Porsche is racing two of its greatest liveries again, and a Belgian is driving one
Two anniversaries, two icons, painted onto today's fastest prototype
Porsche is marking 75 years of motorsport and Penske 60 years of racing, and rather than a cake and a press release, they are doing it the right way: with paint. For the Road America 6 Hours on 2 August, the two factory Porsche 963s will carry tribute liveries to a pair of the marque's most beloved racing cars, and one of them puts a Belgian in the cockpit of a Can-Am legend.
Car number 6, the Sunoco 917/30 tribute
The number 6 car wears the blue and yellow Sunoco colours of the 1973 Porsche 917/30, the Can-Am destroyer driven by Mark Donohue and still one of the most ferocious racing cars Porsche ever built. Sharing the cockpit are Kevin Estre and Belgium's Laurens Vanthoor, which for a home audience is the detail that makes this more than an American story. A Belgian in a 917/30 tribute is a lovely piece of continuity.
Car number 7, the RS Spyder tribute
The number 7 car looks back to the Porsche RS Spyder and its 2007 overall victory in the American Le Mans Series, a car that famously beat far larger machinery through efficiency and precision. Julien Andlauer and Felipe Nasr drive it. It is a more recent memory than the 917/30, but no less significant to Porsche's American racing story.
Why now
The occasion is a double anniversary: 75 years of Porsche motorsport and 60 years of Team Penske. "Team Penske's partnership with Porsche is one of the most successful and enduring relationships in racing," said Roger Penske, and the two liveries are a neat way of saying so without a word of marketing. Heritage paint on a current car is the sincerest form of celebration in this sport.
The race itself
It all plays out at Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, one of the great old-school road courses, run to six hours for the first time this year as part of the Michelin Endurance Cup. A longer race gives the liveries more track time and the result more weight, so this is not a parade lap in fancy dress.
The car wearing the paint
Crucially, these are frontrunners, not museum pieces. The Porsche 963 is a hybrid LMDh prototype of around 707 hp, built in Flacht, Germany, and it has been the most successful LMDh car since the current rules arrived in 2023. Dressing the most effective sports prototype Porsche currently races in the colours of its ancestors is exactly how heritage liveries should be done.
AutoNext Take
Heritage liveries can be lazy, a shortcut to nostalgia when a team has nothing else to say. This is the opposite, because Porsche has plenty to say right now and is choosing to say it with genuine history rather than invented drama. The 917/30 and the RS Spyder are real high points, the 963 is a real winner, and putting a Belgian in the Sunoco car gives local fans a proper reason to tune in on 2 August. Sometimes a great livery is simply a great livery, and both of these are.
