Deliveries to customer teams of the LMDh car Porsche 963 will be a while in coming. Jota and JDC-Miller will not receive the vehicles until April and will therefore miss the first races of the season in the Endurance World Championship (WEC) and the IMSA series, as Porsche confirmed on the sidelines of tests in Daytona on Wednesday.
“There are problems in the supply chain,” says Urs Kuratle, head of Porsche’s LMDh program. “When our customers signed the contracts, they knew the cars would be delivered in April next year. Based on the calendar, that means we won’t have customer cars in Daytona, Sebring, Long Beach and Portimao.”
Previously, Porsche had only announced that the customer vehicles will probably not be available for the 24 Hours of Daytona at the end of January 2023. With today’s statement it is clear that JDC-Miller will start at the fourth IMSA round in mid-May at the earliest. The earliest possible start for Jota in the WEC is the 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps at the end of April.
“There isn’t a date for every car yet, but it will be in April,” says Kuratle, who emphasizes: “We don’t like that fact, neither do the customers, not even the governing bodies, but that’s the way it is. We communicated that very early on, and that’s basically still the case.”
However, representatives of the customer teams are present both at earlier private tests and this week at the official test drives in Daytona in order to get to know the car as well as possible. Team representatives will also be involved in setting up the customer vehicles.
Together with partner team Penske, Porsche is fielding two LMDh cars each in the WEC and in the IMSA in the 2023 season. In addition, there should be a maximum of four customer cars. In addition to the previously confirmed customer teams JDC-Miller and Jota, it is expected that the German team Proton Competition will also field one car each in the WEC and IMSA.