Double-Duty LMDh Drivers, Teams Reaping Benefits

Photo: Porsche

Drivers from Porsche, BMW and Cadillac that are undertaking dual season programs have all found benefits with having extra seat time in their respective LMDh machinery.

No fewer than five drivers are set for twin campaigns in this year’s FIA World Endurance Championship and IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship seasons that has resulted in a reduced core factory driver pool for each of the three manufacturers.

Matt Campbell, along with Mathieu Jaminet, are set for full season WeatherTech Championship programs with Porsche Penske Motorsport, and are also slated to run at least five of the eight WEC rounds as third drivers.

“For sure it’s beneficial in every way, not only for myself as a driver but also for the team,” Campbell told Sportscar365.

“We can learn from what we’ve done on each weekend from each championship for sure and learn something for the following.

“I’m enjoying doing both championships for sure. And obviously we’ve had a lot of success this year already with the program.

“I think it’s really going to show the level of consistency we have now and just minimizing mistakes.

“You look at the team and the performance they’ve done this year, it’s very impressive because there hasn’t been any point where we’ve made a big mistake in a race at all.”

BMW’s Sheldon van der Linde and Dries Vanthoor, meanwhile, are competing in full WeatherTech Championship seasons and all non-conflicting WEC races, as is also the case for Cadillac ace Earl Bamber.

The 2025 season marks the South African’s first full-time focus in prototype machinery, after splitting WEC Hypercar and DTM duties last year.

“I think it’s a huge benefit for me personally just to really get to know the ins and outs of this car,” van der Linde told Sportscar365.

“There’s so much fine-tuning you can do as a driver in the car with settings on the brake-by-wire, the anti-rollbars, for example, it’s details you cannot adjust in the GT3 car, which sometimes you forget about when you jump in the [LMDh] that it’s even available to you.

“It’s settings like those that I really am getting to grips with now and trying to fine-tune the car during driving for my liking and that’s where I feel the biggest difference at the moment.”

While Campbell and Jaminet drive for the same team in both series, van der Linde, Vanthoor and Bamber split their time between different organizations, although both with an open-book policy of data sharing.

“It’s been a great collaboration between JOTA and Action Express,” Bamber told Sportscar365.

“We’ve had Iain (Watt, Action Express technical director) over here for a couple of tests already. We’re just going back and forth.

“I know Taka (Tomoki Takahashi, JOTA technical director) speak a lot on the phone, so the two teams are really sharing information a lot back and forth on previous learnings and stuff like that and what we’re learning.

“I think it’s just overall raising the project because we’ve got five cars on track working together rather than individual cars.

“There’s been a really big impact on the way that they’ve changed the structure, the way we go about racing this year at Cadillac, and I think it’s also going to help going to Le Mans with four cars.”

Bamber said his two teams are even sharing setup data, which helped JOTA get up to speed with its new Cadillac V-Series.Rs in a pre-event test at Imola in March.

“We started off here with a baseline of Sebring,” he said “That was a big discussion between Action and JOTA when we came here testing a month ago.

“Maybe the Long Beach setup would be a little aggressive for this place but that’s probably just a good simple example of the collaboration that’s going on and the shared ideas.

“Everyone’s sharing data and setups between all the cars these days. It’s very much the NASCAR philosophy they do. Everyone can see everything — the same in America.”

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