How Porsche's top class comeback lends prestige to the 2023 Le Mans battle

When Porsche announced that it was quitting LMP1 at the end of 2017, the first question was obvious: what’s going to happen to the World Endurance Championship now? The second was, when are we likely to see the German manufacturer shooting for outright honours at the Le Mans 24 Hours once more? The answer to those questions turned out to be inextricably linked.

The WEC has survived, despite limping on without Porsche and any other serious manufacturer opposition for Toyota through the dying days of P1 and into the Hypercar era. But now, as the championship enters a new age with multiple car makers duking it out at the front of the field, Porsche is there among them with a successor to its line of Le Mans winners, from the 917 through the 956/962 and on to the 919.

Few were predicting that it would be back so soon when Porsche announced the decision in July 2017 to axe the 919 Hybrid P1 programme after just four years of racing for the twin-hybrid rocketship. The pessimistic prognosis for a marque that went on to complete a hat-trick of hat-tricks in 2015-17 – the WEC drivers’ and manufacturers’ titles as well the Le Mans crown – was based on Porsche’s previous hiatus from the top of the tree in sportscar racing.

It stretched all the way from its 16th victory in 1998 to the race debut of the original version of the 919 in 2014. That was an absence that no one would have predicted when Porsche sprung its decision on the world – and some of the drivers it had under contract – at its annual awards night late in 1998.

But the sands of sportscar racing shifted quickly as P1 entered its death throes after Porsche followed sister marque Audi out the door. A successor was required, and quickly found in principle if not in practice.

Plans for the original version of the Le Mans Hypercar formula were announced at the race from which it takes its name in June 2018, and a set of rules published the following December. The problem was that there were few if any takers, despite a drive to slash budgets from the reputed €100million-plus being spent by Porsche, Toyota and Audi in the pomp of P1 in the mid-2010s. Even the Japanese manufacturer, a key player in the formulation of the regulations, didn’t publicly commit to the new category until June 2019.

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By then there had been some more twists and turns on the path to the sportscar nirvana we appear to have reached today. The key fork in the road was the announcement of the LMDh formula on the eve of the Daytona 24 Hours round of the IMSA SportsCar Championship in January 2020. This isn’t the place to go through all the zigs and the zags, though it’s worth pointing out that Porsche kept a weather eye on the future of top-class sportscar racing through this time despite heading for Formula E on its P1 withdrawal.

Porsche had winning pedigree in Le Mans' top class prior to its withdrawal in 2018 - its 919 Hybrid LMP1 taking the first of three wins in 2015

Photo by: Sutton Images

It was an observer in the round-table discussions that laid the foundations for LMH and, perhaps more significantly, was part of a push along with Ferrari for a change of direction in mid-2019. Their unsuccessful proposal was dubbed GTE-plus, which as it suggests meant adding power and aero to their existing GT machinery competing in the WEC.

So it shouldn’t have been a surprise that, when LMDh was announced as an alternative entree into the WEC, Porsche put its hand up in support, and was the first manufacturer to do so. Central to Porsche’s enthusiasm was the ability to race the same car on the world stage and in North America in IMSA, and the costs involved.

“The new LMDh category allows us to fight for overall victories with a hybrid system at the Le Mans, Daytona and Sebring classics – without breaking the bank,” said Porsche CEO Oliver Blume on the announcement of the programme.

The stars had aligned for Porsche in a way they never did in the years from 1998 to 2014 – what you might call an interregnum, because the true king of Le Mans was in absentia, from the top category at least. Although it did, of course, maintain a permanent presence in the production ranks with a line of 911s built for the GTS, GT, GT2 and GTE classes.

The successes of WSC95 paved the way for the abortive LMP2000, which Porsche announced at the same time as it broke the news that it wouldn’t be defending its Le Mans crown in 1999

Yet Porsche’s withdrawal after the completion of the single season for the carbon-chassis 911 GT1-98 that triumphed at Le Mans but was trounced by Mercedes in the FIA GT Championship was regarded as nothing but temporary at the time. A Porsche absence from the top class at Le Mans and beyond for one year was one thing, but anything much longer seemed out of character.

