Why Penske remains ambitious for its WEC learning year

The announcement last May by Porsche that Team Penske will run the factory cars in the World Endurance Championship, as well the IMSA SportsCar Championship, on the arrival of its new LMDh prototype in 2023 was nothing short of momentous. It meant the US giant would be ending long absences from not only world championship motor racing but also the Le Mans 24 Hours. Only those historic returns won’t be made next year: they are happening right now in 2022.

Penske will join the WEC – and therefore go back to Le Mans – this season with what might be described as a lead-in programme, one that tells you just how serious, diligent and, perhaps, humble the team is. A Team Penske-run car, an off-the-shelf ORECA-Gibson 07 LMP2, will grace a world championship grid tomorrow at the Sebring 1000 Miles WEC opener, a first since it called time on its Formula 1 programme at the end of 1976.

Then, come the second weekend of June, the car shared by two new Porsche factory drivers (Felipe Nasr and Dane Cameron) and one old (Emmanuel Collard) will be back at the Circuit de la Sarthe after an even longer absence. It’s 51 years since the Sunoco-liveried Ferrari 512M driven by Mark Donohue and David Hobbs graced the grid.

Taking part in the WEC this year was “absolutely necessary”, says Jonathan Diuguid, a veteran of the team’s Porsche RS Spyder LMP2 and Acura Daytona Prototype international programmes in North America, and now managing director of a new entity called Porsche Penske Motorsport that will run the LMDh on the world stage and in North America. The WEC attack is about learning the intricacies of a new series and moulding a team as development of the Porsche ramps up through to its debut next year.

“Obviously our group knows how to go racing and to be successful, but there is a lot to learn outside of making the car competitive,” says Diuguid.

That’s not just about gaining experience of tracks “we’ve never been to or haven’t been to for quite a long time”, he explains, but also “understanding the differences in how the races are run between IMSA and the WEC”.

Penske makes its long-awaited return to world championship competition as a precursor to its 2023 LMDh programme with Porsche

Photo by: Porsche Motorsport

“One of the main focus points is the difference in race strategy between the two championships,” points out Diuguid in reference to IMSA’s sometimes trigger-happy approach to deploying the safety car and WEC’s Full Course Yellow virtual safety cars and, at Le Mans, the slow zones where speed is limited to 80km/h (50mph) within defined points.

“The FIA takes an approach to try to keep the race as fair as possible, so there are a lot of virtual safety cars and things like that to maintain the distances between the cars,” he observes. “In IMSA you have regular reset points where the cars compact up and you can gain large amounts of time or even laps, and do some strategy plays. The strategy approaches are quite different and the only way to learn about them is to experience them. We’ll probably make mistakes, but we will learn from them to understand how the different rules and regulations apply.”

That’s why Penske is undertaking a full WEC campaign with its ORECA. Diuguid admits that a limited programme focused on Le Mans was discussed, though rapidly discounted.

"We are going to the races with the intention to be competitive and have the chance to win. Penske doesn’t enter any championship or any race without that mentality" Jonathan Diuguid

“It became clear quite quickly that it wasn’t going to be an option; we’ve seen the WEC making an upturn and entries are hard to come by,” he explains. “A full season was aligned with the goals of the programme. It is more racing on top of LMDh testing, but all of that goes to making sure we as a team are fully prepared for 2023.”

That team will end up as a mixture of staff carried over from the campaigns with the Acura in 2018-20, which yielded the DPi title in the second and last of those years, and new recruits from Europe. Diuguid is promising “a one-team approach” across the European and North American arms of Porsche Penske Motorsport.

“Information transfer is going to be quite open and there is going to be lot of cross-pollination,” he says. “In the LMDh testing phase we already have positions repeated, two mechanics and two engineers in the same position.”

This year is going to be a busy one for Penske’s new sportscar set-up as it ramps up the LMDh test programme that kicked off in earnest at Barcelona in February, and races in the WEC. The ORECA will arrive in April at a new facility in Mannheim, 80 or so miles north of Porsche Motorsport HQ in Weissach. Diuguid then expects the team to be on track every couple of weeks either racing the ORECA or testing the LMDh, with that development programme expanding to North America in the summer.

Diuguid was Scott McLaughlin's engineer in IndyCar last year. Now he's the managing director of the newly-created Porsche Penske Motorsport entity

Photo by: Porsche Motorsport

A desire to be on track as much as possible explains the arguably left-field choice of Collard as the silver-rated driver alongside Nasr and Cameron, the first drivers announced by Porsche last December for the LMDh programme. Penske has opted for an old hand rather than a young gun, though the supply of the latter has been diminished for this year with a tightening up in the way the FIA’s driver categorisation rules are applied.

