Racing, Politics and Power: Why Porsche’s WEC Threat Isn’t Really About Money
Porsche’s hints at quitting the WEC aren’t really about money, but about influence over the rules that shape the sport. Rivals like Ferrari and McLaren are showing that creative funding models exist, making withdrawal a short-sighted option. In endurance racing’s Platinum Age, walking away would only hand rivals the spotlight; Porsche’s real play is leverage, not exit.
Could Porsche exit the WEC?
Porsche’s success at the recent 6H of COTA notwithstanding, rumors have started to surface about the company’s long-term commitment to top-level sportscar racing. The Race, in an article bluntly titled “Porsche Casts Doubt On WEC Future”, asked the company’s VP of motorsport Thomas Laudenbach to confirm Porsche’s presence in the series next year. His answer was evasive:
“It’s too early...It is a tough period but we have to consider a lot of things.
But yeah, it’s probably not the easiest time, I agree with that.”
Laudenbach is right to reference the European car industry’s challenges: legislation mandating EV adoption, collapsing demand for luxury cars in China, and a Chinese EV sector advancing so aggressively it keeps every German automotive CEO awake at night.
Closer to home, Porsche is struggling while direct rivals like Ferrari are dominant. Its parent company, Volkswagen AG, is stressed to the point of closing facilities in Germany.
Yet, against that backdrop, I believe Porsche’s comments about the WEC aren’t about lap times or even money, at least not directly; they’re about power, positioning, and whether Stuttgart can influence the rules of the game.
Yes, Porsche’s WEC/IMSA programs have financial implications, but it would be shocking if Porsche weren’t already exploring creative funding models, as rivals like Ferrari and McLaren have done. We’ll return to those.
The larger point is this: Laudenbach’s hesitation isn’t really about what’s happening on the track. Motorsport has always played out on multiple levels: what you see in a race broadcast, the technical battles behind the rules, and the politics that decide who gets to write them.
Porsche’s calculus is shaped far more by those hidden layers than by lap times alone, and believe it or not, money is probably not the issue, or at least, it shouldn’t be, because motorsport, when utilized properly, is not just a cost sink.
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In less than 500 words.
Let’s get one thing straight: Motorsport is marketing, nothing more, nothing less.
Anyone with an understanding of the difficulties German car manufacturers are now facing who hears Laudenbach’s comments will immediately think Porsche’s WEC fate is tied to the cost of running the program.
That’s not the whole story, but it’s important to discuss.
Motorsport generates passion, but passion doesn’t pay for wind tunnels, carbon fiber, or pit crews. For all the romance attached to it, racing has always been about marketing.
When Porsche, Ferrari, Toyota, or McLaren invest in racing, they’re not primarily doing it to indulge enthusiasts. They’re doing it because on-track involvement has the potential to raise their stature and in turn generate more car sales (“what wins on Sunday sells on Monday”).
The math works out even better if they can get others to pay for their on-track involvement, and this is of course where we have to talk about sponsors.
From the very beginning, sponsorship has been the fuel that keeps the engines turning. Wealthy patrons, tobacco brands, oil companies, tech firms, luxury houses, all at some point or another paying to buy into the sport, which in turn keeps the on-track action heated.
The pattern is always the same: money comes in because those backers expect something out.
Greater notoriety.
Brand association with speed and success.
Access to passionate fans who, eventually, become customers.
There is no motorsport as you and I enjoy it without this exchange.
The idea of “pure” racing, untouched by commercial motives, is a fantasy. The teams and manufacturers that last are the ones that understand racing is an advertising platform with lap times attached (case in point, Ron Dennis understood this first and in the process transformed Formula 1 into the powerhouse we know today).
This reality doesn’t cheapen racing; it’s not as if brands are paying to affect outcomes on-track directly.
If anything, being clear-eyed about what makes the racing world go-round clarifies why the stakes are so high. A Le Mans victory or a championship win is worth more than a trophy; it’s a marketing multiplier, and if teams can make their sponsors happy, well then they’ve just earned another shot or two at trying again.
For a factory team, the brand is its own sponsor, and Porsche sell cars because they have a history of being a titan on-track. In this line of thinking, to leave the WEC not at a time when only a handful of competitors are racing, but nearly all of their primary rivals are duking it out, seems very defeatist on their part.
Then again, if racing really is just another outlet for ads, then based on accepted corporate practices it shouldn’t be surprising to see Porsche’s WEC program on the chopping block, even if this seems like a puzzling strategic misstep coming from a company with Porsche’s pedigree.
