However, Audi officials recently said the manufacturer will not race in IMSA, concentrating instead on the World Endurance Championship.
“We’re so excited by the momentum. In 2022, you’ll see a lot of those cars being unveiled for the look and the styling. You’ll have a lot of testing going on,” Doonan explained. “The hybrid system being utilized is a combination of a Bosch motor and a Williams Automotive Engineering battery system. It’s all being housed in a Xtrack gearbox. It won’t be a proprietary hybrid system; it will be common to all the manufacturers.”
LMDh manufacturers aren’t saying much and have kept a tight lid on their teams from spilling any beans. No amount of cajoling from SPEED SPORT has been able to unearth much beyond corporate announcements and team owners Chip Ganassi and Bobby Rahal telling the media how excited they are to have a chance to compete for the top prize at Le Mans in 2023.
JDC Miller is not part of the equation in the LMDh class. Cadillac gave that spot to Chip Ganassi Racing and JDC Miller team principal John Church says he is actively pursuing a deal with other manufacturers.
Gary Nelson, team manager for Action Express, which won the 2021 DPi title, has been tight-lipped about his team’s plans.
“We’re expecting to win that’s the short answer, but beyond that I don’t have a lot of details that I can share, but we’re approaching it the way we do everything. In the past when we rolled out onto the track at Daytona (for the Rolex 24) we always perform well,” Nelson said. “Action Express just does things that way. We’re looking forward to the new challenge but it’s hard to answer. A guy asked me the other day, ‘Are you going to forget to take your briefcase home?’ I said, ‘I’ll have to wait to see when I leave to see if I did forget it.’”
Everybody wants to know what Team Penske is doing and SPEED SPORT spoke with team owner Roger Penske during his Thanksgiving vacation. His legacy with Porsche sets the stage.
“You have to go back six decades when I had the opportunity to race a Porsche Spyder RSK and RS 60 as a driver before I retired as a driver,” Penske said. “Then there’s the opportunity to run the 917-10 and the 917-30 programs in the ’70s with (Mark) Donohue and then the Spyder program, in 2007, ’08 and ’09.” That’s five championships for the brand.
Penske says LMDh is a long-term program.
“We looked it for us to partner with a world-class manufacturer, specifically with Porsche to get to Le Mans and win, which is not something we have done as a team or the team members,” Penske said. “And I think we set our goals high with a key commercial partner. We thought it would be worthwhile to sit down with Porsche and look at what their opportunities were with WEC (World Endurance Championship) and LMDh starting in 2023 and with that we were able to put together a long-term program.”
It’s a whole new endeavor.
“We wanted to run both series, not just one. We wanted to be one global team — Porsche/Penske Motorsports and what we call ourselves today. It’s pretty exciting when you think about that as a partner.
“I set goals every day and one of them has to be a contender in long-distance races,” he added. “We’ve been successful in IMSA but not much about WEC and with Porsche and, of course, the crown jewel being Le Mans and that will bring a lot to the table for us.”
Team Penske excels at everything it does and Penske credits his people for that success.
“We’ve earned a lot of respect on the track but that goes a long way to the next victory but you have to perform and your people have to perform,” he explained. “It’s a journey, it’s a marathon. This program is not going to be a sprint race. We like it and we have a lot of good people. Jonathan Diuguid, who headed up our Acura program and a number of people we had success with will now work on the Porsche program and that makes a difference.”
Team Penske has an LMP2 car in the shop. Penske says it will get the team into the endurance groove again.
“You can’t go to the first tee at the Masters and never have played for a couple years,” Penske said. “That alone will spice up the 2022 season.
There’s little doubt that the IMSA season will have many tasty morsels on the table ahead of the feast to come in 2023. n