Porsche 963 Racing Expansion: The team has been open about bringing another Porsche 963 competitor to racing in 2024. This new rival will wear the unique “Hertz Racing Gold” paint job, first appearing at this year’s Spa WEC. Despite the doubt, further information shows that this chassis has been bought.
Sam Hignett, the experienced leader of Jota, talks about how they are always looking for money, a vital part of turning their attempt into a full-fledged WEC effort. Hignett was brave enough to talk about how hard their business road was. His cautious confidence shows that even though the goal is just out of reach, this project will be successful.
Hignett keeps quiet about this extra entry. He says that Jota won’t depend on drivers who get paid. He talks eloquently about how they choose drivers, which is a problematic symphony like their first car. They are looking for a lot of talented people who show promise.
Hignett is happy that Antonio Felix da Costa, Will Stevens, and Yifei Ye will be this year’s trio. He confidently says, “Over the past three seasons, we’ve scoured the LMP2 landscape, and in our cockpit, we have three of the brightest stars, each of whom is in the top tier of their field.”
Robert Kubica, a former Formula 1 driver who now races with WRT in LMP2, is a bit of a mystery. Kubica is a top candidate for the Jota in 2024. The new 963 is set to come out in November, after the 2023 Bahrain World Endurance Championship.
In addition to what Jota has planned, German Proton wants to make the 963 bigger. They have one entry in the WEC Hypercar and one in the IMSA SportsCar Championship GTP in North America. The intelligent team director, Christian Ried, is wary about a second team joining the WEC. The plan for the 2024 European Le Mans Series will help them decide what to do.
Ried describes their situation correctly, focusing on how calendars work together on purpose. During a recent trip to the Fuji WEC track, where his team has three Porsche 911 RSRs in the GTE class and one ORECA-Gibson 07 in the LMP2 class, he said, “We have a lot of speed.” They make decisions based on the complicated schedule web, which puts IMSA GTP rounds and WEC races in uncomfortable conflict with each other.
In 2024, Porsche won’t promise how many customer cars it will make. This is because it was the 963 that made the company famous in racing. Thomas Laudenbach, who is in charge of racing at Porsche, explains that their goal goes beyond making sales. For these cars to fight and do well in motorsport, they need much help.
Another part of Porsche’s story is racing. During the 2023 racing season, privateer teams got two 963s in WEC and two in IMSA, a first in motorsports.
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