Now is the time for Porsche to fight for the apex
In a business, you’re either a cost driver or a revenue driver, and this distinction is made even more clear when a company is public-facing.
Unfortunately for marketing departments everywhere, it’s often very hard to tie a euro of marketing spend to an exact amount of euros in revenue, so it’s seen as a cost center.
Now, does marketing generate revenue?
Absolutely, because you can’t sell anything if people don’t know about what you offer. Marketing is something you have to keep doing in perpetuity to keep customers aware of your products (and remind them constantly you still exist, not a trivial matter in a world in which there is so much churn), and over time the idea is that revenues snowball much faster than the costs it takes to generate those sales.
Granted, Hypercar programs are expensive to run, with some estimates putting a two-car program somewhere in the rough range of 20-30 million euros per WEC season, and others putting those costs closer to the 45 million euro mark. And yet, the WEC program is actually a relatively cost-effective way of capping off the company’s racing ecosystem with the 963 serving as the perfect “halo car”.
Racing in the WEC is an order of magnitude less than keeping an F1 program going, and while it may be difficult to quantify exactly how much each WEC season generates in incremental Porsche road-car sales, it’s hard to argue that having several 963s shooting past several other Porsche GT3 cars provides ample material for exciting marketing copy.
More broadly, it’s always been shocking to me that in tough times people pull away from marketing because this is exactly the time when brands should be creatively leaning in!
Jean-Claude Biver is a man who transformed the watch industry, which itself goes hand-in-hand with motorsport. Here is what he said nearly a decade ago regarding marketing in China, a key area for watches also which at the time was experiencing a pullback in spending:
“You know, five years ago, everybody went to China and nobody cared about America.
Now, because we have a problem with China, everybody goes to America and everybody forgets China. It’s totally nonsense and we are not doing this. It’s the biggest opportunity.
This is why we are investing so much. We are investing like never before in China.
Number one, it’s an opportunity. And number two, what is happening now? As everybody takes the money out of China and goes and put it in America, where our voice is becoming much louder.
We pay less and we have more voice. So it’s the best way to invest and that’s what we’re doing.”
In this regard, it is shocking to me that Porsche would even consider removing itself now or in several years from a WEC program. It needs to sell cars, and the way it’s thinking through going about this is to move farther out of the public eye?
And let’s be clear, Jean Claude Biver was talking about leaning in during tough times for an industry. That’s certainly the case for automobiles generally but we are in the Platinum Age of endurance racing where, as we’ve already said, many of Porsche’s main rivals will in fact be in front of new and existing customers on a consistent basis.
Let’s assume however that Porsche has looked at its costs, factoring in sponsor contributions, and thinks the gap is still too for Volkswagen AG’s shareholders to swallow at the moment.
How have Porsche not looked at other ways of closing that gap, which their on-track rivals are already implementing to great effect.
Racing doesn’t just sell cars…it sells Hypercars
All of us dream of owning a piece of the on-track magic, but for a very lucky few, the opportunity is available to fully live the dream, and some forward-thinking racing brands have capitalized on this.
For years, Ferrari has been developing special race cars to enhance the experience of special clients, but this was taken to the next level with the 499P Modificata program.
If you are an extremely loyal Ferrari customer, the company will manage a car that’s nearly identical to the 499P that’s running in the WEC, including transport to tracks around the world.
As the world splits off into the have-nots and the have-everythings, I can imagine demand for such a program being constrained only by how many 499P Modificatas Ferrari can produce and manage, and the accounts I’ve gathered seem to confirm that.
Consider this excerpt from Graham Goodwin on The Week In Sports Cars on May 4th 2025:
“20 of those cars [at Imola in 2024]. These are customer 499 Modificatas, and I think the order book is almost double that.
And effectively, it’s funding their factory program.”
McLaren, a company that is always on the leading edge of commerce in motorsports, is actually set to pre-sell a sample of its racing cars for 2026 and 2027 - these haven’t even hit the track yet - via an auction.
However, they are also taking a page out of Ferrari’s playbook by selling customers a version of its upcoming Hypercar.
Here is Zak Brown speaking with commentators in the broadcast booth during the recent ELMS race at Silverstone:
“It’s two cars for the FIA World Endurance Championship confirmed, but that’s not the only Hypercar we’re going to be seeing out of McLaren because with information we’ve been getting from from your team you’ve taken some cues from what Ferrari have been successful with. We’re going to see is it 30 of those track cars to selected customers?
Zak Brown: Sales are going very well there. It’s a big boy car. So the people that want to see what it’s like to drive a real Le Mans race car, they’re going to have an opportunity and the whole experience that comes along with it, hanging out with the team and seeing the car in development and joining us at Le Mans, et cetera.
