"You have to look at the season on a race-by-race basis really," Dieter Gass, JOTA’s team principal and previously a major figure in Audi’s all-conquering Le Mans efforts, says. "The BoP [Balance of Performance] is something you can’t influence, and with more than 20 Hypercars, anything can happen. You need to have good drivers; you need to stay out of trouble."

The BoP table will clearly play a role in the outcome. It will have an impact on pace over a single lap and over a stint. But in WEC, racing is more than that. Raw speed alone cannot be the defining factor. "It really is a matter of who on the day does the better job," says Gass.

And in the case of Porsche’s privateers, while some information and data is shared between Penske and the customer teams, both Proton and JOTA are left to their own devices when the track action begins. All six 963s are identical and there will be no pressure to play second fiddle to the factory cars.
For Proton Competition, minimum time spent in the pits is essential for any podium challenge Photo: JEP/Motorsport Images
"Being a privateer brings positives and negatives. We don’t have to do all the testing – Penske can do it for us," Button says. "But the negative is…you’re not doing all the testing, so you’re taking information from another team…

"The big manufacturers like Toyota and Ferrari, who were up front last year, have to be favorites. But with JOTA’s experience, there’s no reason we can’t be challenging. You see what they did last year – they led the race from last on the grid."

Two cars improves JOTA’s odds. During race week at La Sarthe, a second car to explore additional setup or strategy options is valuable, particularly if the weather’s changeable.

The 963 is also a more mature package now. It’s now reliable and far better on tire life over a stint. Gass is pleased with the progress both his team and the factory have made. This is a car, he feels, that’s finally ready to meet the challenges that Le Mans will throw its way.

"The Qatar podium, in a field of 19 Hypercars, was a huge reward," he says. "I think the car’s good enough now, not only in performance, but because it’s improved so much in reliability."

Proton Competition, on the other hand, is slightly less bullish about its prospects. Christian Ried, who co-owns the team, believes its 963, driven by Julien Andlauer, Neel Jani and Harry Tincknell, can fight up front. But he isn’t as confident that an overall win can be on the cards.

"In the end, we have to see what the BoP will be; it’s going to be interesting," he says. "We have to be realistic. We have a great driver lineup, the car can do 24 hours, so if we stay out of trouble, do the basics and stay out of the pits, I think we could fight for a podium. We are still learning, though – even Penske is, too."

Nevertheless, you shouldn’t underestimate Proton’s ability to win big races. This is a team that on the outside looks like a small, familyrun unit, yet that paints a picture that couldn’t be further from the truth. The scale of its operation is astonishing. At Le Mans, it’s running five cars across the three classes and could nab a podium or better with all of them.

"Ultimately," Hignett concludes, "we know there’s a huge amount of luck, experience and speed needed to win Le Mans. Luck is about whether the car breaks down or not. Experience, there’s massive value in that. Third is speed – if you have that, you can be there or thereabouts.

"I would put Christian (Ried) and his team in with a chance. He’s capable and things might go his way. Same with us. If one of us pulls it off, I don’t think the party would ever finish. We could dine out on it for the rest of our lives!"


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RACER July/August 2024: The Legendary Races Issue

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emailBy Laurence Foster | July 18, 2024 10:06 AM ET

Timing is everything, as 2024 Indianapolis 500 winner Josef Newgarden explains in the new issue of RACER magazine.

The culmination of a duel worthy of one of the world’s legendary races, Newgarden’s last-lap move on Pato O’Ward, when he passed the Arrow McLaren around the outside through Turn 3, proved decisive in securing a second-successive win for the Team Penske driver. You can plan, you can run the scenarios through your head, but in the end this was reactive — the defining moment when instinct takes over.

Fittingly, Indy’s first back-to-back winner in more than two decades graces the cover of RACER No. 329, our annual Legendary Races Issue. And could he become the first driver in “500” history to earn three straight wins? The 2025 cover is yours if you do, Josef…

Speaking of defining moments, victory for the No. 50 Ferrari 499P in the 2024 24 Hours probably came down to an inadvertent tap from its No. 51 sister car on the No. 8 Toyota GR010 HYBRID. With just two hours to run, that likely cost Toyota a sixth win in seven years at La Sarthe, but — and a theme develops here — secured back-to-back wins for the Prancing Horse.



We’ve got fascinating insight on Ferrari’s 24 Hours win, and we also look at how the little things added up to thwart the Action Express Racing Cadillac’s chances of a strong result at La Sarthe on its road trip away from the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship “day job.”

