In December, Porsche announced that it would return to the world’s top endurance racing with an LMDh car from 2023. Today we learned that the German automaker’s partner will be none other than Penske. There’s more interesting information about why the entry isn’t a hypercar, at least depending on which press release you’re reading.
The union of these names should excite sports car racing fans all over the world, but especially here in the USA, where we saw the well-known RS Spyder with PHL support and DHL livery dominate its class in the American Le Mans Series in 2006 and 2007 . More recently, the two of them joined forces in a Formula E campaign it was so short, mysterious and unsuccessful, nobody talks about it anymore.
The new joint operation will be called Porsche Penske Motorsport and “run for a number of years,” as Porsche always describes Press release. Speaking of publication, I’m amused by this passage (bold of you really):
From 2023 the LMDh vehicles will be the best along with the best in endurance racing so-called hypercars (LMH). The prototypes will be used by Porsche customer teams in both championships as early as 2023. The vehicles, which weigh around 1,000 kilograms and are based on an LMP2 chassis, are powered by a 500 kW (680 PS) hybrid drive.
It is clear to me that “so called” in this context is probably only intended to equate “LMH” – the technical name for the top endurance racing class of the FIA - with “hypercar”, as everyone calls it. Still, I can’t help but spot a touch of shadow here, in anticipation that LMDh and LMH cars will take overall victory at Le Mans in a few years’ time.
What makes this particular phrase choice even funnier is that the FIA version of the press release calls the Porsche-Penske effort a hypercar right in the headline and does not mention LMDh at any point in the body of the text. Same goes for the tweet below. Was that intended? A mistake? Is the FIA just being petty and now calling them all hypercars? Who still knows!
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For those who haven’t kept pace with the ever nebulous nature of prototypes in global endurance racing, here’s the long and short. In 2018, the FIA and ACO jointly proposed the Le Mans hypercar class, with which prototypes – at least visually – should be better adapted to the manufacturers’ street hypercars, hence the name. It was a play against the nostalgia that many fans share for the days of the McLaren F1 GTR, the Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR, the Porsche 911 GT1 and the Toyota GT-One in the mid to late 1990s. The new regulations also included a vague element of homologation production of cars and should reduce costs compared to the outgoing LMP1 regulations.
Over time, we learned that it didn’t save the designers as much money as they wanted, and the homologation thing was more like one weak suggestion as a legal requirement. This gave IMSA the opportunity to develop their DPi – Daytona Prototype International specification, which is used in American sports car racing, into LMDh. It uses a range of specified chassis from major suppliers as well as specification kinetic energy recovery systems to actually keep costs down.
The big manufacturers initially seemed very interested in hypercar, but that enthusiasm soon waned. Toyota, Aston Martin and Peugeot were early commitments. The FIA then decided to allow LMDh cars to take part in endurance world championships such as Le Mans. which upset Aston because suddenly it was paying many times more money to develop a hypercar, the performance of which should now be balanced with much cheaper IMSA-based prototypes. The British automaker canceled its plans. Nobody took his place until Ferrari rushed in from nowhere in February.
That brings us to this day. Last weekend, Toyota’s GR010 hybrid hypercar, the first in the class to be on the grid, won the 6 Hours of Spa slower than LMP2 machines despite the start of the weekend. It will be years before other automakers join them: Peugeot’s hypercar is expected to arrive in 2022, while LMDh entries from Porsche Penske, Audi and Acura are slated for 2023 (as is the Ferrari hypercar). And then there are all the other big names that are supposed to join either class, like Alpine, BMW, McLaren, Cadillac, and Hyundai.
The decision to opt for an LMDh car instead of a Hypercar makes sense for Porsche as the brand can keep up on both sides of the pond. In addition, customer cars are also sold to private individuals.
“We are very pleased that we got Team Penske to form this partnership,” says Oliver Blume, CEO of Porsche AG. “For the first time in the history of Porsche Motorsport, our company will have a global team that will take part in the two largest endurance series in the world. To this end, we will build team bases on both sides of the Atlantic. In this way we can create the optimal structures that we need for overall victories in Le Mans, Daytona and Sebring, for example. “
I wouldn’t mind if a red and yellow paint job was thrown back on that day.
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