And then we’ve actually sold the race cars as well. And we sold the first six in about seven phone calls. And it’s exciting; I think everyone’s excited to see McLaren back in sports car racing. ”
What’s stopping Porsche from doing exactly this?
The reported cost of the 499P Modificata program is about 5 million euros per customer, so doing some rough calculations, at around 5 million euros per Modificata-style unit, 20–30 customer Hypercars gets you to 100–150 million gross; even net of ops/logistics, that meaningfully covers several WEC works campaigns.
Porsche already have the 963 RSP developed, and there is no doubt in my mind - not one - that the company could sell as many more road-going 963s as it is able to produce.
After all, this is Porsche we are talking about, with all the heritage, history and passion that go along with the name.
Surely someone at Porsche has floated this.
Surely Porsche could sell more, and more valuable sponsorships.
With the recent announcement that privateers can run Hypercars in the Asian Le Mans Series, there is a likely customer base for traditional, track-configured 963s as well.
Also, let’s not forget that Audi, sister company under Volkswagen AG, is set to enter the ludicrously expensive world of F1 in 2026 via the acquisition of Sauber. Getting in was expensive, keeping things going on track will be stratospherically expensive and sure, it’s Audi not Porsche, but the money all rolls up to the same parent company and out to the same shareholders.
So, yes, times are tough for Porsche, the company, for Volkswagen AG and for European carmakers, but all of this discussion so far leads me to believe that any talk of perhaps leaving the WEC is not really about money, because they have plenty of viable options within their remit to make the 963 factory program work.
I believe that what this is all really about is the game that happens off-track, which is often where wins are determined, far away from any paddock or pit lane.
There are several levels of competition in this framework. We’ll return to them further on, but for now we should focus on the two off-track issues at play for Porsche, explicitly mentioned by Laudenbach:
The Balance of Performance (BoP)
The long-term convergence (or lack thereof) between LMH and LMDh prototype sports cars
Balance of Performance: A pillar of the “Platinum Age” of sportscar racing
BoP is controversial, but it’s foundational. I’ve written before that keeping manufacturers engaged is the first rule of modern motorsport, and you do that by preventing two things: first, one or two teams being so dominant that it causes others to question their efforts, and second, a cost spiral where everyone feels like they have to spend more and more just to stay afloat, let alone win.
If you can do this, more teams will come, and more teams mean stronger grids, more competitive racing, and faster fan growth.
Fans sometimes say “let the chips fall where they may and let the best team win,” but that’s strategically naive. If one manufacturer dominates year after year, the rest of the field starts to question their spend, new entrants hesitate, and casual fans check out.
To stop this, you need mechanisms to keep the playing field tight:
F1 uses a cost cap
Spec-leaning series like IndyCar (with spec chassis, constrained aero, two engine OEMs) inherently limit the gravest performance differences (albeit admittedly not disparities in spending)
WEC and IMSA rely on BoP, adjusting weight and power to keep grids competitive
Does BoP decide everything?
Hardly.
It touches only the car’s baseline. Strategy, driver skill, pit stops, and execution remain decisive. A team could have the most favorable BoP and still lose with poor decisions.
So yes, Porsche was stung at Le Mans 2025, the year in WEC is rough after they took the driver’s championship last year.
But it’s hard to see how that would be enough to make Porsche walk away.
Why BoP alone isn’t a justification
Porsche have been racing for decades. They know success comes down to execution as much as machinery. Penske’s motto “Penske Perfect” reflects exactly that.
The Le Mans BoP is separate from the WEC BoP; Porsche obviously knows this. If Le Mans is the ultimate goal (and make no mistake, for Roger Penske, it is), one frustrating year shouldn’t justify abandoning the whole program.
Toyota has been just as vocal about BoP frustrations this season, with equally disappointing results. Yet they aren’t threatening to quit. If anything, Toyota seems to understand that leaving during what I’ve called the “Platinum Age” of sportscar racing would only hand more spotlight to rivals.
Which raises the bigger question: if BoP alone doesn’t explain Porsche’s posture, what does?
Unlike BoP, there is historical precedent for legitimate concern over the ongoing separation of the LMH and LMDh rulesets.
What’s past is prologue in motorsports
Whereas the BoP debate collapses under serious scrutiny, the issue of technical convergence is far more significant, and it sits at the heart of one of motorsport’s most damaging historical episodes.
