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A year in highlights: Porsche takes back-to-back IMSA titles

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IMSA
Porsche Penske Motorsport

The 2025 IMSA season is in the books and Porsche Penske Motorsport won all of the championships’ major titles. Again.

Though it didn’t come easy, the whole team rallied to take major titles with the #6 of Matt Campbell and Mathieu Jaminet and #7 of Felipe Nasr and Nick Tandy, joined for the longer races by some of Porsche’s most accomplished factory drivers.

With such a rollercoaster year, it felt natural to go back and pick out a handful of moments in greater detail, the sum of which added up to another PPM success - defending its already impressive 2024 season.

A stunning start

In both of the last two seasons, winning the Daytona 24 Hours has proved not only a prestigious affair and a motivator for the whole team, but a foundation upon which to build a title charge.

You don’t win at Daytona without flawless execution. Felipe Nasr, Nick Tandy and Laurens Vanthoor survived attacks by the #24 polesitter and the late-charging #60 cars to hold on to victory, while a podium proved a crucial start for the #6 too.

It was clear the driver line-up reshuffling - with Tandy joining Nasr in the #7 and Matt Campbell replacing Tandy alongside Jaminet in the #6, had worked well from the get-go.

Sebring further backed that up as the 963 added a race it was yet to win. For Tandy, it was the last remaining event on a resume which now includes Daytona, Le Mans, Nürburgring and Spa 24-hour race wins alongside the 12 hours of Sebring. He’s the only driver to win all of them overall.

The #7 led 166 of 353 laps and became the first team since 2017 to win Daytona and Sebring in the same season, and the first team in the GTP era which started in 2023 to win back-to-back endurance races - and arguably the two toughest ones at that.

If Daytona and Sebring are the most punishing long-distance races in IMSA, Long Beach, the third race, is a one-stop, one-hour-and-30-minute sprint. And the #7 car won that too.

It just shows the 963 and the PPM team have the range to execute and be successful across any IMSA race. The car is versatile and ready to meet whatever challenge is thrown at it.

An epic set of pitstops put the #7 and #6 into first and second having trailed before that, and this was the crucial factor in the win. Another prestigious victory secured at the Grand Prix of Long Beach.

It was a perfect start to the season, and one that was much needed given what happened later…

The first win

It is true that the #7 car had stolen the headlines for the first three races with its hat-trick of prestigious and versatile wins, but behind the scenes, Campbell and Jaminet felt confident that bad luck and circumstance had halted their victory bids and that their time would come.

The pairing have been good friends for years and even won an IMSA title together in GTD Pro in 2022, so they know how to get the most out of each other over a season to have the best chance of success and not to panic. A third and two second-places to start the season told the pair they were close.

Laguna Seca is where the season changed. Finally getting the victory their pace had deserved, without anything out of their control snatching it away.

It wasn’t straightforward; early contact with a GT car meant an early pitstop, but the undercut that created, and some sterling pace from Jaminet, made sure the car led after the #7 had stopped.

“Our first win of the season at last!” said Jaminet.

“We were involved in an incident early on, so I didn’t expect such a fantastic result. But a perfect team strategy got us to the front. It was a close battle to the end, even with our sister car.

“We managed to bring it home. Now I’m really looking forward to the race in Detroit.”

The key to success

No championship success comes without adversity. It’s clear that after a balance of performance change ahead of the Detroit race, things became a lot more difficult for Porsche Penske Motorsport.

But Campbell and Jaminet fought back in the face of adversity, and though Laguna was the breakthrough victory, but it was the races after perhaps that paved the way for the title.

A podium in Detroit, top fives at Road America and Watkins Glen, a seventh at Indianapolis and a third at Petit Le Mans meant the Indy result was the worst of the year and seven of the nine races were finished in the top five for the #6 car.

“I would say it was after Laguna where it really started to look like something was maybe going to be possible,” said Campbell.

“Consistency is key in a championship run, and more or less from Laguna onwards that's where we were consistent and getting those valuable points.

Certainly when this mid-season adversity struck, the long relationship between the two drivers was absolutely crucial in helping to reset and focus on taking the maximum possible result every weekend.

The finale

If the championship finale wasn’t stressful enough already, Campbell and Jaminet had to start it by walking nearly two kilometres to the track because the traffic was so bad it almost made them miss the recon laps!

Then, their friend and team-mate Julien Andlauer fell ill and was not cleared to race, so the #6 had to share the third driver of the #7 car, Laurens Vanthoor, for this crucial event.

After the race got going, the #6 hit the front but was stuck out on track at an early caution which meant every other car could pit and they had to stay out.

But from there, the tide began to turn.

“We had a very good car going into the race, the team did a really good prep,” said Jaminet.

“We still had some question marks after qualifying, you know, but we made the right choices on set-ups, and to say we had a good package is always nice.”

At the next caution where they needed a pitstop, the team timed it perfectly and pitted just before, jumping into the lead.

Them Jaminet delivered two lead-extending stints at the front before handing over to Vanthoor.

Ultimately the team fell two positions in the next round of stops but fought hard to take a podium at the end of the race.

Pride was the feeling of the day within the team.

“First of all, I couldn't be prouder of the team and the drivers,” said Porsche Motorsport Director LMDh, Urs Kuratle.

“Thanks, Larry [Vanthoor] for the double shift today. He is quite well-paid, so it's OK,” he joked.

“We won championships. Having a back-to-back championship in a BoP [balance of performance] championship is quite remarkable, and I couldn't be any prouder to be part of the team.”

While the #6 car sealed almost all of the major championships including drivers’ and teams’ titles, the #7 contributed to the manufacturers’ championship success and won the Michelin Endurance Cup for the longer-distance races. A clean sweep of the major titles for Porsche Penske Motorsport.

This season showed the team’s refusal to give up, even when times proved difficult during the season, the team pulled together and became stronger through the adversity, battling through to succeed in the target of winning all of IMSA’s major titles.

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© 2025 Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG

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