Little things? That would also be the constant trickle of changes that every Formula 1 team brings to its cars during the cut-and-thrust of the season. Each one in isolation might barely register on lap time, but cumulatively, they can be the difference between winning and losing, as we find out.

Also in this issue, we chat with one of the breakout stars of the 2024 F1 season, as well as a cult hero of Netflix’s “Drive to Survive,” Yuki Tsunoda, check in with Ford and Chevrolet on their new-for-2023 GT3 Mustang and Corvette programs, and get JR Hildebrand’s high-speed impressions on McLaren’s ultimate track-day car, the no-compromise Solus GT.

We also bid farewell to one of the undisputed legends of U.S. racing, 1963 Indianapolis 500 winner Parnelli Jones, who passed away in June. As our own late, great Robin Miller noted, a Mount Rushmore of American race drivers would have to include Parnelli, a man whose successes stretch way beyond the Indy 500 and into Trans-Am, off-road racing, and even a brilliant run of success as an owner.

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Vintage Motorsport Art Director and RACER's in-house artist extraordinaire, Paul Laguette, recently released eleven new prints ready to illuminate the walls of your sacred space.





Available in two sizes (12"x16" and 18"x24"), the posters are printed on museum-quality thick matte paper and feature original illustrations with famed drivers and cars as the stylized subjects.


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RACER No.331: The Champions Issue

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emailBy Laurence Foster | December 23, 2024 10:37 AM ET

It’s the end of the year, the off-season for most major race series (although not all – step forward Formula E…) and the perfect time for RACER to look back on just a few of the significant accomplishments from 2024 in our Champions Issue.

But first, let’s rewind to something we said back in the spring… In RACER’s 2024 Formula 1 Preview, we somewhat pessimistically stated that “Far from closing the gap with their own developments, Red Bull’s rivals are chasing a moving target once again.”

Turns out we were wrong and that, thanks to McLaren’s hugely-significant upgrade package that came online at May’s Miami Grand Prix and Ferrari’s perseverance in sorting out a floor upgrade that initially wasn’t, we ended the 2024 season with three teams capable of winning on any given weekend. Even four on occasion, thanks to Mercedes finding its sweet spot on the cold and slippery streets of Las Vegas.

In the end, it was honors even between Red Bull Racing and McLaren-Mercedes. The former’s Max Verstappen put in perhaps his finest season yet for a fourth consecutive drivers’ championship, while the latter’s Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri collectively edged out Ferrari for the constructors’ title – the first team to win a championship with a customer power unit since the heady days of Brawn in 2009.



So roll on 2025, with the very real prospect of a season-long head to head between Norris and Verstappen. And perhaps add in Piastri, Ferrari duo Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton, and even George Russell and Mercedes, too.

Yes, after three seasons of maturation for the new-for-2022 aero rules and a decade of relative stability for the turbo-hybrid power units introduced in 2014, Formula 1 finally looks set to deliver the evenly-matched, multi-team title battle in ’25 that we’ve all been waiting for.

But what about after that?

Waiting in the wings is F1’s tech overhaul for 2026, featuring major aero changes and a significant makeover for the power units. Rules resets of similar magnitude have tended to lead to one team dominating, at least in the early going. But with F1 this good right now, let’s hope we’re proved wrong on that one, too.

But back to 2024, and our look back on the F1 season includes some insight on why Max and McLaren split the titles (and, no, it’s not all just down to Sergio Perez’s tanking season at Red Bull) and our take on the top five drivers from a campaign that saw seven multiple winners from four different teams. We also get set for the arrival of a rookie wave in 2025, with our focus on Kimi Antonelli taking over Ferrari-bound Lewis Hamilton’s drive at Mercedes. Expectations are sure to be high for the Italian teenager, so it’s going to be a fascinating debut season.



Continuing the champions theme, we talk to newly-minted triple NASCAR Cup Series champ Joey Logano, whose second title in three seasons made it a third-straight Cup championship for Team Penske.

And staying with Penske, we look at how Porsche Penske Motorsport’s third season running the Stuttgart marque’s 963 LMDh protototypes in both the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and FIA World Endurance Championship delivered a near-full set of titles in 2024.

Also in this issue, we talk to the NTT IndyCar Series’ finest brains to learn how they find a performance edge in a near-spec, ultra-competitive field, celebrate Thierry Neuville finally landing an FIA World Rally Championship title, and check in with world motocross great Jorge Prado as he switches to Monster Energy Supercross’s packed stadiums.

And that’s another year in the books. It was a blast putting this final issue of 2024 together. We hope you enjoy it, and we look forward to bringing you the best of global motorsports in 2025.