Among hardcore IndyCar fans, “The Split” is still the shorthand explanation for why the series underperforms relative to its potential. The full history is complex, but one truth is clear: U.S. open-wheel racing would look very different today if its stakeholders had managed to agree on technical coherence.
In the 1970s, IndyCar was sanctioned by the United States Auto Club (USAC). At the same time, another open-wheel series (Formula 5000) was running, and there were discussions about a merger. A unified set of rules could have created a single, compelling championship with the best drivers, cars, and teams in North America.
Instead, the merger never happened. Worse, in 1979, the leading teams splintered off to form Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART); technical disagreements between USAC and CART followed. Teams were forced to constantly adjust, never certain their configuration would be competitive, or even allowed, from one event to the next.
From the perspective of teams and drivers, this was intolerable. Why invest millions in engines or chassis when you couldn’t be sure the rules wouldn’t tilt against you the next season? The long-term effect was corrosive: fragmentation, fan confusion, and a loss of credibility that American open-wheel racing has never fully recovered from.
Which brings us back to Porsche. Their demand for coherence between LMH and LMDh rulesets is perfectly understandable. In IMSA, their performance has outshone their WEC results, and clearly the uncertainty around how the two technical formulas are balanced leaves them uneasy. The logic is straightforward: align the rules, ensure parity, and wherever you race, you know you’re on even footing.
More consistency should, in theory, mean more certainty, and, crucially, happier manufacturers. But as USAC and CART proved, convergence is very difficult. First you need consensus that convergence is necessary (not a given). Then you have to define what “coherent” actually means (much harder). And finally, you have to absorb the enormous switching costs of aligning programs built on different foundations.
The Race reports that LMH/LMDh convergence may not arrive until the next decade; Porsche know this. Which is why the idea they would walk away now is contradictory: leaving the WEC would mean forfeiting any influence in shaping the ruleset they claim is so central to their future.
Is it really logical to believe they would leave, then return under a ruleset in which they had little to no involvement?
So when Laudenbach floats the possibility of an exit, it isn’t really about money. It isn’t even about BoP or technical minutiae.
At least not directly.
It’s about the layers of motorsport that you don’t see play out on track but are arguably the most important because they literally determine how that racing looks in the first place.
These two remaining layers are the endless jockeying over how rules are interpreted, and the political maneuvering that decides who gets to write them in the first place.
The three levels of motorsport
Back to the framework I mentioned earlier. In motorsport, there are really three levels of competition:
The sport you see on track – cars, drivers, lap times.
The sport behind the sport – exploiting loopholes, interpreting gray areas, or better yet, shaping the rulebook to your advantage.
The politics that underpin both – the ongoing maneuvering, lobbying, and influence games that determine whose vision of the rules prevails.
When Thomas Laudenbach speaks about Porsche potentially leaving the WEC, he isn’t really talking about level one, even if that would be understandable: Porsche won the WEC drivers’ title in 2024, and 2025 has been highly unremarkable. His frustration is with levels two and three: the rules game and the politics around it.
As soon as regulations are announced, engineers and team principals will pore over them trying to find any way to bend the spirit of these regulations to their will, while staying within the letter of those rules.
For instance, the recent McLaren flexi-wing controversy certainly caused a lot of discussion between Team Principals and the FIA. Going back even further, Colin Chapman’s dual-chassis Lotus 88 went ahead because the regulations did not specify whether the word “chassis” was singular or plural, but was quickly disallowed after it was unveiled because teams, fearing they would be at a huge technical disadvantage, protested to the FIA and won.
That part is crucial: how rules are followed ultimately comes down to value judgments made by people, so their relationships with those jockeying for any advantage may, however subtly, affect those calls.
So you can be sure that politics play an enormous part of motorsport, and this is the game Porsche is playing.
Porsche’s outsize role in the WEC
If Porsche left the WEC it would certainly be a shock, but it wouldn’t be the first to leave; it wouldn’t even be the first globally known, Volkswagen AG-owned brand to leave.
Indeed, Lamborghini recently exited the WEC after the two-car manufacturer rule went into effect. To be fair, endurance prototypes were always an ambitious stretch for a brand whose racing pedigree was still under construction. Their withdrawal wasn’t shocking, rather it reflected the realities of cost, BoP, and the marketing calculus changing once results failed to keep pace with expectations.
Isotta Fraschini, Vanwall and Glickenhaus all left competition as well. Perhaps to recoup some of the cost of Hypercar development, Glickenhaus developed a road-going version of its 007, but could it ever hope to produce enough on a scale to self-fund a two-car WEC program?
