Porsche wins Daytona 24 as hybrid-powered racing takes off
'What we do at the track ... has relevance to what we do with our road cars,' says Porsche's head of motorsport.
DAYTONA, Fla. – Porsche (DRPRY) triumphed this weekend at the crown jewel of American sport car racing, securing an overall win at the Rolex 24 at Daytona International Speedway with its 963 GTP race car.
The grueling 24-hour endurance race is not just a test of racing teams' stamina and performance under pressure, it's also a pressure cooker for testing new technology and reliability. It's no wonder why more and more big auto brands have signed on to compete.
The GTP (grand touring prototype) is the top class series in the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, with manufacturers like Porsche, BMW, Cadillac, and Acura duking it out racing futuristic, aerodynamics-focused race cars that feature hybrid electrified powertrains.
It’s this feature — hybrid electric power — that drew the big manufacturers to the series, now in its second year. A similar sister series (World Endurance Championship) in Europe counts Ferrari, Toyota, Peugeot, Alpine, and Lamborghini in its ranks, with Cadillac and Porsche fielding cars in that series as well. There’s a reason why those brands chose to enter a series that features next-gen powertrains, and that's because they view it as the future of showcasing new technology.
The fans seem to be loving the new hybrid-powered GTP era as well. This past weekend's Rolex 24 at Daytona had its biggest attendance ever, which builds on last year's previous record-setting crowd, though exact figures have not been released by the Speedway yet.
“I would say it was definitely the next step in sports car racing,” Porsche VP of motorsport Thomas Laudenbach said in an interview with Yahoo Finance about GTP racing. Laudenbach notes Porsche was one of the first manufacturers to commit to the new hybrid-powered series. And it being a “brand name” in motorsport, Laudenbach said, gave cover for other brands to jump in as well.
“When you look at all the 11 manufacturers that are here [across all classes of the WeatherTech championship], that's the most that's ever been given the technology integration with sport,” said John Rowady, CEO of rEvolution, a sports marketing firm. “This is a huge new world for automotive marketing to build all this innovation into the sales channels and how they generate business.”
It was that next step in racing technology — hybrid tech — that attracted Porsche to the series as well. ”It has relevance to what we do with our road cars,” Porsche's Laudenbach said.
Porsche’s endeavors with electrification are well known, and it has been pushing forward with such powertrains over the past decade. The Taycan EV was one of the first performance EVs on the market and had its best sales year ever with over 7,500 cars sold, in addition to the plug-in hybrids that Porsche has been making for years now, starting with the Panamera SE Hybrid back in 2013.
Overall hybrid sales have also been growing in America with 1 million hybrids sold last year, representing a 76% jump in sales according to Edmunds.com.
The good old technology transfer that many automakers say originates in racing and comes to production cars is still in play. The manufacturers are well past using innovations like windshield wipers and rearview mirrors that originated in the heyday of racing; now everything from new batteries and drivetrains to software that blends electric power with gas is all being tweaked on the track.
Porsche Team race car driver Dane Cameron, one of the drivers of the winning Porsche 963 race car, said the tech “crossover” is apparent in everything they do. “I think in that crossover, the technology crossover and the way [Porsche engineers] lean back and forth to put things on the road cars [from race cars] … they're not so far away from the race cars in a lot of ways,” Cameron said to Yahoo Finance.
GM Corvette driver Tommy Milner, who races in the series below GTP, said Porsche isn’t the only innovator here.
“I think the relationship between race car and streetcar is as close as it's ever been with the Corvette [Z06 GT3.R race car],” Milner said from the Corvette factory in Bowling Green, Ky., late last year. “There's dialogue with the racing team engineers and with the production car engineers as they evolve from generations within the model year; if there are things that the production car engineers can build into that car, they will do so to help the race team.”
Building a sustainable business
Ford CEO Jim Farley told Yahoo Finance last month that not only does he want to expand Ford’s racing presence across race tracks (and off-road trails) globally, but he wants it to be a profitable, sustainable business.
“We think that racing could be a business, a sustainable business I've seen over my 40-year career,” Farley said from Ford’s Season Launch racing event. “We want our racing to be sustainable as a business so that when Jim Farley or whoever is next, we're still racing for the same reasons to keep our products fresh, so that you want to make the business healthy enough to make money from racing.”
And believe it or not, the motorsports business is profitable. Porsche sold over 400 race cars last year to customers who race 911 GT3 R race cars, for example, across the globe, not to mention parts and servicing of those race cars, which provide revenue as well.
“Porsche motorsport is not only GTP [factory-owned racing]. For sure, it's an important one, but we start really from, I would even say grassroots racing,” Porsche’s Laudenbach adds. “Somebody can buy a race car and go to a track weekend. We got the 'one-make' series,” Laudenbach said, referring to series where every competitor uses the same car and parts, for example a 911 GT3 R race car. “I think there's far more than 30 [Porsche] one-make series all over the world,” he said.
Ford is targeting Porsche in this realm too, making multiple versions of the Mustang sports coupe into race cars across various levels. While Ford’s goals here in motorsport are audacious, it has a long way to go to catch up to where Porsche is on that front: The German automaker has now claimed 23 overall wins at Daytona, and that’s just one track.
“I think it's fair to say that I cannot imagine our brand without motorsport,” Laudenbach said in all seriousness. Though he adds the caveat, in his German accent and with a slight smile, that racing must be “run as a business case.”
No doubt Ford, GM, and other automakers looking for glory on the asphalt of Daytona would agree too.
Pras Subramanian is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on Twitter and on Instagram.
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