Porsche pretty much dominated at the World Endurance Championship season-opener in Qatar back in March. The German manufacturer’s 963 LMDh led all bar 52 of the 355 laps on the way to blocking out the podium positions. But there’s every reason to expect that it is going to have more of a fight on its hands second time out for the Hypercar field in 2024 this weekend in Imola.
Porsche certainly thinks so. It is not expecting its domination to continue in Sunday’s Imola 6 Hours.
“I expect a really different weekend for all the cars and I’m looking forward to see how we are going to show,” says Jonathan Diuguid, managing director of the Porsche Penske Motorsport factory squad that competes in both WEC and the IMSA SportsCar Championship in North America. “I do think it is going to return to a normal order with Toyota and Ferrari [which between them triumphed at every race last year] fighting for the win, but I expect us to be there too.”
The Losail International Circuit presented a unique challenge for the WEC, and that went a long way to explaining why Porsche was consistently on top in the Qatar 1812Km. Not only did it win take the top three positions in the race, it claimed the pole and topped every session bar one through the pre-season Prologue test at the beginning of race week and then free practice.
The track was described by Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe technical director David Floury as an “outlier”. The Qatar venue is not the run-of-the-mill circuit faced by the WEC field. That is the result of what Diuguid ranked as “the smoothest racing surface” he’s ever seen over the course of his motorsport career. And by smooth he is referring to the absence of bumps and the fine asphalt.
The new surface laid down as part of the massive overhaul of a circuit built for the arrival of MotoGP back in 2004 made tyre warm-up critical. Graining of the Michelin tyres was perhaps the biggest problem faced by the Hypercar field in Qatar. This was a phenomenon caused by the tyre skipping — “micro-sliding” was the term used by Michelin - across the high-grip track surface when cold. It causes an unusual and aggressive form of tyre degradation. The French tyre supplier was urging caution during the warm-up phase on a new set of tyres — unheated these days after the ban on ovens or blankets — in Qatar.
PPM admitted it did encounter graining when it stayed in the Middle East after last November’s 2023 WEC finale in Bahrain to take in two days of testing at Bahrain. It went away, did its homework and returned with a set-up that both avoided the problem and allowed the drivers to rapidly switch on the tyres without inducing graining.
Source: Autosport