Porsche’s planned 2024 updates for the Porsche 963 are all focused on improving its reliability according to Porsche Penske Motorsport’s managing director Jonathan Diuguid, to improve the car’s form during the key long races in IMSA and the WEC.
“We adhere to a very clearly defined process,” Diuguid explained. “All of the updates we are requesting and discussing with the FIA, ACO and IMSA are for reliability. After running the car for a year we have exposed things we didn’t see in testing and our goal is to have reliable cars that can perform at the highest level at longer races like Le Mans. And Le Mans showed we weren’t prepared for that.
“We aren’t focusing on performance, we are focused on things like driver cooling and we have had driveline issues we are trying to address. We are also working on updates to components on the hybrid system that we are working on with our partners at Bosch. They are bringing quite a big update for the MGU that every LMDh car will get.
“It’s improving those areas that have taken us out of races or severely reduced our performance.”
Leaving reliability to one side, in year 1 of the 963’s life in the WEC its outright performance hasn’t been strong enough to allow it to compete for wins consistently. The best results came at Portimao and Fuji, where the #6 managed to bag third-place finishes.
Despite this, Diuguid reiterated that Porsche hasn’t been pushing the rule-makers for permission to make performance upgrades, due to the BoP (and platform BoP) system and defined performance window that the category and its ruleset are governed by. The 963 has shown race-winning potential in IMSA’s GTP class, winning three races during its debut season.
“I think the ruleset is clearly defined with what the performance target for the LMDh cars has been,” he said. “The targets, whether that’s testing in the wind tunnel or the minimum weight, have been met, so our focus has been on what we can control. We are involved in discussions, like all manufacturers are, on the BoP process and those working groups have been fruitful.
“Hence our focus is reliability, The process is you bring a request, a justification as to why you need the request, either explaining your failure or showing the issues you’ve had. It’s an open dialogue and a process that every manufacturer goes through.
“It’s difficult but it’s up to the sanctioning bodies to determine what they feel is a performance upgrade and what isn’t. It’s not an argument, it’s a presentation of what we want to change. It’s up to them to come back and say, ‘If you want to bring this upgrade, you need to go to the wind tunnel.’
“It’s been quite open.”
