NGT Motorsport shifts to Pirelli World Challenge

NGT Motorsport team owner Ramez Wahab has established one of the most respected Porsche customer teams in North American sports car racing, and has decided to shift his program's focus from endurance to sprint racing next year.

"GTD we're not going to do next year," Wahab told RACER. "Our plan is to run four to five cars in IMSA GT3 Cup, like we've always done, and also to run in World Challenge with four or five cars. The plan is to run two cars in GT – GT3-spec cars – and two or three in the new Porsche Cup class. I don't want to abandon IMSA, so we're going to keep doing the GT3 Cup, and I'm not saying World Challenge is going to be perfect, but it's something new for us and something exciting. I think it's a step up from GTD, and it won't cost $2 million to run, so it also makes business sense for us."

NGT scaled its GTD program back after the Watkins Glen round when driver Henrique Cisneros stepped aside to focus on business interests, and other than a brief reappearance at the Lonestar Le Mans event at Circuit of The Americas and again at Petit Le Mans, Wahab's GTD program was up for reappraisal heading into winter. The final decision involves a switch from IMSA sanctioning to the SCCA-run PWC championship, and comes with the need to purchase new cars.

"We need to buy new [GT3] cars for World Challenge, and there are new rules coming for 2016, so that's going to be expensive, because we'll need to buy new cars again in 2016; but it looks like we can run them in TUDOR if we want to our Europe or the Middle East once we have them, so it creates opportunities for us that we did not have with the [non-GT3] Porsche GT America," he added. "When we have those cars, hopefully we can run them for four or five years."

Continued support of the Sean Edwards Foundation and the Motorsport Safety Foundation created by Cisneros is also expected to carry over to PWC.​