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AdvertisementBy David Malsher-Lopez - Dec 18, 2025, 1:00 PM ET

New RACER magazine celebrates greatness, past and present

Calling RACER No. 337 “The Greatest Issue” might seem like a tough brief to deliver on. But inside, our new issue lives up to the billing, telling stories of greatness from motorsports past and present.

Fo us, one aspect of greatness is versatility – not just taking part in multiple types of racing, but excelling in them. When discussing the most versatile drivers in motorsports history, there are several candidates for second- and third-best, but the greatest is surely indisputable. Despite his career not starting until he was 19-years old, or perhaps because of this, Mario Andretti accelerated his learning curve by driving anything and everything, his ultimate aim being Formula 1. When he got there, he was ready – and famously took pole for his first grand prix, in 1968 – before continuing to drive anything and everything!

Not only did Andretti drive a wide variety of cars, he also won with them, and was often the difference-maker. Ferrari would not have won the 1970 edition of the Twelve Hours of Sebring without Mario’s speed, verve and determination, and several years and experiences later, he combined those same qualities with a hard-earned technical savvy to relight the fire under a distracted Colin Chapman in Formula 1. The Lotus 77 of 1976 started off as a wayward hound of a car, but largely thanks to Andretti’s feedback, it became domesticated and at the season finale in Japan, he took pole and victory. The following year in the Lotus 78, he became a Formula 1 World Championship contender, and with the Lotus 78 and 79, he sealed the deal in 1978. It’s hard to imagine any of Andretti’s contemporaries providing the same combination of driving talent and engineering know-how to inspire a team’s renaissance.

Of course, Mario being Mario, during his spell at Lotus, he was filling up the weekends between grands prix to race part-time for Penske in Indy cars and competing in the IROC championship (winning the title in 1979). As you can appreciate, it wasn’t the work of a moment to narrow down which of Andretti’s cars we wanted our resident artist, Paul Laguette, to portray on the front cover of this issue, but we feel we’ve covered some memorable bases…

Of course, motorsports is more specialized now by necessity – heck, Formula 1 has 24 rounds per year and runs from early March to early December. Which is why this latest RACER, containing our celebrations of the best drivers and teams of 2025, couldn’t go to press until we knew who was the F1 champion. To this end, as well as paying tribute to Lando Norris, we’ve also commemorated McLaren’s previous 12 F1 world drivers’ championship triumphs.
And bringing versatility into the present, we’ve highlighted a few modern-day drivers who have embraced several motorsport disciplines. One such is Kyle Larson, but in this issue of RACER, our interview with him focuses on his remarkable clinching of the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series championship. It’s quite appropriate that he features in an issue celebrating greatness: with this second title in five years, we have no doubt that Larson is on his way to joining the NASCAR pantheon.

Continuing the theme of greatness, we’ve also tried to narrow down which are the all-time best Indy cars, but it’s a task made tricky by the evolution of the championship and its calendar. The Chaparral 2K was a sensational ground-effect car that absolutely belongs on the list of contenders, but even its designer John Barnard would admit it might have struggled at Langhorne or Pikes Peak. Our effort to decide on the greatest Indy cars depends very much on context.

Discussions about the greatest ever road course are less contentious: the Nürburgring-Nordschleife was a daunting challenge from the day it opened in 1927, and remains so today, because in truth, its evolution hasn’t kept pace with that of the race car, nor could it possibly meet the most demanding safety standards of top-rank series. But that reputation for danger is undoubtedly part of its allure… for onlookers, at least. Jackie Stewart once recounted, “The number of times I thanked God when I finished a lap there… I can’t remember doing one more balls-out lap at the ’Ring than I needed to. It gave you amazing satisfaction, no doubt about it, but anyone who says he loved it is either a liar or he wasn’t going fast enough.”

When a legend who won three grands prix there – one of them by four minutes – describes the challenge of the Nürburgring in such an awe-filled manner, there’s little doubt that it’s the greatest track.
There’s a lot more to enjoy in this RACER, too, including a celebration of another IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship GTD PRO title for Corvette Racing, a double helping of off-road racing, courtesy of Baja 1000 debutant Vaughn Gittin Jr. and Ford’s all-American Dakar racer Mitch Guthrie, an interview with World Superbike legend Jonathan Rea, road impressions of BMW’s M4 CS, and much more.

CLICK HERE to purchase the new issue of RACER. Get 6 print issues of RACER Magazine, unlimited digital access to the RACER archive, and 24/7 motorsports streaming on the RACER+ App for one year at only $8.33/month, two years at $7.71/month, or three years at $7.22/month. CLICK HERE and subscribe now for the ultimate motorsports fan experience.