire the car, it’s always difficult to stop in the garage and you don’t see the finish line of a special 24-hour race. But it’s important to save parts, to save mileage on parts, and not put the car at another technical risk because it wouldn’t be safe. There could be a crash or something like this, and we would lose more parts.”

"I smashed into what I thought were polystyrene boards, but they’re weighed down by massive sandbags, so it ripped the thing to pieces!" Nick Tandy

That decision highlights how critical the supply chain for this new breed of LMDh machinery is. The requirement to run the common electrical hybrid system has created hurdles throughout the pre-season testing programme, and legendary team chief Roger Penske points out that we shouldn’t underestimate this extra strain.

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“This high-voltage hybrid has been a challenge for us from the standpoint to understand it,” he says. “I think we have more engineers looking at computers than we do people working on the car right now. It certainly looks like it in our pit.”

Porsche wasn’t aided in its parts situation when Tandy crashed in qualifying and then spun off in the race, inflicting damage to the car, which was leading at the time with eight hours remaining.

“I went to the inside [of an LMP3 car] at The Kink, fully alongside like we do every three laps with them, and I don’t know if he thought he could turn in but there was no room, and because these cars are so wide I had to go up on the inside kerb, and I was already shallow turning in, and we were at the end of a triple stint,” says the 2015 Le Mans winner.

The new Porsche 963 showed promise on its debut and led before a clash required repairs before retiring with gearbox failure

Photo by: Jake Galstad / Motorsport Images

“The thing snapped, so I bailed out onto the grass, thinking I’ll just rejoin at the next corner. Then I smashed into what I thought were polystyrene boards, but they’re weighed down by massive sandbags, so it ripped the thing to pieces! It should have been an innocuous trip across the grass. But that caused us an issue.”

Kuratle adds: “The nose was damaged, and there were a lot of smaller carbon bits and pieces around which were damaged, like the antenna and things on the car. The [three-lap] stop might have looked slow, but as a matter of fact the guys did a good job. They changed a lot of parts doing this stop.”

It wasn’t all doom and gloom for Porsche – the #7 did see the chequered flag, 34 laps down on the winner in 14th position overall and seventh in class. It lost the majority of this when the team opted to replace the car’s energy store system, made more time-consuming due to the number of bolts required to anchor the high-voltage system on safety grounds.

“We know that was the root cause,” asserts Kuratle. “We changed the battery on this one, and the issue we had was not there anymore.”

This car suffered a second trip behind the wall, for a much faster repair to a broken water pipe.

“There was a water leak from the engine, from the combustion engine,” adds Kuratle. “It was the first [time the pipe had failed] as well. We had many firsts with issues we never faced before, so there’s a lot to do after this race.”

While it has many aspects to investigate from a reliability standpoint, Porsche will also be mildly concerned about the pace gap to the dominant Acuras that scored a 1-2 finish. While both the MSR and Wayne Taylor Racing-run cars encountered gearbox issues, which meant their oil reserves needed refilling, when it came down to raw performance stints – such as at the start and towards the finish – the ARX-06 was simply untouchable.

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Tandy was very honest about the pace deficit to the MSR Acura after the race: “It comfortably had eight tenths to the Porsche and the Caddys, and it probably had three or four tenths on the Taylor car. It was all acceleration and straightline speed, it was just a bullet in a straight line. You can’t build a car with less drag and more power and different torque curves, they’re all regulated. So, fair play, they must’ve done well to get the thing set up for Daytona.”

The #7 Porsche of Campbell, Nasr and Christensen made it to the end but was many laps down after several delays

Photo by: Porsche Motorsport

But potential does appear to be there in the 963 and, when reminded of his sparkling comeback drive on Sunday morning, Tandy says: “We don’t know why we had that pace all of a sudden. It’s not like they slowed down, we picked up pace from the previous stint that I ran. All we did was change tyres. Maybe we just got the tyre into a nice temperature window, it just started to work for us.”

Acura’s pace could open a Balance of Performance debate a little earlier than IMSA would have liked, with all GTP cars currently on a baseline performance level. PPM boss Jonathan Diuguid explained, ahead of the Daytona race, that he’d like it to stay that way.

“Honestly, the LMDh formula does a pretty good job of making the box relatively small in general,” points out Diuguid. “When I’ve seen some communications from other manufacturers about worrying less and less about BoP I think that’s truthful and genuine, because the power and weight are similar, and aerodynamic regulation box is quite tight. With these cars right now, we’re all just looking towards the racing.

"If we sell a car, we will give support so that a professional team with professional drivers will be somewhere near the front of the pack. I’d rather sell fewer cars, and make sure they’re run properly" Thomas Laudenbach

“The drag and aero performance window is relatively small, [Porsche’s] approach was more about adjustability to be able to use our single aerodynamic device [the rear flap assembly on the 963] to get the largest aero balance range that we could to be able react to these different tracks that require different things.”

Next month the Porsche 963 programme elevates to a different level, as the second round of IMSA at Sebring is paired with the World Endurance Championship opener – where Porsche goes in to bat against Le Mans Hypercar opposition from fellow debutants Ferrari, along with Peugeot and Toyota. That opens an altogether different BoP conversation…

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“There’s been open communication between the two groups, IMSA and ACO/FIA; I think there is going to be a different schedule between the two [BoPs], and that’s driven off the race calendar too,” says Diuguid. “I think IMSA’s approach will be pretty consistent with what they’ve done in the past, but the WEC approach will be slightly different because at the onset they’re going to have a different challenge to balance LMH versus LMDh cars.”

The two series use different windtunnels to come to BoP decisions: IMSA uses Windshear in Concord, USA; WEC uses Sauber’s in Hinwil, Switzerland. Diuguid reveals that “there will be some slight aerodynamic differences based on the windtunnels”, and so the 963 in WEC will run a slightly different aero spec to the IMSA car.

The Penske Porsches will soon take on their next challenge when they debut in the WEC against bespoke Le Mans Hypercars

Photo by: Porsche Motorsport

It smacks of the IMSA 962 and its European version, the 962C – and still to come are the customer cars. They are delayed by the parts supply-chain issues and should appear at the end of April.

It feels similar to 1984 again, when Bruce Leven’s team became the first customer to get a 962 later that year but graciously loaned it to Al Holbert for the Riverside and Laguna Seca rounds. Its legacy was born, and Holbert’s victory with Derek Bell at Mid-Ohio kickstarted a tremendous streak of success over the following three years.

Would Porsche want vast numbers of customer cars on that scale again? Head of Motorsport Thomas Laudenbach urges caution: “It could well be, but I’m not sure we necessarily want that! We need to give support, it’s part of our philosophy.

“We’re all long enough in the business to know that the manufacturer support we see now won’t last forever. Therefore, customers stabilise a series for the long term. For us, it’s not a business case about selling as many cars as we can, and we won’t then leave them alone so they’re at the back of the grid.

“If we sell a car, we will give support so that a professional team with professional drivers will be somewhere near the front of the pack. I’d rather sell fewer cars, and make sure they’re run properly.”

The 962 sparked a golden era for Porsche in sportscar racing. And with the 963, it could be a little bit of history repeating.

Although the 963's debut wasn't one that will last long in the memory, Porsche has plenty of credit in the bank

Photo by: Porsche Motorsport