Penske Confident Porsche “Going to Get Better” in Hypercar

Roger Penske believes that Porsche Penske Motorsport “is going to get better” in the FIA World Endurance Championship Hypercar class after a challenging start to the season.

The factory squad is racing at Monza this weekend off the back of a disastrous 24 Hours of Le Mans that saw all three of its Porsche 963s encounter significant trouble.

Porsche is fourth in the Hypercar manufacturers’ world championship standings after five races, while its No. 5 lineup is sixth in the drivers’ table.

Penske, whose team runs two cars in the WEC full-time with Porsche, told reporters on Friday that he feels there is improvement to come but that the gains could be gradual.

The best result for a Penske Porsche so far this season was third place for the No. 6 crew of Kevin Estre, Andre Lotterer and Laurens Vanthoor at the 6 Hours of Portimao.

“I think that, as we look to the future, we’ve got three more races here and want to continue,” said Penske.

“We’re going to get better. The chance that we’ll continue to race in the U.S. is only going to give us more understanding of where the car is and how to get more performance.

“That will just be pulled in. From communication, we’re doing it better. We had to build a shop in Mannheim [for the WEC entries]. This is a journey, not a sprint.”

Porsche Penske has already won in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, but its WEC results have been a step behind those of LMH manufacturers Toyota and Ferrari.

Penske explained that global supply chain issues affected the Porsche 963’s track testing program, while an urgency to get the WeatherTech Championship program underway in January had an impact on the WEC season preparations before it kicked off in March.

“Supply chain, for us, is probably the biggest issue we’ve had to deal with across this thing,” he said.

“You pull that out… we went to test after test, after test, after test. We sat there for two or three days and maybe ran [for] two hours.”

But Penske also spoke of support from the top echelon of Porsche management after its chairman Wolfgang Porsche and CEO Oliver Blume addressed the team during Le Mans.

“We didn’t have the pieces and parts for WEC,” he said.

“We started at Daytona and for 60 to 90 days, that’s where we were focusing on our efforts. Today, the information technically is going back and forth. We just have to execute it.

“As disappointing as Le Mans was, the strength of the partnership… when you have Wolfgang Porsche and Oliver Blume say: ‘we want to talk with the team.’

“Because we saw the last half-hour and we knew it wasn’t going to be a happy day. They could have gone home and said, ‘hey, not a very good day here.’ But they came in and did everything they could to say, ‘let’s pull this partnership tighter together.'”

Porsche Motorsport Vice President Thomas Laudenbach, speaking alongside Penske, added that a delayed start to performance-focused testing may have impacted the factory 963s’ competitiveness.

“Mainly starting this year, we had the first proper development performance test where we could work on the car to make it faster,” he explained.

“Before, everything was mainly [about] doing reliability, sorting out problems and functionalities. This was never intended, but it’s what it was.

“In the tests we had before Le Mans, we really made good steps with performance. It’s the little things, but the little things are half a second, and half a second is the world.

“I think we would have loved to do it much earlier, but you have to live with what you have. Under these rules, there are a lot of parties and you can’t control everything.

“We’re not looking back. It’s clear where we want to be. Porsche Penske Motorsport doesn’t join the series just to fill up the grid. In the end, our goal is always to win races.”

While acknowledging that the team has more performance to find, Laudenbach also expressed some frustration at the number of high-voltage gremlins for the Porsches.

The LMDh hybrid system — consisting of a Bosch electric motor, Williams Advanced Engineering battery and Xtrac gearbox — is used by all cars under the platform per the technical regulations, but Porsche has suffered issues more frequently than its rivals.

There was even a setback at Monza on Friday when the No. 6 Porsche had its hybrid components replaced due to a problem that surfaced during Free Practice 1.

“We are for sure not happy with the high-voltage system reliability issues, ” said Laudenbach.

“I think that’s not a secret. Just looking at it, there are too many failures on the system where we just say [that is] not good enough.”