20th Le Mans win looms into focus as Porsche Hypercar is quickest — again

“It was about understanding the car and what we needed to do to make it work — these are complicated cars and for that you need time,” says WEC driver Laurens Vanthoor, the architect of the startling performance of the No6 Porsche at Fuji courtesy of an opportunistic move to take the lead at the first corners. “The car became much nicer to drive and as drivers we could get much more out it.”

Porsche has achieved the improvement without recourse to one of the five so-called evo jokers allowed to a manufacturer over the lifecycle of a LMDh or Le Mans Hypercar. These can be categorised as hardware changes that result in an increase in performance. Improvements aimed at improving reliability are unlimited, though still have to be signed off by the rule makers, while software is free.

Jonathan Diuguid, boss of the PPM squad that races in both WEC and IMSA, explains that the focus since last year has been reliability. “Our performances in the endurance races in 2023 weren’t the best,” he points out.

“To know what we want to change we have first to be pretty confident that that is the area in which we want to develop the car,” he says. “We had reliability problems and that is what we focused on with the resources within Porsche Motorsport and PPM. After that you are limited with performance evo jokers and you are limited from a budgetary perspective.”

There is, however, an engine upgrade in the works at Porsche. It intends to move away from the current flat-plane cranks its 4.6-litre twin-turbo V8 currently runs to try to reduce vibration in the name of reliability. Plans for it to arrive in time for Le Mans in June have been abandoned, though Porsche is still promising a 2024 introduction.

The performance at the Qatar Prologue was significant because Porsche has been a loser in the Balance of Performance reshuffle for the start of the 2024 season. The car has gained only a couple of kilos since the end of the last year, but its power has been cut from 520kW to 514kW, a reduction of approximately 12bhp. The hit it took was greater than those that went against Toyota and Ferrari, the manufacturers above it in the WEC pecking order at the end of last year.

It’s far too early to say with any certainty that Porsche has now leapfrogged ahead of them. The Losail International Circuit in Qatar was built for MotoGP, remember, and its overhaul last year has left it with a track surface that could probably be described as unique in terms of the WEC. Toyota wasn’t the only manufacturer to be hit by tyre graining during the Prologue, probably as the result of it having the heaviest car under the BoP.

Saturday’s Qatar race probably won’t give an accurate picture of what is to come in the WEC this year. But Porsche clearly remains on an upward curve on the road to Le Mans as it attempts to claim victory number 20.