It opted for a known quantity with recent WEC experience: Collard was GTE Am champion in 2016 and 2019-20. He owes his silver status to the downgrade for which he was eligible upon passing 50 last year, and has had multiple stints racing factory Porsches, including with Penske. His appearances with the team in the American Le Mans Series with the RS Spyder included an overall victory in the 2008 Sebring 12 Hours together with Romain Dumas and Timo Bernhard ahead of the Audi and Peugeot LMP1 turbodiesels.

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“The approach goes back to the goals of the programme,” explains Diuguid of the choice for the third driver. “We want to be successful, but at the same time we want to learn by participating in as much of each of the races as possible. ‘Manu’ comes with a wealth of experience. He understands the championship and knows when to take risks and when not to take risks.”

Collard tested the Penske ORECA at Sebring in January, though Diuguid insists that it wasn’t a try-out to see if a veteran with 24 starts at Le Mans to his name still had it.

“You have to create the right environment: for him to be a successful part of our team we had to give him plenty of seat time,” he says. “Although Manu lacks prototype experience over the past three or four years, he picked it up quite quickly.”

Diuguid stresses that the goals for the WEC campaign include winning as well as learning.

“We are going to the races with the intention to be competitive and have the chance to win,” he says. “Penske doesn’t enter any championship or any race without that mentality, but we do respect the teams that have competed in the championship for quite a long time. We are not naive or over-confident going into this championship.”

Diuguid points out that Penske is beginning its campaign with a track at Sebring where the team “has a tremendous amount of experience”. That means it is going in “with the intention to be competitive and to have the chance to win. It is a learning experience, but it you don’t go in with the aim of winning, you’re not going to learn much.”

Penske is intent on winning in LMP2, which explains its decision to hire veteran Collard as its silver

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Penske's major rivals

WRT

Reigning LMP2 champion defends its title with a two-car squad. Rene Rast bolsters the lead crew alongside fellow Audi factory driver Robin Frijns, although silver Sean Gelael, runner-up last year with Jota, isn’t a like-for-like replacement for Charles Milesi. Ferdinand Habsburg moves over to what looks on paper to be a second-string car to share with Norman Nato and Rui Andrade.

Prema Powerteam

The Italian single-seater powerhouse takes in its first sportscar campaign with what might just be the strongest line-up. European Le Mans Series champions Robert Kubica and Louis Deletraz are joined by Lorenzo Colombo, a race winner in FIA Formula 3 last year but still silver-rated.

United Autosports

The British squad has put together two strong crews for its first multi-car World Endurance Championship attack as it attempts to regain the title it won in 2019-20. Josh Pierson, at just 16, is teamed with Oliver Jarvis and Alex Lynn, who is replaced by Paul di Resta this weekend. Former champs Filipe Albuquerque and Phil Hanson are joined by team returnee Will Owen.

Jota

Will Stevens, a multiple winner with the team in 2016-20, comes in alongside Antonio Felix da Costa and Roberto Gonzalez in the car that finished third last year. Fewer ‘fake’ silvers should work in their favour. The line-up of Ed Jones, Jonathan Aberdein and Oliver Rasmussen could be the sleeper in the pack.

Vector Sport

The line-up put together by an all-new team based at Silverstone underlines its ambitions. Audi man Nico Muller is paired with Sebastien Bourdais and Ryan Cullen for the season, with Mike Rockenfeller coming in for the Frenchman first time out at Sebring.

Hypercar - Toyota's to lose? 

Hirakawa joins Buemi and Hartley aboard the #8 Toyota, replacing the outgoing Nakajima

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Can anyone stop Toyota from sweeping to a fourth straight World Endurance Championship crown? That’s a question that has to be asked in the face of a Hypercar class entry that will remain slim in the extreme until Peugeot arrives in the series some time after Le Mans. The answer to that one lies with the chances of Glickenhaus taking the fight to the reigning champion.

The American entrant’s solo Pipo-engined 007 LMH entered for the full season is one of two cars that will take on the Toyota GR010 HYBRIDs across all six races. The Alpine-Gibson A480 is a grandfathered LMP1 machine and, under the Balance of Performance that has been part of the top class of the WEC since 2021, should be half a yard behind the Le Mans Hypercars on outright pace.

Glickenhaus is promising it will be pitching up with a much-improved car, to be driven at Sebring by Romain Dumas, Olivier Pla and Ryan Briscoe, after showing promise without threatening Toyota across the three races of its debut season.

