The big winner at this year’s Le Mans 24 Hour race was Audi as we all know celebrated its victory with a special edition of the R8 dubbed the R8 V8 Limited Edition. It appears that Porsche decided that the tenth victory of Audi was enough and it needs to change this. As a result, the German manufacturer announced that it will develop a completely new race car that will compete in 2014. For those who don’t know, Porsche’s most recent win was in was in 1998 with the 911 GT1. the first overall victory for Porsche took place in 1970 with the legendary 917 short-tail driven by Hans Herrmann and Richard Attwood. The 16th victory took place in 1998 in the Porsche 911 GT1 driven by Laurent Aiello, Stéphane Ortelli and Allan McNish. Other victories were obtained in 2008 and 2009 with the Porsche RS Spyder sports prototype in the LMP2 category.
Hartmut Kristen, Head of Porsche Motorsport, is already prepared for one of the most challenging development programmes in the company’s history. “We’re looking forward to the task of developing new technologies and to continue on with the success of the Porsche RS Spyder. After the conclusion of our works-supported sports prototype programme in the American Le Mans Series we have kept up with the latest technological advances. Now we will begin with detailed research in order to evaluate the various concept alternatives for our new car. These obviously depend on how the regulations for the year 2014 look in detail. In principle, these regulations are interesting for us because the integration of our hybrid technology in the vehicle concept is one possible option.”