The Weissach marque had enjoyed – and rarely endured – a presence at or near the front of the grid almost every year from 1968 and the arrival of the 908, its first contender in the premier category. Projects were hastily rushed through, cars dusted down and rolled out of the museum, the parts bin raided and left-field projects thought up in double-quick time as Porsche went back to the Circuit de la Sarthe year after year seeking outright victory.

That included the 936 Group 6 car, a multiple Le Mans winner largely forgotten because of its place in time sandwiched between the all-time greats that were the 917 and the 956. It was hastily conceived late in 1975 for the following season at a time when Porsche’s motorsport department thought it was concentrating on its new Group 5 935. The car was built in such secrecy that it’s said that Ferry Porsche, son of founder Ferdinand and the ultimate boss of the company at the time, didn’t even know about the development of a car that recorded back-to-back victories at Le Mans in its first two campaigns in 1976 and 1977.

Porsche's 1975/1976 Group 5 Le Mans winner was built in such secrecy that not even the son of Ferdinand Porsche knew about it

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Twice the 936s were brought out of mothballs, once in 1979 when petroleum magnate David Thieme paid for a last-minute and ultimately unsuccessful Le Mans campaign, though a Porsche privateer in the form of Kremer Racing with perhaps the definitive version of the 935 (the K3) upheld company honour. It happened again in 1981 when new Porsche boss Peter Schutz asked upon taking the helm what was in the pipeline for Le Mans.

He wasn’t impressed when he was told about the 924 Carrera GT Turbo programme that had yielded a sixth-place finish the previous year. He wanted to pitch up at the Circuit de la Sarthe with a car that could contend for the overall win. That explained one final – and successful – hurrah for the 936, now powered by a version of the flat-six turbo that Porsche had on the stocks for an abandoned Indycar programme.

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The Dauer 962LM Porsche GT1 car that would give Porsche win number 13 at Le Mans in 1994 was also inspired by some aggressive questioning over the winter. Research and development boss Horst Marchart wanted to know how the company was going to beat a racing version of the McLaren F1 in the GT1 class. Famed Porsche engineer Norbert Singer knew he couldn’t do it with the improved version of the 911 Turbo S LM he was planning, so hatched the plan to ‘borrow’ the design of the 962 for the road that maverick team boss Jochen Dauer had been touting around.

Marchart’s question was born of some duff information. McLaren was in fact a year away from building the F1 GTR, but the GT1 rules circa 1994 were devised to give the cars a shot at victory. And that’s just what Porsche did with the Dauer.

There are more examples of such lateral thinking from Porsche. The WSC95 World Sports Car, winner with Joest in 1996-97 and developed in conjunction with TWR Inc in North America, was a cut-and-shut special created out of a 3.5-litre Group C Jaguar XJR-14.

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The successes of WSC95 paved the way for the abortive LMP2000, which Porsche announced at the same time as it broke the news that it wouldn’t be defending its Le Mans crown in 1999. The inference was that Porsche would be back at Le Mans in 2000, but then-Porsche motorsport boss Herbert Ampferer insists that it was never certain that the car would race. He recounts two conversations with Porsche president Wendelin Wiedeking, one after Le Mans 1998 and another when the LMP2000 was complete.

“Wiedeking asked me what would it change for the company if we won Le Mans for a 17th time, and I had to reply, ‘Not a lot’,” recalls Ampferer, who was still able to set a project known internally as 9R3 in motion. When the car was complete, his boss posed some more pertinent questions.

Porsche was victorious in 1998, but the 911 GT1's successor was mothballed and it took until 2014 for it to return to the fight for outright honours

Photo by: Rainer W. Schlegelmilch / Motorsport Images

“He asked who is the biggest and most famous sportscar manufacturer in the world,” explains Ampferer. “I said, ‘Porsche, of course’. So he said, ‘Then prove it. Look, we build a lot of sportscars, but we haven’t made a super-sportscar. Instead of going back to Le Mans in 2000, let’s work on a project that proves that Porsche is a great manufacturer of super-sportscars.”

