The rumors of a
heavy shakeup in the Porsche
lineups for its LMP1
effort in the FIA World Endurance
Championship were confirmed with the
exit of Romain Dumas and Marc Lieb
along with the retirement of Mark
Webber, and it didn’t take long for
the German manufacturer to confirm their replacements, as well the
list of GT
factory drivers with some new faces.
Confirmed at the
Night of Champions event at Weissach, the new LMP1 drivers announced
by Porsche were Nick Tandy
and Earl Bamber,
making the step up from the GTE ranks while André
Lotterer comes from the recently closed
Audi LMP1
program, pretty spot on with the latest rumors.
Lotterer is like a
sportscar legend thanks to his seven years of Audi, with three titles
of the 24 Hours of Le Mans along with a FIA WEC title. Bamber and
Tandy have in their favor their Le Mans win 2015 along with strong
LMP2 performances from Tandy, which should boost Porsche’s hopes
for a title defense in 2017.
On the GT side,
Porsche confirms the speculations by calling Laurens
Vanthoor from the Audi GT3 program and
Dirk Werner
from BMW. Werner is in fact returning to where he once belonged, as
his early years with Porsche were quite productive. Vanthoor comes
from a bittersweet win in the FIA GT World Cup along with everything he did
during his stint with the GT3 class Audis, mostly raced with the WRT
squad.
The lineups for the
pair of Porsche 919 Hybrid
machines in FIA WEC became like this: the No. 1 car will still have
Neel Jani, now alongside Lotterer and Tandy, while the No. 2 puts
Earl Bamber along with Brendon Hartley and Timo Bernhard.
Vanthoor will go to
America to race along with former rival Kevin Estre in one of the 911 RSR GTE to race in the IMSA
WeatherTech Championship, while Werner
stays there to pair with Patrick Pilet, with Fred Makowiecki and
Richard Lietz being the third drivers for the longer North American
Endurance Cup. On Porsche’s return as a factory squad to FIA WEC in
the LMGTE-Pro
class, Lietz and Makowiecki will welcome Michael Christensen and a
fourth driver yet to be named.
PHOTO: Porsche
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