With an international youth development programme, Porsche continues to expand its racing involvement. From the 2012 season on, initially two young drivers will receive support as Porsche Juniors for their Carrera Cup Deutschland campaign. Porsche provides them with a large portion of the season’s budget. The young pilots will choose a team themselves. A Junior coach assists them with their training away from the circuits and is available for mentoring at the race tracks. Initially, the programme runs over four years.
In their second season, if their performance is good enough, the Porsche Juniors should switch to the world’s fastest international one-make series, the Porsche Mobil 1 Supercup, which is run as support to Formula 1 races. At the same time, Porsche selects new talented youngsters who will launch their GT careers in the Carrera Cup Deutschland. Aside from financial support, the pilots receive the similar assistance as the internationally successful Porsche factory drivers. Fitness tests with constantly adapted training plans as well as media training and sponsor obligations are also part of the programme.
“With our long term Youth Development Programme, we continue the extremely successful tradition of the Porsche Junior team,” says Hartmut Kristen, Head of Porsche Motorsport. “For us, supporting talented youngsters is an investment in the future. In line with our LMP1 project we want to expand our driver line up. After all, aside from our works commitment in prototype racing, we don’t want to neglect our GT racing activities and we also want to support our customer teams with works drivers in the future.”
Porsche has been intensively involved in supporting youngsters in motorsport since 1997. Today’s Porsche factory pilots Timo Bernhard, Marc Lieb and Patrick Long were trained as Porsche Juniors. Recently in 2011, Marco Holzer made the leap from Porsche Junior to works driver. Other great names in motorsport to emerge from this scholarship programme are Dirk Müller, Lucas Luhr and Mike Rockenfeller.
Source: Porsche
