Diuguid: Ferrari, Toyota Have “Found a Bunch of Pace”

Photo: James Moy/Toyota

Ferrari and Toyota have “found a bunch of pace” in recent FIA World Endurance Championship races that has made Porsche unable to take the fight in terms of pure performance according to Porsche Penske Motorsport managing director Jonathan Diuguid.

The German manufacturer finished sixth and seventh in Sunday’s Lone Star Le Mans at Circuit of The Americas amid issues for both of the factory Porsche 963s that could have instead put them in podium contention.

The No. 5 Porsche was forced to pit on the opening lap after the team forgot to remove a safety cone from the top of the Pitot tube, while the No. 6 machine was running fifth until Kevin Estre was handed a drive-through penalty for overtaking while under a yellow flag.

Estre and co-drivers Laurens Vanthoor and Andre Lotterer dropped to seventh but ultimately gained a position back late in the running after a 100-second stop-and-hold penalty for the No. 20 Team WRT BMW M Hybrid V8.

“Neither one of the cars executed a perfect race,” Diuguid said. “In general, I don’t think we had the pace to compete for the win today.

“Ferrari and Toyota seemed to have found a bunch of pace and LMDh cars are just fighting against which Hypercar wants to win that day.

“We need to find some more pace for Fuji.

“The manufacturer points have tightened up and basically whoever wins Fuji is going into Bahrain with the championship lead and that’s going to be our goal.”

Diuguid took aim at the two LMH manufacturers, which have combined to score victories in the last three WEC races, with Porsche having been winless since Hertz Team Jota’s triumph in the Six Hours of Spa in May.

“Ferrari and Toyota seemed to have pace when they want it and if they decide to win the race, we have to be perfect to be even close,” said Diuguid.

When asked where the team could have realistically finished if neither car had faced delays, Diuguid suggested a podium would have been possible for the No. 5 car.

“I think third or fourth was probably their potential,” he said. “We lost 43 seconds with having to come in to remove that part, not including the power we were down at the start.

“Basically, the part was blocking the intake of the engine so the charge temperatures were high.

“We lost some time there. Take 40 seconds off wherever we finished now is probably our potential.”

Lotterer, meanwhile, felt the No. 5 car was the quicker car of the two Penske-run Porsches on Sunday.

“Once again we showed we could do damage limitation through good calls in terms of strategy,” he said. “We were good in operations in that regard.

“It was obviously not an ideal qualifying, starting 14th, and the penalty. But we still managed to finish P6, which is, I would say, considering these things, a good result.

“The sister car was quite strong. They qualified well and had better pace in the race. We need to understand what happened there.

“We were struggling a bit with the car.

“At the end, [it was] good points. I guess we’re still leading. Two more races and Fuji is next so lets keep pushing.”

He added: “We had a dream start of a season, got lucky in Spa and sometimes we were supposed to finish fifth but then we managed to finish P2.

“Le Mans, we were there where the car was performing. We clearly didn’t have the stuff to win there. The car didn’t have enough straight-line speed.

“In the [regular] WEC races, we managed with the strategy and operations to do the best we can and good execution today. We could have avoided a penalty but that cost us a place.

“It’s the first race where things didn’t run so well.”

Jamie Klein contributed to this report

John Dagys

John Dagys is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Sportscar365. Dagys spent eight years as a motorsports correspondent for FOXSports.com and SPEED Channel and has contributed to numerous other motorsports publications worldwide. Contact John