You already know who Kelly-Moss Racing is. This team has been fielding championship-winning Porsches since 1988, and every year it seems they get more and more drivers into serious machinery. While most of their business is client-based arrive-and-drive kind of stuff for PCA, SCCA, and GT3 Cup, they do some higher-level racing from time to time as well. Next year the Wisconsin-based team is stepping back into the lime light with a two-car effort in IMSA’s highly competitive GTD category with the new-for-2023 Porsche 911 GT3 R based on the 992 chassis. Concurrently, the team will field a pair of 718 Cayman GT4 RS Clubsports in the Michelin Pilot Challenge series GS category as well.
According to a report from Sportscar 365, team boss Andy Kilcoyne has already signed the driver lineups for these four cars, but is still a few weeks out from announcing them. In a conversation with that site, Kilcoyne had this to say:
“We’ve really worked on aligning our vision with Porsche in subscribing to their ascension model, or as I call it their ‘pyramid’.”
“With being involved in Sprint Challenge, being involved in Carrera Cup, we did a handful of Michelin Pilot Challenge races this year and we’re looking to expand that to a two-car effort for 2023, then GTD being the final rung on the ladder within the Porsche sports car world.
“The plan is to run a full season effort in GTD with one car. We have the budget for all of the endurance rounds for the second car and we’re trying to see if we can finalize a driver lineup that would work for the sprint rounds in the second car, which would be a different lineup than the endurance rounds.”
“We started a little over a year ago with this idea. We really ramped up our Cup car programs for 2022 and we’re going to make the Cup car programs a little smaller for 2023 as we work on repurposing some of the staff.
“We’ve done different things in ALMS and we were the foundation under the buildup of Level 5 back in the days.
“We have a lot of the people still within the organization that were a part of those programs.
“There’s a lot of braintrust and a lot of ability here. It’s just going to be fun to be able to finally brand a program as Kelly-Moss.”
It is the generally accepted understanding that Porsche will open up allocations of its new 963 prototype to further customer teams starting in 2025. The company will be fielding a slew of cars globally, with four cars running under the Porsche/Penske tie-up, and an unknown number going to at least three customer teams, if not four, for next year. Those include confirmed placements with JDC Miller Motorsports here in the US and Jota Sport overseas. The current going rumor is that AJ Foyt Racing will get one, and Proton Competition will also receive a 963 (or two).
Once those orders have been filled, Porsche can then look toward building another set of race cars and distributing them to more teams. Kelly-Moss Racing wants to be one of those teams in the next round. So it is going to set out to prove that it can compete and win with Porsche machinery at as high a level as it can, in order to be deemed worthy.
Here’s more from Kilcoyne’s discussion with Sportscar 365:
“We could be viewed as having lofty aspirations but there is going to be one other GTP car through Porsche available in 2025 so we’re trying to show that we’re capable and worthy and hopefully be in GTP in a couple of years.
“It wasn’t until there was communication with Volker [Holzmeyer, Porsche Motorsport North America President and CEO] about customer programs being available on that.
“Initially it was thought that it was only going to be the Penske effort. But with the announcement of JDC and other customer programs, there’s an avenue for that.
“If we’re going to fully subscribe to their ascension ladder, I want to be there.
“We still do a lot of PCA club racing stuff too. That’s the root of where we came from. We want to be able to say that we participate in every level.”
The more Porsches on the grid, the happier we are!