Team Penske has confirmed that it would not compete in the FIA World Endurance Championship’s LMP2 class after the 24 Hours of Le Mans next month.
Dane Cameron, Felipe Nasr, and Emmanuel Collard drove the Penske Oreca to eighth place in class in the Sebring 1000-mile race and fourth place in the Spa 6-hour event. However, the 90th edition of the 24 Hours of Le Mans will be the entry #5 car’s final appearance in the WEC season.
The team “will instead focus on testing and preparation of its Porsche Penske Motorsport LMDh programme” ahead of its debut in both the WEC and the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship in 2023, according to an official team statement.
The Porsche will make its competition debut at Daytona next January in the Rolex 24.
“We are very appreciative of our time in WEC this year and we have been able to make the most of our time on track this season,” said Team Penske president Tim Cindric.
“As an organization, we didn’t have a lot of experience within WEC, so running the races in 2022 has allowed us to learn the tracks, the rules and understand how a race weekend operates.”
“We were able to gather a lot of feedback and information over the first two races and we expect to learn even more at Le Mans.”
“Fortunately, our LMDh program is progressing quickly, so we need to focus that to ensure we are prepared for the start of the 2023 season.”
In addition, Porsche said this month that it will be able to sell and service two LMDh hybrids built in collaboration with Multimatic Motorsport for the WEC and IMSA series in 2023.
“It could be up to two in each [series]. We are saying that that is the maximum and we can’t do more than that,” Porsche Motorsport boss Thomas Laudenbach told Motorsport.com.
“One thing is clear, it is not about as selling as many cars as we can – that’s not our goal.”
“With such a high-level prototype, if we sell a car to a race team, first of all it is important that the team is at a certain level to handle it and then that we can support them.”
“We want to make sure they have everything to be competitive.”
