The penalty for the No. 6 Porsche Penske Motorsport 963 following Indianapolis, which significantly altered the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship point spread in GTP going into next weekend’s Motul Petit Le Mans, was the result of a “procedural issue,” says Porsche Penske Motorsport team manager Jonathan Diuguid.
Following the TireRack.com Battle on the Bricks, IMSA conducted in-depth tech inspections of several cars. One of those was the No. 6 PPM 963 that finished third in the six-hour race. IMSA found “modifications to its wiring harness/loom that were outside of homologation,” and the No. 6 was moved to next-to-last in the GTP field. That changed the championship fight from a near-dead-heat between the two PPM cars to a significant margin for the No. 7 team.
While noting that PPM respects IMSA’s procedures and rules, Diuguid notes that the rule violation was not intentional. There also appears to be no evidence that it provided any sort of competitive advantage.
“IMSA decided to do some additional in-depth inspections on the cars post-Indy road course race, of which ultimately we’re fully supportive,” he said. “Entering that process, none of us inside the group were nervous about anything or concerned. Ultimately, the outcome was, IMSA found that a homologation procedure hadn’t been followed. I know that IMSA penalty was pretty vague in the sense that it said wiring loom, but we’re specifically talking about a right-hand sidepod loom, which feeds the leader light panel and the transponder on the right-hand side of the car. Basically, a procedural process for an update to a length and the routing wasn’t followed.”
The changes to the wiring loom were to eliminate some Controller Area Network (CAN) errors that the team had experienced, and the updates will be on all of the 963s by Petit Le Mans next weekend.
“It was updated on the PPM cars, and ultimately not done on the customer cars,” Diuguid said. “While it was disappointing, the process and the rules and regulation exist. An update had been made on the Porsche side due to some CAN errors that we’d experienced in 2023 and in the early part of 2024, and none of those CAN errors existed since the update happened. And all the Porsche 963s are going to have the wiring loom that the PPM No. 6 raced at the Indy road course fitted to the car for Road Atlanta.
“In the end, it was a procedural issue that wasn’t followed, and regulations are pretty clear. I would say that the discussions with IMSA were positive, but at the end of the day, they’re there to enforce regulations as they are written.”
Diuguid said the penalty doesn’t really change the team’s approach to the overall championship since Dane Cameron and Felipe Nasr were going to be leading no matter what. But with the wider gap now to Mathieu Jaminet and Nick Tandy, it opens up some options to go after the IMSA Michelin Endurance Cup title a little more aggressively.
“I think we’ll utilize our two-car team to take some strategies that would put ourselves in the position at the hour intervals where the Endurance Cup points are scored, even if it’s to the overall negative finishing position of the 6 car,” he said. “I think we’ll use as an opportunity to capture some of those intervals, even if it means staying out to get those endurance points and then having to pit three or four laps later. I think we’ll definitely try to capture every single championship that’s possible. That’s our goal.”
Cameron, Nasr and the No. 7 team go into next weekend’s season finale at Road Atlanta with a 124-point margin in the overall standings over Tandy and Jaminet in the No. 6. The No. 01 Cadillac Racing V-Series.R of Renger van der Zande and Sebastien Bourdais is another 40 points back, so in position to take over second in the championship. The No. 7 leads the No. 01 in the IMEC standings by four points. The No. 6 isn’t in a likely position to claim that championship, but the team could certainly position it to take points away from the No. 7’s pursuers.
