Yes, Racing Matters for Modern Road Cars, and Porsche Explains Why

Michael Steiner, a member of Porsche's executive board for development and research, has an irrepressible smile on his face as we chat inside a Team Penske motorhome at Daytona International Speedway. It's easy to understand why, as the sights and sounds of race cars fighting on the nearby track supply an appropriate thrum of background noise and hold the promise of future wins, of potential championships. But the German manufacturer's top-level sports car racing efforts no longer rely solely on the countless 911s competing in GT classes around the world. Two of Porsche's brand-new 963 LMDh gasoline-electric hybrids (also known by the classic IMSA "GTP" acronym, for "GT Prototype") have kicked off their first competitive outing during the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship's season-opening Rolex 24. Porsche's partnership with perennial powerhouse Penske will also see two 963s compete full-time in the Europe-centric 2023 FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC), and the team will enter three of its GTPs in the 100th anniversary edition of the 24 Hours of Le Mans in June.

Porsche hasn't taken an overly long break from top-class factory-backed international sports car racing, but the 963 program represents the German company's first such effort since the marque retired its all-conquering 919 Hybrid following the conclusion of the 2017 season (not counting the unhinged, track-record-breaking 919 Evo). So it's no wonder Steiner is happy, but there's more to his satisfaction than the surface-level pomp and circumstance that comes automatically with running flashy race cars in blue-riband endurance events. There's a bigger and more significant picture here, even for people who will tell you they don't give two cents of a damn about motorsports.

Why Does Racing Matter Today?

I haven't conducted anything remotely resembling a scientific survey on this matter, but the people who don't care for motorsports seem to be the same kind of people I've encountered that ask this question. It's as if the emergence and proliferation of electrified automobiles, various ongoing grandiose fantasies of autonomous driving, and even the anticipated rise of the machines (i.e., artificial intelligence) tells them motorsports' days are numbered.

It's a particularly odd—ignorant, really—hot take when you consider the fact attendance and viewing figures for multiple pro racing series around the world continue to increase. The Rolex 24 saw an all-time record crowd of an estimated 50,000, much of which series officials attribute to interest in the new era of various manufacturer-backed hybrid GTP cars. The NTT IndyCar Series likewise is in a healthier state than it has been in years, and Formula 1—once the Fabergé egg of motorsports to millions of racing fans while forever struggling to establish itself in a single U.S. market—has a not-long-ago-unthinkablethree grands prix scheduled in the States this year (Miami, Austin, and Las Vegas), and a total of five in North America between May and November.

It's even more odd when you know promoters' ability to sell tickets isn't the only reason many of the world's most prestigious manufacturers are still playing ball as others sign up to get into the game.

"[Racing is] still the heart of the company for Porsche," Steiner says. Cynics will dismiss this as a nice sound bite that's on brand for a company that's forever marketed its racing successes in service of selling more sports cars. There's always an undeniable image/marketing component for any carmaker that races—motorsport is, historically, as much of a marketing exercise as an engineering one, depending on which side of the garage you view the proceedings from. But Steiner insists, "Motorsport still drives actual innovation. It doesn't matter if we're talking about e-mobility (fully electric vehicles) or mobility with hybrids, or combustion engines. Motorsport is pushing engineers to the limit, be it 800-volt technology [developed in the 919 Le Mans racer and now found in the Taycan electric road car] or be it more efficient energy regeneration and recuperation—it always, or most often, comes from motorsports."

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Where once that sort of track-to-road tech transfer focused heavily on outright performance, however, today's street-car targets and looming government regulations have modified the mission statement.

"It's about efficiency today, not [only] performance, with a given amount of energy," Steiner says. "Can you run your car more efficiently? Who is better on the brakes and [recovering] electric energy back? Still today, the Taycan is the best car in terms of electric braking. We still have the brake pedal as the main driver to recover energy. And this helps in real driving a lot. It's not about who can only run the longest distance;realdriving means [repeatable] acceleration and braking. And this is something we learned in racing. It's also about aerodynamic drag—a drag coefficient for electric street cars [that helps improve the range] for long-distance driving." He didn't but could've mentioned the other side of that wind tunnel—extreme racing-derived, downforce-producing aerodynamics intended for bleeding-edge handling as experienced with the new 2023 Porsche 911 GT3 RS.

Do Racing Lessons Really Get Passed to the Production Side? How Long Does It Take?

With no regulations mandating precisely how much technical knowledge, if any, makes it from racetracks to production-car engineering offices and assembly lines, it's easy to hang onto doubts about tech transfer. Steiner, though, insists Porsche's different departments these days lean on each other consistently.

"I bring the race teams and the guys from series [production-car] development together—whenever we have problems or I think there is need for innovation—I bring them together to look for better efficiency in the energy-regeneration potential, but also in [the recent past to make motors] smaller, and things like that. This is a lot of fun, having race car engineers and engineers from series-car development in one room, brainstorming what could be done better."

How often do such meetings occur?

"We did that the last [few] years, especially for getting the electric motors smaller and more efficient," he continues. "We do that now for battery-cell technology. The race guys know a lot about thermal management of cells, and for the series production cars we are starting to develop our own cells, our own chemistry, and we're now starting to get the chemistry from series development together with software know-how and sensor know-how from the race guys. So that happens maybe every month now, and we started that three or four years ago."

