Porsche has held their Night of Champions celebrations, with their 2023 programmes being announced, and how the drivers are going to be divided between the cars.
The very big programme for Porsche will be their new 963 LMDh car, which will run under the Porsche Penske Motorsport banner in both the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, and the FIA World Endurance Championship.
Car #6 in IMSA will have Mathieu Jaminet and Nick Tandy as the full-season drivers. They will be joined by Dane Cameron for the 24 hours race at Daytona. Car #7 will be shared between Matt Campbell and Felipe Nasr, and they will be joined by Michael Christensen for the Rolex 24. Porsche has opted only to run three drivers in each car for the 24 hours race, which is different from many other teams, who typically go with four.
Photo: Porsche Motorsport
They will also run two cars in the FIA WEC, with three full-season drivers in each car. Car #5 will have Michael Christensen sharing the seat time with Frederic Makowiecki and Dane Cameron. Car #6 will have Andre Lotterer, Kevin Estre and Laurens Vanthoor as the drivers. It’s a bit of a surprise that Porsche has chosen to split up the Christensen/Estre duo, since they have run together for many years – especially when Estre is going to share the car with Vanthoor, who was the 3. driver in the GTE Pro car as well for many seasons at Le Mans, including their 2018 win.
As previously announced, the Pfaff Motorsports GTD Pro outfit will have Klaus Bachler and Patrick Pilet as their full-season drivers in IMSA. Laurens Vanthoor will help them out at Daytona.
Gianmaria Bruni, Richard Lietz, Thomas Preining, and Romain Dumas are still a part of the Porsche works driver squad, and their programmes will be announced at a later stage.
Porsche has also announced a new Porsche Junior. That will be young Danish racer Bastian Buus, who has had a couple of great years in the Porsche Carrera Cup Deutschland, Porsche Carrera Cup France, and Porsche Mobil 1 Supercup. The young Dane has only been racing real cars for two years, but has already won in all the series. 2023 will consist of more Cup racing for him, with Porsche Mobil 1 Supercup being the top of that iceberg. Further programmes will be announced at a later date.
The first sportscar task of 2023 will be the ROAR test at Daytona International Speedway, which is run on 20-22 January, followed by the 24 hours race on the very same track, one week later. The FIA WEC season starts at Sebring International Raceway on 17 March.
