Everything changed for Pfaff Motorsports in 2022: campaigning for a new class in GTD PRO and new drivers, both experiencing their first full season in IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship competition. The results, however, were the same, if not more superlative: a championship for the team and drivers from five wins.
It’s all new in 2023 for the Toronto-based team, which was recently inducted into the Canadian Motorsports Hall of Fame. Two new Porsche factory drivers, one of whom is looking at his first full season of IMSA, and a new car, the new 992-generation 911 GT3 R. Fortunately, on the drivers’ side, changing every year isn’t too much. of a challenge
“There is a little bit of an adjustment period, but I think that’s what makes Porsche drivers so special, is that that adjustment period is a fraction of what it would be for someone outside the grid, if you flight,” explains team principal Steve Bortolotti. “Porsche does an incredible job of preparing their drivers through their ladder system, and once drivers are hired by Porsche, they do a really good job of teaching them how to perform and helping them understand the car, frankly.
“So it makes our job as a team substantially easier to have the revolving door, I guess, that we’ve had the last three years. It’s certainly not easy, but there’s a breakthrough with the work that Porsche has done behind the scenes with the drivers that has made it much easier for them to adjust than someone who doesn’t know the brand or the unique nature of the car.”
For this season, the driver line-up includes Patrick Pilet, known to IMSA fans for having been one of Porsche’s GTLM drivers, including winning the championship in 2015. Pilet is partnered with Klaus Bachler, for whom many of the circuits Americans will be new. Laurens Vanthoor joins endurance racing.
“It’s a great honor to be here with this great team, when they won the championship the last two years. Then, together with Patrick, he’s won the championship in GTLM, so he’s got so many races here, so much experience.”
Both drivers know that maintaining the success that Pfaff has had in recent years will not be an easy task, especially as they and the team work to get the best settings for the new car and figure out what it wants on tracks where it doesn’t have seen none mileage But they also understand that Pfaff’s culture is integrated with theirs and believe that even if the start is slow, they will return the team to the top step of the podium.
“It is always difficult to win, and what they have achieved is something very special”, declares Pilet. “We must not forget that we must be humble because it is a new car; it’s not like you come with a past car that you know perfectly well, you have all the settings and everything. We have to learn this car, we have to learn to work as a team as well. I’m not afraid of that, because we have exactly the same philosophy and his way of working is very nice. It’s a very good approach to racing, and there are real racers. But yes, we will go step by step. We will try to improve every race and the championship is long.”
The latest generation of Porsche’s GT3 racer had an inauspicious debut at the Rolex 24 At Daytona, where Pfaff struggled throughout the race to finish fifth in GTD PRO, one lap down. IMSA usually tries to introduce new cars as underdogs and adjust the Balance of Performance parameters to bring the car into contention. However, at Daytona, the Porsche teams were surprisingly off the pace. The 992-based GT3 R is quite a different machine to its predecessor, and some of these differences not only make it difficult for teams to adapt, but also played a part in what might have been a slight handicap to manufacturing: smaller 5mm intake restrictors. than the previous generation, in a big one.
“Certainly, I think it’s a lot more work than we expected for the season, because the car is very different in philosophy from the previous car,” says Bortolotti. “That said, the struggles that were well-documented since Daytona are something that we feel…there are two sides to every story, right? Certainly a role can be attributed to performance balance, but then the drivers they don’t say, “The car is perfect; put a cover on it.” So we have to focus on controlling what we can control and developing the platform that we have.
“That’s where our team’s focus has to remain with a new car, because the car is, from a suspension geometry point of view, substantially different to the old car; it doesn’t seem to have as much mechanical grip as the previous generation car. This has brought up new challenges and the way the car does lap time with its downforce, compared to the old car. It’s different. That doesn’t mean one is better or worse than the other, it’s just different and not a construct of what we had in the past. It’s like we’re starting over, and we just have to follow our engineering processes and the data and make the right decisions as a group to improve the car as best we can within the parameters set by IMSA.”
BoP can complicate the improvement process, but Pfaff believes the proven ingredients of his successful program will help the team find its way back to the top. Michael Levitt/Motorsport Images
When introducing new GT3 cars, manufacturers don’t always try to make them faster, because this is a homologated class of performance balance. The goal is usually to improve reliability, ride, comfort, tire degradation, and widen the configuration window whenever possible. But in doing so, teams have to learn new things.
“In handling, as a driver, there are some big differences with the old car, for sure,” explains Bachler. “He’s four years younger, so a lot has changed. The car is more balanced, mechanically, and also aerodynamically. In general, ABS and (traction control) were improved. But they are small things; it’s still a 911, so it’s not revolutionary. It’s evolution. And in the end, we just have to be as quick as possible with the development of the setup, because that’s new in this car.”
As the team heads into the second round of the WeatherTech Championship, the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring, a race they did not actually compete in in 2022, they are confident there will be some improvements from the Daytona result. . A change to the BoP will certainly help, and the team has a race to learn the new car under its belt. All of that, plus the way the team does things, their overall philosophy, lead them to believe they will be back in contention in the near future.
“It really starts when we’ve done a good job over the last few years of really defining our process that we think has led us to success, and believing in that process and working the process,” Bortolotti says. “It sounds like a cliché, but the reality is that we think we have a very open and contrarian culture where we’re not afraid to disagree with each other and challenge each other with new ideas, and it’s very collaborative. I think that’s only helped us with a new car and it’s helped us find success faster because we’re not afraid to talk to each other. And that’s not in a confrontational or negative way. I mean, it’s definitely in a healthy and respectful way that we communicate with each other.
“But at the end of the day, it’s the people who need to hear these things, who may be hearing something for the first time, who have confidence in what they do and in their work, to hear someone else’s critique and then request learning and understanding of what is being said. So I really think that success has been well documented on our part and we just have our little recipe that we know what makes us great, I hope, and we have to continue working on the plan.”