What About E-Fuel?

Again, although I've neither performed nor funded an empirical survey, I'm comfortable saying that based on "anecdotal" evidence—namely, what I hear from friends, neighbors, people on the street, and most of all feedback fromMotorTrendreaders—a lotof you just aren't feeling electric vehicles. I'm not interested in using this space (at least not today, in the context of this column) to convince anyone otherwise. This is where e-fuel comes into play for car enthusiasts who have zero desire let alone intention of surrendering their combustion engines.

What exactly is e-fuel? My colleague andMTtechnical director Frank Markus sums it up nicely here. He's also provided an informative look at Porsche's involvement with the tech, its investment in Texas-based Highly Innovative Fuels (HIF), and their corresponding partnership with Chilean oil and gas companies ENAP and Empresas Gasco, ExxonMobil, and Siemens Energy. In a overly brief nutshell, HIF's process involves extracting existing CO2 from (for now) Chilean air and converting it into "green" methanol, which is then finally upconverted into non-crude-based gasoline. The methanol can be made into gasoline in the core refinery, or it can be supplied to other gasmakers to blend into their end product.

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What does this have to do with Porsche and motorsports? Simple: The company last spring put $75 million into HIF Global for a 12.5 percent stake in the company and has so far invested more than $100 million overall into e-fuels. It's also this year beginning to use this e-fuel to power the Mobil 1 Porsche Supercup one-make (911) racing series. Worth noting: Regardless of who supplies it, F1 too plans to switch to e-fuel beginning with its 2026 season, something Ford found appealing as it partnered with Red Bull Racing. And such gasoline is well on the radar of other top-flight racing categories, as well. This will, if all goes according to plan, allow them to continue to run combustion engines and to produce the sights and sounds motorsport fans are loath to relinquish in the form of nothing but all-electric racing series. It's early days—but the barrel is rolling, and you can bet Porsche along with other involved manufacturers are in discussion with series like IMSA and the WEC to ultimately drive down this track.

What Does It Mean For You?

As much potential impact as electric vehicles might have on the carbon emissions problem, they do little in the short and medium term—maybe not even in the long term—for the globe's existing in-service fleet of more than 1 billion gas-powered cars. That's why alternatives such as e-fuels can play a critical role in the overall picture, and why a company like Porsche is investing in the effort. But don't expect to find the product in widespread locations and gas stations quite yet, unfortunately.

What's the Biggest Limitation Right Now?

"There is still a need to really improve the technology to gather it out of the air in an efficient way," Steiner says. "Today you have different kinds of chemical solvents that could absorb CO2, and then you can heat that and get CO2 out of it, but this process is not durable, the chemistry is not as stable, so we need to do at least some research work to get this to scale in a more efficient way. That means a lot oftonsper day. We did and will invest in several different kinds of technical solutions, so [it hasn't] played out already, which one is the right path. If you perform the CO2 [capture] OK, then the storage and transport is no problem.

"[It's possible to hit] 14.5 million gallons per year in the second half of 2020s when we will have bigger volumes together with HIF, with a huge plant planned in the U.S. [likely in Texas]. In Chile we are waiting to get the release for the next step up from the government, we are looking forward to getting it this year, so there is already planning. We know what we would like to do but we're just waiting for the new government, to get its [agreement]. This is something we need to do. And we are also looking for other locations where we have access to green energy where it is not needed directly on the power grid. We're looking at 145 million gallons of production within a decade." (That's roughly the equivalent of 10 percent of the amount of conventional gasoline sold annually in the U.S. at the moment.)

How Soon Is E-Fuel Affordable for Average Consumers?

Along with production volumes, this is another, ahem, massive issue that won't be solved soon, perhaps not for decades. Porsche's e-fuel today costs $40 or so per gallon, which is useless to people on the street. But, Steiner says, "Costwise we see a good path to bring it below. But still, with conventional taxation we see today in Europe and the U.S., if you add a lot of taxes—and today there is a lot of tax—we see no chance for a business case. What's needed is either tax benefits or subsidies for e-fuel, so there is a huge and wide range of actions that can be taken. … But we are running this fuel in Supercup racing beginning this year."

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Full Circle

His final point brings us back to where we began. The 963 didn't win in its Daytona debut, as Acura claimed the podium's top step and demonstrated an early-season performance advantage over its GTP competitors, not only from Porsche but also BMW and Cadillac. But Steiner still had plenty to smile about as he departed the Rolex 24, for this race was merely an early drive down a long road of fresh progress, on the track and off. It's no coincidence Lamborghini is set to join the IMSA GTP fray next season, while the Porsche Penske team and Cadillac this year simultaneously contest the WEC along with similar prototype entries from Ferrari, Glickenhaus, Peugeot, and Toyota. Does racing still matter? The answer, if it isn't obvious by now, is a hard yes—and perhaps more so than it has been in many years.

Editor's note: Up next for Porsche and the rest of the new IMSA GTP field is the Mobil 1 12 Hours of Sebring on March 18, preceded on March 17 by the FIA WEC 1,000 miles of Sebring endurance race at the same venue.