Porsche Penske Motorsport begins its begins its GTP title defense this weekend at the Roar Before the 24, a year on from its historic triumph at the Rolex 24 At Daytona. The winter break is short for the IMSA teams but the German brand hasn’t rested on its laurels. In preparation for the season ahead, it has employed a new strategy for a reduced pool of drivers across IMSA and the FIA WEC and signed off a second evo “Joker” update for the 963.
How effective will these changes be? We should get some hints here in Daytona, where at the very least, the update to the 963’s suspension should have an impact on the approach that Porsche Penske Motorsport and Porsche’s 963 customer teams JDC-Miller and Proton Competition take to setting up their cars.
“A large portion of the suspension architecture is the same,” Porsche Penske Motorsport managing director Jonathan Diuguid explained to RACER, when asked for more detail on the aim of the latest Joker. “It’s more of a fine-tuning adjustment than a wholesale design change. With it, we expect the operating window of the car to increase. Even with the performances we had in 2024, we still struggled at certain phases of races and at certain types of circuits.”
The update should help counteract that, he continued, by widening the car’s operating window. The thought is that over the course of a season, this will enable Porsche Penske Motorsport and the customer teams to extract more performance from the 963 at some of the longer races.
“Our goal is to have a car that performs well across all the track conditions and temperatures it gets exposed to during a 24-hour race specifically,” Diuguid said. “We feel these tools will help us do that and activate the tires.
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“The Rolex 24 is one of the unique races on the IMSA calendar, for instance, where there are two compounds available from Michelin — the soft and medium. We are hoping these updates will open the operating range specifically on the sofer compounds and offer performance there.
“The aero performance of the car is quite similar, if not the exact same. But these mechanical updates are supposed to help us gain more mechanical grip, especially in low-speed corners and close the balance shift between high-speed balance and slow-speed balance. It’s targeted at a broad range of tracks though. We are hoping to gain performance on bumpy circuits and smooth circuits alike.”
The developmental race in GTP is starting to heat up. While Acura is still yet to bring any substantial evolutions for the ARX-06, Cadillac has confirmed publically that it has also played a Joker in time for the start of the 2025 season, bringing an update to the V-Series.R’s electronics package.
From the outside, the fleet of cars racing for wins in GTP this year may look identical to last season, but upon closer inspection, we are beginning to see these cars evolve and mature at a steady pace.
