Porsche Penske Drops IMSA GTP Driving Champ Dane Cameron in Lineup Shakeup

Dane Cameron, the co-winner of this year’s GTP driving championship in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, has been dropped from Porsche Penske Motorsport for 2025.

Felipe Nasr, who co-drove to the IMSA title with Cameron, will partner with Nick Tandy in the No. 7 Porsche 963 in IMSA next year. Mathieu Jaminet, who partnered Tandy this year, will continue in the team’s No. 6 entry and be joined by Matt Campbell, who is being switched from his role as a member of a three-driver squad in the WEC. Jaminet and Campbell won the WeatherTech GTD Pro driver’s championship in 2022 on board the Porsche 911 GT3 R of Pfaff Motorsports.

Cameron, the lone American driver on Porsche Penske, was shuffled out, in part, by the decision to use two drivers per car in the World Endurance Championship instead of three. In the WEC next year, Kevin Estre and Laurens Vanthoor will continue in the No. 6 entry. Andre Lotterer, currently the third driver, will not have his contract renewed.

Rookie Julian Andlauer will move up to prototypes in the No. 5 Porsche 963 alongside longtime Porsche veteran Michael Christensen. Frederic Makoweicki has also agreed to part ways with Porsche Penske.

In the WEC for the past two season, factory Hypercar teams have kept three drivers under contract all year, in part to secure the best opportunity at the Le Mans 24-hour, where three drivers are required.

When the WEC declined to make three drivers mandatory for all races in 2025, Porsche Penske elected to use its IMSA drivers to fill in at Le Mans next year. The two-driver approach for all races outside Le Mans was a strategy pioneered by the Cadillac Racing team of Chip Ganassi Racing.

The Ferrari factory team, by contrast, has already confirmed it will continue with three-driver line-ups in the WEC in 2025 after winning at Le Mans two years running with the No. 50 and No. 51 Ferrari 499P entries. Headed into Bahrain, Ferrari’s trio of Antonio Fuoco, Miguel Molina and Niklas Nielsen, winners at Le Mans this year, are 35 points behind the leading Porsche trio of Estre, Vanthoor and Lotterer.

Jonathan Diuguid, the managing director Porsche Penske Motorsport, said this year’s success resulted from careful attention to driver pairings resulting in consistent performances and that the changes for 2025 have been made with the same intent.

In addition to reliable Porsche 963s, the success was “Largely due to the strong performances of our driver pairings,” said Diuguid. “For 2024, we relied on consistency and continuity and made only a few targeted tweaks to the squad. This decision proved to be right.”

The IMSA combinations finished first and second in the WeatherTech title chase.

Cameron completed three seasons with Porsche Penske, starting with an LMP2 effort in 2022 in the WEC designed to prepare for the Hypercar campaign. Last season, he competed in the WEC before being re-assigned to IMSA. Along with Nasr and Josef Newgarden, Cameron co-drove to victory in the Rolex 24. He and Nasr won the six-hour at Watkins Glen.

Although he would not be drawn on his situation with Porsche Penske after clinching the title at the Petit Le Mans, Cameron was philosophical in his comments following a fourth IMSA championship. “To win everything and be one-two with both cars is exactly what we wanted,” he said. “To get to three (championships) was amazing, and to get to four was something I never dreamed. Now it’s time to chase the next one.”