The Future Of Porsche's Racing Tech Transfer to Street Cars? Software.

Motor Trend

7 hours ago

On April 12, 2025, Porsche made history, becoming the first automaker to win three classes of professional motorsports with three different powertrains on the same day. In California, a 963 hybrid won the LMDh class and took the overall win at the IMSA Long Beach Grand Prix while a 911 GT3 R won the GTD Pro class in the same race with pure combustion engine. Across the country, the 99X Electric won the Miami e-prix in Formula E on pure battery power. Different as they may be, each shares a common link with the Porsche road cars you can buy today and in the future.
Porsche uses motorsport to drive tech innovation, focusing on software as the key to improving road cars. Software impacts drivability and efficiency, with lessons from racing series shared across projects. This approach is cost-effective and enhances both performance and development.
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'We have a philosophy that, yes, motorsport is part of our DNA,' Porsche vice president of motorsport, Thomas Laudenbach, told MotorTrend , 'and I cannot imagine Porsche without motorsport, but we are not doing motorsport for the sake of its own. We do motorsport to give a contribution to the company, and this is exactly what we are talking about.'
In the past, tech transfer from racing to the road consisted mostly of more power and better aerodynamics, but as everything on a car has become linked and controlled by computers, the next frontier is in the software that controls them. Hard parts like engines, suspension, and aerodynamics are fairly mature technologies, but automotive software is still in its relative infancy.
'It is still a very steep curve,' Laudenbach said. 'It's growing so fast, it's changing so fast…I mean, if you look at the combustion engine, obviously development [today] is slower like this because you know, it is more and more difficult to make the [next] step. If you look at the software, not only software itself, how we approach it, the tools…I would say [it is] still very steep, the curve, how fast it changes.' It's All in the Software
In all three racing series, physical parts on the cars are heavily regulated, particularly when it comes to batteries and electric motors. Software, though, isn't and has become the most important factor in improving lap times and efficiency.
'Everything you can do on the software has a much bigger impact and a much bigger effect in the drivability,' Porsche Formula E driver and reigning champion, Pascal Wehrlein, told MotorTrend , 'because yeah, there's also software things in in a combustion engine, but the effect is just smaller than an electric car. We pay a lot of attention to the software and I would say that is our biggest toolbox for setting up the car and getting quicker and so on. And there's just so many more things you can do on the software compared to a combustion engine.
'How much we are going into the details,' he continued, 'into the smallest details, I would say on the software side is even more than what I did when I was in Formula One, just because there are so many different options on, you know, the four-wheel drive, how to set up the four-wheel drive. How much work do you want to have at the front? At which point in time in the corner you want to have more front torque or less? What you can do on the braking side, on the [energy] recuperation, setting it up for different corners? In certain corners, where it's high speed, you need something different than in the low-speed corner, but then also when the track is bumpy, or not bumpy. We are going so much into the details.'
Lauderbach agrees. 'It's absolutely right. We always love about talking about hardware. And I did develop combustion engines for 18 years, so I'm a real mechanical guy, and it's absolutely right, probably the bigger part is software. And but this is the good thing about it because some things [physical] we are not allowed to touch [under the regulations]. But we have a big freedom of software, and I think that's good because racing should give freedom where it is beneficial also for your brand. And that's certainly in software and I think this is probably also the biggest change between the projects.'
Because the applications are so different, it's not as simple as just sharing code between teams in different series or with the engineers working on the road cars. Instead, it's the exchange of knowledge and ideas which brings this tech to cars like the 911 GTS T-hybrid.
'It's for sure not a carryover part,' Laudenbach said, 'but it's from learning about the difficulties, about the weak points, about the solutions, for sure they benefit from each other.
'When you have more than one project,' he said, 'you just work it on in a wider range and then you always find synergy. These two programs (Formula E and LMDh) benefit from each other in various areas. And at the same time, this is linked so close to our road car development. We work a lot on road cars as well in the motorsport department and do benefit from each other. If you tell your engineers, oh, please sit together with these guys from this program, then you know what they do? They sit together for an hour, they chat, and they go to it. If you sit side by side, if you meet each other with a coffee, this is the best way to benefit from each other. These two programs benefit, but also this is very beneficial to what we do on road cars, even inside the motorsport department.'
It's not just about making the cars faster, either. Power makes heat, and heat needs to be dealt with before it breaks things, on a race car or a road car. Efficiency matters in racing because using less fuel or electricity allows you to go farther between pit stops, and it matters for the same reason on the street.
'Look at Formula E,' Laudenbach said. 'It's not our battery, but we control the thermal system [and] energy management. That's a lot of control systems. That's a lot of software. I mean, if we work with AI in the meantime and there you can learn a lot of the one side and transfer it to the other. Sometimes then you figure out that, okay, I can only take this because this [other technology] is not allowed. It's never carry over one to one.
'But you still learn a lot about how to handle it. It's software functions, it's control systems, it's sometimes also just the tools that we use, the approach that you take is not always [about] the final product. In the end, you have the product, there, no matter if it's software, hardware, but it's also, how do you approach it, because you're always looking for being most efficient. Especially Formula E, [where] we have a cost cap. It's a factor to say, okay, can I reach a certain goal with the smallest amount of money? These kind of things we always exchange because it's in the background.' Cheaper and Easier
Not only are software learnings easier to transfer between programs, software is also easier to iterate on and less expensive to develop.
'Compared to hardware,' he said, 'it's not that cost intensive. Yes, you have you have the labor. But you know, you' not always having to change your bits and pieces. And don't forget, if you talk about bits and pieces, you always have to stop and throw parts away. So it's a lot more, let's say, cost efficient.'
Whether in the office or trackside, the way data is managed and analyzed has changed a lot in the past decade.
'If we would do it like 10 years ago,' Lauderbach said, 'where the engineer himself goes through all the raw data, that doesn't work anymore. You got to feed your data through automatic analysis. It's just more [a question of], how do you analyze? How do you get something out in order to make the car quicker? This is a lot more or this is high sophisticated, a lot more automation and algorithms, than 10 years ago.
'It's a software basically to calculate what the car's doing because you got sensors. Obviously, you want to calculate some figures, you see what the car's doing in order to feature simulations. The simulation then gives you back again in which direction you have to go.'