Porsche Plans Factory SportsCar Effort

Porsche AG and Porsche Cars North America announced Saturday in Austin, TX at CTO that the sports car marque will field a two-car factory team named Porsche North America throughout next year’s inaugural TUDOR United SportsCar Racing championship.

The effort will utilize the new Porsche 911 RSR, the same as the 2013 24 Hours of Le Mans LM GTE-Pro class-winning entries. The headquarters for the program will be at Porsche Motorsport North America in Santa Ana, Calif. CORE autosport will act as the competition partner for the program.

“North America is Porsche’s single largest road car and motorsports market. Therefore, we have decided to focus a full factory program in the newly formed series, similar to our competing in the World Endurance Championship together with Manthey Racing," said Hartmut Kristen, head of Weissach, Germany based Porsche Motorsport. “Having finally a unified platform to compete on has made the decision so much easier to enter a GT based Porsche factory team for the first time in American sports car racing," he added.

It is planned that the driver lineup for the season will come from Porsche’s factory driver stable for both works-entered cars. A driver announcement will be made at a later date.