Porsche looks set to take up the extra entry for the Le Mans 24 Hours it gained for winning the IMSA SportsCar Championship crown at Road Atlanta last weekend.
Thomas Laudenbach, boss of Porsche Motorsport, told Autosport/Motorsport.com that it “absolutely makes sense” for the factory Porsche Penske Motorsport squad to run a third 963 LMDh in the double-points round of the World Endurance Championship in addition to its two full-season entries.
At the same time he stressed that no final decision has been made on the additional car.
Porsche successfully applied to have an extra factory 963 on the Le Mans grid in 2023 and ’24, but for next year it has the additional entry guaranteed after securing the IMSA GTP title with the #7 car driven by Felipe Nasr and Dane Cameron at the Petit Le Mans 10-hour race that closed out the season last Saturday.
“It is not decided yet, but it is more likely we will run the three, especially now we have the entry,” said Laudenbach.
“You need budget for that, but we all know how quickly a car can be taken out of the race at Le Mans.
“That is why we have done it with three for the past two years and why there is a good chance we will do it with three again.”
#7 Team Penske Motorsport Porsche 963: Dane Cameron, Felipe Nasr
Photo by: Michael L. Levitt / Motorsport Images
Porsche looks set to go into the Le Mans WEC round next June with a reduced contingent of cars in the Hypercar class even if it decides that PPM will field a trio of cars for the third year in succession.
The customer Jota team, which is running two Porsches in Hypercar this year, will switch over to Cadillac in 2025 when it becomes the General Motors brand’s factory representative in place of Chip Ganassi Racing.
Even if Proton Competition, the second customer team running the 963 in WEC, expands to two cars, Porsche’s full-season representation in WEC looks certain to be reduced from five to four cars.
Laudenbach confirmed that an announcement of PPM’s 2025 driver line-ups across its world championship and North American campaigns will be made before the conclusion of the WEC season.
“There will be an announcement before the race in Bahrain [on 2 November],” he said.
With that news imminent, it appears unlikely that a decision on the third car at Le Mans will be made in time for its drivers to be included in the announcement.
IMSA is allowed to award three entries for the Le Mans WEC blue riband round in June by race organiser the Automobile Club de l’Ouest.
One of these so-called ‘at-large entries’ goes to the winning car in the GTP teams’ championship, which was won by the #7 PPM entry of drivers’ title winners Nasr and Cameron.
The winners of the Jim Trueman and Bob Akin Awards gain the other two.
These awards go to a bronze-ranked driver competing in LMP2 and GT Daytona respectively based on a separate classification to the main class championships.
Nick Boulle, who also won the LMP2 title with Tom Dillmann at Inter Europol by PR1/Mathiasen, and Orey Fidani, who raced with Matt Bell at the AWA Chevrolet team, claimed the two awards and therefore an automatic Le Mans entry each.