Should we have been surprised that Matt Campbell emerged as the best driver in Porsche Penske Motorsport’s #5 entry in this year’s World Endurance Championship? Probably not.
It may have been his first WEC prototype campaign, but he was no stranger to the 963 after a year in IMSA or the series from past GTE campaigns. He was on it from the get-go, taking pole at the Qatar season-opener, and maintained strong form through the season.
Performances on his IMSA forays and a victory back in a GT car at the Bathurst 12 Hour made him a dead cert for the Top 50.
How Campbell aided Porsche’s Daytona glory
There were no race victories for Campbell on his return to the WEC at the wheel of a prototype, but given that the Porsche 963 LMDh wasn’t the car to have at the Le Mans 24 Hours he arguably ended up with something much more worthy and valuable - a win in the blue riband round of his beloved IMSA series at Daytona.
It somehow seems wrong to label him as a part-timer at the IMSA arm of the Porsche Penske Motorsport squad given that he’d yet to do his first race for the team in the WEC by the time he pitched up the Daytona International Speedway in January. But that’s what he was as he joined full-season pairing Felipe Nasr and Dane Cameron, as well as Penske IndyCar star Josef Newgarden, in the car that would go on to win the season-opener.
Yet he certainly didn’t drive like one.
Daytona as far as the #7 PPM entry was concerned was the ‘Matt and Felipe Show’. They anchored the German manufacturer’s first outright victory in the Florida classic since 2003, driving 17 hours between them - and without the help of their team-mates from before dawn on Sunday morning. There was an ultra-competitive race to be won, and Porsche and Penske needed their quickest drivers in the car at the crunch stage of the race.
PLUS: How canny Porsche strategy snatched Daytona spoils from Cadillac
Campbell and Nasr stood head and shoulders above their team-mates and were pretty equally matched. There was a tenth between them, with Nasr in the ascendency, on a 100-lap average, a little more when you measure it over 200 laps of the Speedway. Cameron and Newgarden languished a long way behind.
Campbell impressed, too, on his subsequent IMSA appearances at Sebring and then Road Atlanta for Petit Le Mans. He’ll be back full time in North America ’25, sharing with Mathieu Jaminet rather than 2023 team-mate Nasr. Expect more heroics from the quiet man from Australia.
