A rearguard action amid the massed ranks of PPM’s engineering brain farm, and its nimble-fingered drivers, saved what could have been a case of grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory.
After a hugely disappointing debut for the 963 at Daytona last year, plagued by hybrid battery and gearbox problems, the 2024 IMSA SportsCar Championship season opener was relatively trouble-free – apart from its No.6 car, which placed fourth, being penalized for a “failure to adhere to controlled powertrain parameters”.
Other 963s, including the customer cars, did receive warnings for the same issue but were not forced to take penalties after the software ‘fixes’ were identified and distributed across all four machines to prevent it from happening again.
After the 24 Hours was over, Porsche’s LMDh factory director Urs Kuratle was asked about the problem that has caused the No. 6 car to be penalized, and he explained: “[It was] power made basically when the car was being charged, especially toward the Bus Stop Chicane. We had peaks and they were just too much for the system, put it this way. There were corrections done, and that was it.”
That allowed Felipe Nasr to get the job done on track, to beat pre-event favourite Cadillac by 2s after a day of hard racing.
Source: Autosport