"If we do our job we can be close to our competitors, but at the end of the day results are not only about pure performance" Luca Ciancetti

“We had a clear view of the limitations of the car after Le Mans,” says Luca Ciancetti, who heads up the race programme at Podium Advanced Technologies in Italy. “I think we will have a much stronger package this year.”

He stresses that the focus, within the limits laid down by the car’s homologation, has been on reliability of the non-hybrid 007, although one development allowed in the rules for this year should offer a significant gain: fly-by-wire brake control is now permitted at driven wheels at the rear.

“With the simulation that we have done, we can see that we can have much better brake bias control in different sections of the track and in different sections of each corner,” Ciancetti explains. “It offers interesting potential in terms of outright speed and our pace over a stint on the tyres.”

A single Glickenhaus will contest the full WEC season and is the best hope of stopping Toyota

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

The other major regulatory change for 2022 affects Toyota. The minimum speed at which LMH hybrids can deploy power through the front wheels has been moved from the technical regulations to the BoP. This means it can change from track to track and, when the four-wheel-drive Peugeot arrives, car to car.

For Sebring, this minimum has been set for the Toyota at 190km/h in all conditions, which compares to 120km/h when the car was on slick tyres and 150 when on grooved rubber last year. Toyota has yet to reveal what effect that will have on the performance of the GR010, but it is clear that its decision to switch to wider rear tyres and narrow fronts is related to the rule shift.

Ciancetti is confident that the BoP will give Glickenhaus a shot this year.

“We have had a year of good processes to make the category a real BoP category where the performance is balanced between the different concepts and different cars,” he says. “If we do our job we can be close to our competitors, but at the end of the day results are not only about pure performance.”

Corvette's full-season GTE Pro assault

Corvette is launching its first full season attack on the WEC with Tandy and Milner

Photo by: Paul Foster

Corvette Racing has been a fixture at Le Mans since 2000, only missing the big race in 2020 as a result of the COVID pandemic. Yet this will be the first time it has contested a full season in the WEC. It’s taking on a pair of factory cars from each of Ferrari and Porsche in GTE Pro with a lone Chevrolet Corvette C8.R.

Chevrolet has opted for a split programme: Nick Tandy and Tommy Milner are racing one car in the WEC, while Antonio Garcia and Jordan Taylor take part in the IMSA SportsCar Championship with another. The new strategy can be explained by the rules shift over in IMSA. GT Le Mans for GTE machinery is no more and has been replaced by GT Daytona Pro for GT3 cars, as well as a C8.R in modified form to level up its performance with the new breed.

It’s easy to explain the strategy, says Tandy, who is returning to the WEC for a full campaign for the first time since his year in the Porsche 919 Hybrid LMP1 in 2017.

"At the end of day the championship needs good racing and the BoP process is there to create that. We are very hopeful that, between the three manufacturers, it’s going to be close all year" Nick Tandy

“Le Mans is so important to the Corvette programme and it would be difficult if we were only doing that one race in full GTE trim and on the confidential Michelins [rather than the GTD control tyres],” he says. “This gives us the best possible chance at Le Mans.”

Corvette Racing has turned out in the odd WEC race outside of Le Mans in the past; four times since 2018. The C8.R made two of those starts – at Austin in 2020 and Spa last year – without distinction. The consensus was that the car was given a conservative BoP as the rulemakers felt their way with the new mid-engined machine.

Tandy agrees, pointing out that the Corvette was competitive by the time it got to Le Mans for its belated debut in the big race. He suggests that it’s in the interests of the powers that be to get the BoP right.

“At the end of day the championship needs good racing and the BoP process is there to create that,” he says. “We are very hopeful that, between the three manufacturers, it’s going to be close all year.”

Corvette has split its deck this year with one car entered in IMSA and the other in the WEC

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

The BoP published in advance of last weekend’s pre-season prologue test at Sebring didn’t appear to be in Corvette’s favour. The C8.R was given an engine air-restrictor smaller in diameter than at Spa last year. That can be interpreted as a reflection of the Chevy’s pace at the 24 Hours, when it was all but a match for Le Mans winner Ferrari, which received a draconian BoP hit next time out in Bahrain.

Tandy is confident that Corvette Racing can make a running start at Sebring this weekend. The quirky Florida track, he points out, is the team’s home from home.

“The team has 20 years of experience there and it’s the place we do a lot of testing,” he says. “It’s our back yard.”

Tandy is confident that Corvette can get off to a good start to its WEC assault on familiar territory

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images