The result was the Carrera GT, a car that took the 5.5-litre V10 from the LMP2000 as the basis of its engine. More significant for Porsche Motorsport was that it also drew resources away from the racing department.

“We started working on the Carrera GT with a big team,” recounts Ampferer. “Let’s say 50% was recruited from the motorsport department.”

Porsche also had needed engineering capacity to develop the new Cayenne SUV, which was the official line on why the LMP2000 never raced – Porsche couldn’t lift the lid on its plans for the Carrera GT at the time. That inevitably resulted in a conspiracy theory that still abounds today.

The 963 was the first LMDh to hit the track, in January 2022 and a full six months before any of its rivals. Much of that time was spent doing the heavy lifting on development of the spec hybrid system from Bosch, Williams Advanced Engineering and Xtrac that all cars use

The Cayenne was based on a platform shared by the SUVs built by the Volkswagen Group, then more than 10 years away from taking control of Porsche. A deal was cut, goes the theory, between VW boss and Porsche shareholder Ferdinand Piech for the way to be left clear for Audi at Le Mans. Ampferer says he doesn’t know if there is any truth to it, but can’t be sure of the details of the machinations going on above him in the company.

And so the interregnum continued, although over the years that followed there were hints of it ending. Not least when Porsche pitched up in the American Le Mans Series at the end of 2005 with the RS Spyder LMP2, a car conceived to win races and not just to take class honours. Le Mans wasn’t among them, however, but the car with which Penske swept to 11 wins in the ALMS as well as a hat-trick of class titles in 2006-08 didn’t prove to be the lead-in to the bigger project that many expected. The team that eventually developed the 919 was all-new, an entirely separate entity within Porsche Motorsport put together for that purpose.

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The five years between the end of the career of the 919 and the arrival of a car we know now as the 963 was shorter than expected, and might have been shorter still if the LMDh formula had come on stream in 2022 as originally – though optimistically – envisaged. The opportunity of doing an LMH wasn’t really there for Porsche as it was hatching its return.

The RS Spyder took back-to-back LMP2 wins in 2008 and 2009, but wasn't built to contend for outright honours

Photo by: Motorsport Images

“It was important that if we returned,” says Porsche Motorsport boss Thomas Laudenbach, “we needed to be able to race in the USA, which at that time wasn’t clear.”

The potential for an LMH to race in IMSA was in fact far from clear as Porsche was putting together its partners for its current programme. Penske was announced as its team for both the North American series and the WEC in May of 2021, and Multimatic as its chassis partner – LMDhs are based on one of the next-generation LMP2 chassis from one of four licensed constructors – just weeks later.

Porsche was an early adopter. It was almost certainly the first manufacturer to sign off an LMDh programme, though it was beaten to the punch in terms of an announcement by Audi, even if the VW group project that would have yielded a pair of prototypes only differentiated by their bodywork was firmly led by Porsche. The Audi project, of course, would never see the light of day.

The 963 was the first LMDh to hit the track, in January 2022 and a full six months before any of its rivals. Much of that time was spent doing the heavy lifting on development of the spec hybrid system from Bosch, Williams Advanced Engineering and Xtrac that all cars use. The 12 months between starting testing and racing is longer than the 919 spent on track before its competition debut. It ran for the first time in the summer of 2013, and its gestation included a major engine redesign.

That begs questions about Porsche’s travails with the 963. The car is already a winner in IMSA, but in the WEC it remains some way down the manufacturer pecking order as the series heads to Le Mans. It was no better than fourth best behind the LMHs from Toyota and Ferrari, and Cadillac’s LMDh, over the opening three rounds, despite claiming a podium at the Portimao 6 Hours in April.

What we don’t know yet is whether the pre-event Balance of Performance revisions announced last week will offer a tangible boost to Porsche’s bid for Le Mans victory number 20 with an expanded three-car assault and a swanky new colour scheme that tips its hat to the liveries of its past winners. What we probably can say is that if there was no LMDh, there would be no Porsche back racing for outright victory at the 24 Hours.

The 963 is a winner in IMSA, but its WEC credentials are not proven as Porsche guns for Le Mans win number 20

Photo by: Eric Le Galliot