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Porsche recommits to Le Mans through 2018

Porsche is back at the forefront of sports endurance racing, and it has no intention of leaving anytime soon. The German automaker announced that it will stay in the LMP1 class of both the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the FIA World Endurance Championship through the end of 2018. So its rivals can look forward to a good three more years of heated competition at least. After winning at Le Mans a record 16 times, Porsche dropped out of competition for top honors in 1998. It returned to the front of the grid last year with the 919 Hybrid, winning the 6 Hours of Sao Paulo at the end of its debut season. Its greater victory, however, came earlier this summer when the revised version took a dominant 1-2 finish in the famous French endurance race. That put the team from Weissach in the lead for the World Endurance Championship, which it (spoiler alert!) further extended this weekend with another 1-2 finish in the inaugural 6 Hours of Nurburgring. "Motorsport is an important part of Porsche's brand identity – but not an end in itself. Racing has got to help the technology of future road going sports cars," said Porsche chief Matthias Muller in the statement below. "It was the revolutionary efficiency regulations that convinced us to return to top-level motorsport for the 2014 season. That we have managed to take the crown jewels of endurance racing in only our second year, with a one-two result in Le Mans in 2015 with our highly innovative and complex 919, is an outstanding testimony to the people in the Weissach research and development centre. The competition bears fruits and we see further potential for future synergy between the racing and road car programmes. This is why we have extended the programme." FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) and 24-Hours of Le Mans Porsche confirms LMP1 programme up to end of 2018 Stuttgart. Porsche continues racing into the future with the 919 Hybrid: The board of Porsche AG has decided to extend the Le Mans prototype programme until the end of the 2018 season. With its ground-breaking concept – a downsizing turbo engine and powerful energy recovery systems, combined with an extreme lightweight design – the racing car with a performance of around 1,000 hp serves as a research laboratory for future sports car technology. Matthias Muller, Chairman of the Executive Board of Porsche AG, said: "Motorsport is an important part of Porsche's brand identity – but not an end in itself.

Mercedes may be working on a new electric car dubbed 'Ecoluxe'

Automobile has a lengthy piece this month on how the four German mass-market luxury manufacturers each plan to go after Tesla with their own electric vehicles. It was written by Georg Kacher, the magazine's European bureau chief, and the English version came a month after he wrote the German-language original for Autobild. Tesla isn't exactly a threat to the Germans, but, according to the report, the Model S is planting the right kinds of seeds in niches that are important to the luxury players. The thinking is that - in addition to needed electric vehicles anyway for stricter US regulations - it's better to start designing the machinery now. The article posited Porsche's attack would rest on the coming Panamera platform, but a big hurdle would be battery placement. Unable to find one large space for a lithium-ion pack, engineers would instead put batteries everywhere they could, for a supposed tally of some "108 battery pouches" throughout the body. A few days after the Automobile piece, however, Porsche publicly said it had no intention of challenging the Model S, because the enthusiastic driving the brand is known for doesn't jive with useful range. In Kacher's retelling, Mercedes' plans are even more ambitious, supposedly taking aim at the Model S and the coming Model X. It would do this with an investment in excess of $2 billion in a program called "Ecoluxe" – Mercedes has no brand division akin to BMW's i and Audi's e-tron. The new brand would create a four-strong family of bespoke electric vehicles: a smaller platform with a wheelbase around 106 inches and a larger one with a wheelbase around 118 inches. In addition, the range would have "provisions for rear-wheel drive, all-wheel drive, and rear-wheel steering." The numbers are impressive: seating for seven in the larger vehicles, both longer than 16 feet, front and rear storage areas, ratings of up to 610 horsepower and production capacity of 80,000 units per year. When would we see such creatures? Perhaps as soon as 2019. We do know that if Tesla can knock the Model X over the outfield fence, automakers are going to have to do something. We don't know what the chances are that Ecoluxe is Mercedes' first move - but such a plan could help explain the weird Mercedes concept spied in October.

Porsche to offer next-gen 911 GT3 with a manual

Porsche may have offended some of the purists among its customer base when it rolled out the current 911 GT3 with only a dual-clutch transmission. But according to Car and Driver, the next GT3 will get a stick again. The development comes as the good folks at Zuffenhausen (and Weissach) attempt to balance the instant-shifting benefits of a DCT with the direct involvement of a conventional manual transmission. On the one hand, Porsche introduced a new seven-speed manual with the 991-generation model. On the other, it didn't offer that manual (or any manual for that matter) on the GT3 or even the more hardcore GT3 RS. In response to customer demand for a more back-to-basics approach, Porsche is preparing to introduce a new variant expected to be called the 911 R, with a manual, no turbos, and skinnier tires for a more linear driving experience. And the Cayman GT4 was launched only with a manual instead of a DCT. "The GT3 is full of systems that make sense on the track, but for the purist, there may be something lost," Porsche GT chief Andreas Preuninger told C/D. "It is our long-term goal to have the customer decide between the two approaches." In addition to the DCT, the current GT3 also features a four-wheel steering system. The shift (so to speak) back to a manual option in the next GT3 will undoubtedly come as a welcome development for those purists offended by the DCT-only option – to say nothing of Porsche's movement towards SUVs, diesels, and hybrids. That manual option may not, however, offer all seven forward cogs available in the stick-shift Carrera. One way or another, though, we don't doubt that most customers would still go for the dual-clutch option over the single on they can actuate themselves. Related Video: