Porsche hasn’t quite got the proverbial cigar out yet. They are not sitting back on a chez lounge and mouthing ‘catch up’ to its Gen4 rivals. But the indications are that it currently stands, at the very least, in a very good position right now.
It has very few testing days for its Gen4 development car planned until the Valencia and Jarama pre-season tests in mid-November. Instead, it is waiting for homologation and also the final greenlight for its second factory team, which practically speaking in the sense of components and lead times to the Spanish tests can be activated quickly.
The drill down in to that complex topic will come soon. For now, its Gen4 project appears to be in very good shape with the Olivier Champenois led design of the powertrain seeming to be an early pacesetter.
Outwardly, Porsche will attempt to stay humble. It still does not know exactly what Stellantis, Nissan, Jaguar, Mahindra and Lola have up their collective sleeves.
The way things work are that word starts to trickle out after testing in hushed tones but often with little detail. This time the unofficial hierarchy is Porsche (fast and sorted); Stellantis (fast-ish but improving quickly); Lola (fast but fragile); Jaguar (evolving); Nissan (work to do) and Mahindra (early days).
Porsche publicly seem confident but they, like all others, are reticent to commit detail.
“We are doing our programme, we are in the plan, this means we went from integrating the system, marrying our parts with the common parts, and we arrived already in performance testing, so all is looking good so far,” Porsche’s director of factory motorsport for Formula E, Florian Modlinger, told Formula E Notebook last month.
“Where we will stand compared to the competition, you will earliest see in the first qualifying in Jeddah, you get an idea maybe in the pre-season test in Jarama, but finally you will see in the first qualifying.
“It is a technical product and will be a big, big step and we are very happy about that, but also sporting, commercial, how the tracks will look like and how the tracks are raceable, it goes all together and there the homework needs to be done.”
So where practically and technically have Porsche got an advantage in Gen4. It is quite possible that they have completely nailed their front differential response times and also understand the Bridgestone’s better than others from the get-go.
Of course, we won’t know until the start of the season at the end of this year. Even at the Valencia and Jarama tests in November a true understanding of what the manufacturers have and how they will implement it with their customer teams also.
What we do know is that a fascinating period of trying to sift through the secrets, assemble an order and forecasting who has got the last 18-momnths of design and development just right.
