All eyes are on Porsche Penske Motorsport in Daytona this week and next as its IMSA GTP title defence gets underway.
The German brand hasn’t spent the short winter break resting on its laurels. With a new strategy put in place for its reduced pool of drivers across IMSA and the FIA WEC and a second Evo ‘Joker’ update for the 963, it’s pushing to go back-to-back at Rolex, claim a Le Mans win and fight for titles once again in year three of the LMDh ruleset.
Speaking with DSC ahead of the Roar Before The 24, Porsche Penske Motorsport managing director Jonathan Diuguid shed more light on the suspension update which debuted at last year’s Sanctioned Test. It will be implemented on all active cars for the start of the 2025 IMSA and WEC seasons and could make an impact immediately here in Florida.
“A large portion of the suspension architecture is the same,” he explained. “It’s more of a fine-tuning adjustment than a wholesale design change. With it, we expect the operating window of the car to increase. Even with the performances we had in 2024, we still struggled at certain phases of races and at certain types of circuits.”
It should be effective at a variety of circuits, he continued, and widen the car’s operating window. The thought is that over the course of a season, this will enable Porsche Penske Motorsport and customer teams Proton and JDC-Miller to extract more performance from the 963 over the course of some of the longer races.
“Our goal is to have a car that performs well across all the track conditions and temperatures it gets exposed to during a 24-hour race specifically,” he said. “We feel these tools will help us do that and activate the tyres.
“The Rolex 24 is one of the unique races on the IMSA calendar for instance where there are two compounds available from Michelin, the soft and medium. We are hoping these updates will open the operating range specifically on the sofer compounds and offer performance there.
“The aero performance of the car is quite similar, if not the exact same. But these mechanical updates are supposed to help us gain more mechanical grip especially in low speed corners and close the balance shift between high speed balance and slow speed balance.
“It’s targeted at a broad range of tracks though. We are hoping to gain performance on bumpy circuits and smooth circuits alike.”
Porsche isn’t alone in debuting updates for its GTP challenger this weekend. Cadillac has confirmed publically that it has also played a ‘Joker’ in time for the start of the 2025 season, bringing an update to the V-Series.R’s electronics package.