But Porsche is different: it has decades of heritage and the scale to outmuscle obstacles that could, and have, derailed smaller competitors.
What Porsche is seemingly trying to do by floating an exit is to leverage its influence, and bank on the assumption that the WEC will not want to let them go, perhaps fearing that fans will see the competition as somehow diminished without the Stuttgart titan, or that other manufacturers will also run for the exit if they see an established brand like Porsche leaving.
If public reactions from some of their peers are any indication, this is a topic of active discussion behind-the-scenes. In a recently published piece in Sportscar365, both Thomas Laudenbach (with Porsche running a 963 LMDh) and Toyota Gazoo Racing’s technical director David Floury (representing the GR010 LMH) were asked their points of view on matters of leveling the playing field, and they were not in agreement: the former wants some kind of development limitations without a BoP, while the latter doesn’t agree with the premise that addressing convergence would solve the WEC’s competitive balancing.
What all this comes down to is that by speaking publicly through key team members such as Thomas Laudenbach, Porsche have the opportunity to test its views and assumptions with the public; if those views resonate well, they have leverage with which to go back to the sanctioning bodies to swing regulations closer to their liking.
Unfortunately for Porsche, if Toyota’s comments are any indication, Porsche is losing ground in the politics of who defines the rules. Toyota is openly questioning Porsche’s framing, and Ferrari, the other main player on the WEC grid, is unlikely to say much in a season when it has been dominant.
So will anyone follow Porsche out the door?
At the moment, it seems unlikely.
Ultimately, manufacturers care about engagement, and WEC races have been breaking attendance records in 2025. Even Peugeot, whose parent company Stellantis has arguably been having an even harder time than Volkswagen AG, and who have also been very vocal about its treatment under the WEC’s BoP, have not only committed to staying on the grid, but have also hinted at the possibility of a new Hypercar to follow the 9x8.
In light of all this, can Porsche really hope to unilaterally force a move away from the BoP, or is the WEC facing a future without one of the most storied names in racing?
Is the 963 program done for?
History shows that in motorsport, nobody wins when the tent is split. CART needed the prestige of USAC’s Indy 500, and USAC needed CART’s star power; both lost when they failed to reconcile. The same dynamic exists today. Porsche and the WEC need each other, and let’s not forget Roger Penske, for whom an overall Le Mans victory remains the final jewel missing from a legendary career.
Make no mistake: Porsche racing is not going anywhere, we will continue to see Porsches on-track.
There’s no reason the 963 can’t remain an option for customer teams (assuming Porsche is ok with losing some of its control over the narrative and performance arc of its flagship sports car), and Porsche’s GT3 ecosystem, one of the most extensive in the world in one of the world’s most popular racing classes, is surely far too lucrative and too embedded to disappear.
What is at stake here is not Porsche’s racing presence, but its factory flagship program.
Nevertheless, cutting is easy. Converting the halo into cash is leadership. Porsche is one of the world’s most storied companies and it’s hard to see a scenario where they would indiscriminately put any of their racing activities at risk.
For the on-track concerns, fans who still rage about the Balance of Performance should remember that stability is precisely what attracted brands such as Ford, Genesis and McLaren on top of the incredible grid the WEC already has in 2025.
Current Hypercar rules are homologated until 2032 and if the long-term goal is to eliminate BoP, the pathway will be slow and political. In the meantime, as long as grandstands stay full and grids keep swelling, what incentive is there to change overnight?
Which is why Porsche’s public comments look less like a genuine withdrawal threat and more like a bargaining position. Float the extreme option, walking away, and then negotiate down to something they can live with. What might that “something” look like?
1. Regulatory concessions
BoP reform: greater transparency and independent auditing, reducing the perception of Ferrari favoritism.
Convergence milestones: even if full LMH/LMDh unification waits until next decade, Porsche could push for interim compromises.
2. Commercial leverage
Global visibility: stronger commitments that Porsche’s brand will be seen even more.
3. Financial offsets
Reduced entry fees, freight subsidies, or other cost breaks.
Partnership guarantees: new global sponsors (Rolex-style) that increase ROI for all participants.
4. Political influence
More voice in FIA/ACO technical working groups.
Early role in shaping the post-2032 ruleset to ensure alignment with Porsche’s investment.
Seen in that light, Porsche’s “exit talk” isn’t about abandoning the WEC. It’s about reminding everyone, rivals, regulators, and even its own board pulling the purse strings, that endurance racing’s Platinum Age cannot shine without Stuttgart at its center.
Whether or not Porsche gets everything it wants, the message is clear: this is less about money than it is about power.
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