Opinion: Why Last Privateer Standing Should Be Warning to WEC/IMSA

One day the gold of our present age in top-class prototype racing may well start to tarnish, writes Gary Watkins...

Longtime Autosport reporter Gary Watkins, one of the most recognized and longest-running voices in sports car racing, will be a monthly columnist on Sportscar365+ beginning with his first column below on the now-alarming lack-of privateer involvement across the two major endurance racing championships. - John Dagys

JDC-Miller Motorsports will take the start at this weekend’s Rolex 24 at Daytona with its Porsche 963. As usual. It will be the third appearance for the team’s GTP entry at the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship curtain-raiser. But where are all the other customer 963s that have raced in North America or the FIA World Endurance Championship? They’re parked and gathering dust. It wasn’t meant to be this way.

Much was made of the fact that privateers buying a LMDh car, or a LMH-based prototype for that matter, would go to the grid with identical equipment to the factory team running the same car in IMSA’s GTP class or Hypercar in WEC.

Porsche made even more of its decision to deliver the first 963s to independent operations in the same season as the machine started racing with the factory Penske squad in both series. It was an essential part of the program for a manufacturer that has a long history of selling its prototypes to privateers.

Yet here we are in year four of the so-called ‘golden era’ of sports car racing and the privateer has all but disappeared. JDC-Miller is the only one on either side of the Atlantic. Please don’t in any way regard the yellow Ferrari 499P that races in WEC as a customer car, however it is funded. A satellite factory entry would be a better description of the 24 Hours of Le Mans-winning Ferrari.

JOTA achieved its target of landing a factory deal, and did so in the space of two years, after graduating from LMP2 to Hypercar in the WEC with the 963 in 2023: the British team was picked up to mastermind Cadillac’s works campaign with the V-Series.R. Proton Competition, which had raced in both series with its pair of Porsches, is absent, too, on both fronts.

But it didn’t have to be that way. Proton could be racing with both its cars in WEC this year - with a little help from the Penske empire. That plan, which would have allowed Porsche Penske Motorsport to take up its automatic Le Mans entry for winning last year’s IMSA GTP title, fell over it seems on the intricacies of the wording of the WEC rulebook.