Only two weeks after the Porsche 919 Hybrid’s winning debut race in Mexico City, the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) heads to Austin (Texas, U.S.). On Saturday, September 17th, the sixth of nine rounds of the 2016 WEC will take place on the Circuit of The Americas (COTA) – for Porsche it is the next stop on its title defence mission. The demanding track is known as the favourite of the modern Formula One circuits.
High ambient temperatures can be expected and the timing for the race provides an extra challenge: The six-hour race will start at 17:00 hours with sunset being at 19:32 hours.
Porsche leads the manufacturers’ world championship after having won four races in 2016 – Silverstone, Le Mans, the Nürburgring and Mexico City. It is the third season for the innovative Porsche 919 Hybrid. During this year’s five championship rounds Porsche has scored 201 points, Audi is second (158) and Toyota follows in third position (112). In the drivers’ world championship, this year’s Le Mans winning trio of Romain Dumas (FR), Neel Jani (CH) and Marc Lieb (DE) has extended its lead to 41 points ahead of the best placed Toyota drivers. The first Audi drivers follow in P3 with 74.5 points. The second Porsche works drivers crew of Timo Bernhard (DE), Brendon Hartley (NZ) and Mark Webber (AU) recently achieved two consecutive race wins and improved to fifth in the standings. The reigning World Champions have scored 53.5 points.
The Weissach developed Porsche 919 Hybrid competes in the highest category of the 31 car field, which is the class one Le Mans prototypes (LMP1). The two-time Le Mans winning car produces a system power of over 900 HP (662 kW). Its combustion engine is a ground breaking downsizing motor: the very compact two-litre V4 turbocharged petrol engine drives the rear axle with almost 500 PS (368 kW). Two different energy recovery systems – brake energy from the front and exhaust energy – feed a lithium ion battery that, on command, passes on the energy to an E machine to power the front axle with an extra boost of over 400 PS (294 kW).
“This year’s World Championship has shown an extremely tight competition,