Yahoo Autos How a More Reliable Porsche 963 Took Over the World
In 1983, Porsche did more than just win the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Its 956 prototype finished 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8, another 956 rounded out the top ten, and the top-finishing grand tourer was a 911-based 930 in 11th overall. The run inspired an instant classic of an ad, the finishing order of the race with the simple caption "Nobody's Perfect."
Forty-one years later, Porsche is imperfect again. The brand won 10 of 11 possible 2024 titles across the top prototype and GT categories in IMSA and the FIA World Endurance Championship, the world's two premier sports-car series, with 963s and 911 GT3 Rs winning driver and team titles across IMSA GTP, IMSA GTD Pro, FIA WEC Hypercar, and FIA WEC GT3, plus manufacturers' championships in IMSA GTP and GTD Pro. Only the WEC Hypercar manufacturers' championship got away, and Porsche lost that to Toyota by one position in the final major sports-car race of the year.
It is those Hypercar and GTP classes—the only two top-level sports-car classes in the world—that mean the most. Porsche competes in both with a pair of Penske-run full-time factory entries, an alliance of the manufacturer with the most Le Mans wins and the team with the most Indianapolis 500 wins. It's a world-class program spanning three hubs on two continents; winning was the expectation from day one.
Unfortunately, day one was not the car's strongest. The 963 was plagued with frequent reliability problems throughout 2023, starting with transmission and battery failures on debut at the 24 Hours of Daytona. A few wins in shorter IMSA rounds helped soften the blow in the U.S. series, but the cars entered in the FIA WEC struggled to finish sixth and seventh in the drivers' championship. In these series, the expectation for a Porsche race car is the top step of the podium. Wins in sprint races and respectable finishes in the standings are not enough.
Porsche Penske Motorsport managing director Jonathan Diuguid tells Road & Track that the reliability problems in year one were often tied to the same source, something the factory team addressed over the past off-season.
"The main underlying thing there was vibration-related. We run a flat-plane-crank engine, which inherently has a decent amount of vibration, and the vibrations pick up significantly in the last thousand rpm," Diuguid said. "Porsche investigated changing the engine crankshaft layout to reduce some of these vibrations and ultimately never implemented it, mainly because we were able to put in other countermeasures to adjust these things. Bosch Motorsport and Williams invested significantly in improving the vibration reliability of their components and we were also able to put in some countermeasures for the issues that we were suffering from on the team side."
With a more reliable car in hand, 2024 went another way. At January's 24 Hours of Daytona, Felipe Nasr held off an hour-long charge from 2023 star Tom Blomqvist to clinch the 963's first-ever marquee endurance win—and factory partner Penske's first overall endurance with Porsche since beating the factory Audis with an LMP2 RS Spyder in 2008. Five weeks later, Porsche Penske secured its first WEC win when the team kept a leading car legal with one hastily applied sticker.
At Daytona, Nasr tells R&T that the win came down to executing a risky strategy.
"The mindset is to put everything on the line, and that's exactly what I did," he said. "We had to pull off a strategy that was pretty aggressive because we went very tight on the fuel. They were able to put me in front of the 31 car after the last pit stop service we had, so I knew I had to save a bunch of fuel and stay in front of the 31. I did some magic, and we brought the car home in first place."
The Daytona win led the factory Porsches to a dominant series of championships in IMSA, led by the No. 7 team that won the endurance classic. Nasr and co-driver Dane Cameron finished on the podium in all but two races and finished worse than fourth just once, clinching driver and team titles with nearly 250 more points than the previous year's champion in the same number of races. Porsche Penske's other car, the No. 6 entry of Mathieu Jaminet and Nick Tandy, finished second.
Cameron credited the success to the team's development over the past off-season, not only in making the car more reliable but in other improvements.
"It's been a long road to get here, and we probably missed the mark to begin with, but thanks to a lot of men and women around the world, in North Carolina, across Germany in Weissach, have really never stopped digging to make everything better for us," Cameron said. "It's a world-beating program, with championships everywhere. It's quite a privilege to have your name on the side of the car and be the guy that gets to stand and hold the trophy, but there are hundreds of people that make this possible."
"Our engineering group, everyone at Porsche Penske Motorsport, we've evolved so much from day one," Nasr added. "We have been way more consistent on making the car better, our decisions better, our strategy better. Come race day, we are there to fight."
In the FIA WEC, the trio of Kévin Estre, Andre Lotterer, and Laurens Vanthoor won the drivers' championship by a massive 37-point margin. A privately entered 963 owned by 2025 Cadillac factory partner Jota won both the round at Spa overall and the teams' championship for privateers. The Jota program won that title over a third AF Corse Ferrari 499 P, technically entered privately even as the same team ran the brand's two red factory cars. Only a pass for the lead in the last hour of the last race of the year cost Porsche their manufacturers' title, won instead by Toyota's fourth-year GR010 racers.
Despite all that success, one major trophy is missing. Every single top-flight Porsche sports car since the 917 has won the 24 Hours of Le Mans overall, from the stubby 936 to the unsustainably futuristic 919 Hybrid. Sizable fleets of 963s have now attempted the race twice. Both times, a Ferrari 499 P came out on top instead.
Armed with a more reliable car that seemed capable of winning everywhere else, Kévin Estre took pole for the 2024 race in a Penske Porsche 963. The two factory cars that avoided in-race incidents had the pace to stay on the lead lap for all 24 hours but lacked the punch to fight for a win in the end. Matt Campbell, a full-time driver in the No. 5 WEC entry that finished sixth in the race, believed the car was just a step slow in race pace.
"We showed our speed this year, but unfortunately we just lacked a little bit of race-ability compared to our Hypercar competitors. They just seemed to have a little more at Le Mans, so hopefully we can find something for next year," Campbell said. "I think we were very strong in the wet conditions [during the race's final hours]. I think just on average, particularly top speed, they just had an advantage on us."
Diuguid expanded on the top-speed problem, noting that it is a major issue of focus for the manufacturer as it plans potential upgrades for the 2025 season and for the team as it prepares for the crown jewel of the 2025 season.
"From the team side, we suffered a top-speed deficit, which is our responsibility to go back, look at, and try to optimize... I think from a preparation standpoint, we need to go do some homework," he said. "As far as overall lap-time pace, our cars were competitive, with Kévin getting the pole there leading up to the race. But once we got into the race, we struggled to keep up the pace with the Ferraris and the Toyotas, specifically with the top-speed perspective. Our main focus is to improve our competitiveness there, focusing on the top speed and on the car holistically to improve our potential in general."
That fact leaves Porsche somewhere unusual. The 963 is now unquestionably a dominant force in global sports-car racing, something the Penske Porsche team has proven across two different championships with two different world-class fields. However, it was built to do one thing first and foremost: This is a car designed to win Le Mans. Since it has not yet won Le Mans, all that success is secondary.
Next year, Porsche is changing its approach. Two of its 2024 champions, Cameron and Lotterer, are departing the program; a younger driver, Julien Andlauer, is joining the group. This will allow the team to run four permanent two-car lineups in shorter races across both IMSA and the FIA WEC, adding additional drivers only for major endurance events. All eight should race at Le Mans, and if its third entry is accepted (as it has been the past two years), the team will have an open seat to award to a driver from outside its factory group. That could be anyone, including one-time 963 test driver Sebastian Vettel.
Porsche has won Le Mans more than any other automaker in history for a reason. Next year, the goal is clear. When the car is designed to win just one race, even championships are not enough.
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