MIM-contracted Pascal Wehrlein, making his FIA World Endurance Championship debut, took the #6 Porsche 963 Hypercar prototype to ninth place in the 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps on Saturday, together with his teammates Kévin Estre and Laurens Vanthoor.
Starting P12 on the grid, the trio placed as high as sixth as the cars cycled through their pitstops, before taking the chequered flag just inside the top-10 after a hard-fought race.
‟It was great to get more race laps with the Porsche 963 and to work with Porsche Penske Motorsport for the first time,” declared Pascal afterwards. “I’ve gained a lot of valuable experience. However, the result certainly didn’t meet our expectations. We were significantly off the pace and struggled with tyre wear. Now, we’ll shift our focus to identify areas for improvement over the coming weeks.”
The main aim of the reigning FIA Formula E World Champion, whose first priority this year is to defend his title, was to gain as much experience as possible in the cockpit of the 963 and with the successful PPM team in view of his participation in the fourth round of the WEC, the iconic 24 Hours of Le Mans in mid-June.
The idea of bringing Pascal into the team to compete at Le Mans gained ground earlier this year when he competed in the opening round of the IMSA Sportscar Championship in January, the 24 Hours of Daytona, in which he finished an excellent sixth overall with the JDC-Miller Motorsports satellite Porsche team.
“Porsche bringing a third car into Le Mans, that’s when all the ideas started, if that could be something. Let’s say that work is in progress since a couple of months already. The idea has been there for a long time to me that I want to be racing in Le Mans one day and race in endurance racing, but so far there was never the opportunity to do so because the focus was on Formula E.”
And clearly with Pascal being a factory Porsche driver in Formula E since Season 7, it became natural to dovetail with endurance racing for arguably the most successful manufacturer in this category, which is going through a golden period since the introduction of the joint Hypercar/LMDh regulations on both sides of the Atlantic.
“Obviously here at Porsche everything is based on success, we want to be successful, we want to win Le Mans, we want to win a championship here in Spa and everything is super performance driven. In combination with being already a part of Porsche since a long time now, five years I’m with the team already obviously I know already quite a lot of people as well and it’s not something completely new for me.”
Before arriving at Le Mans however, where he will line up alongside Britain’s Nick Tandy and Brazilian Felipe Nasr, Pascal will compete in the next two Formula E rounds, in Tokyo (Japan) next weekend and Shanghai (China) two weeks later.
Photos: Courtesy of Porsche
