There's a fast, plaid Porsche racing for another win at Road America. Here's how that unique look came to be.
ELKHART LAKE – Two things stand out when the Pfaff Motorsports Porsche is on track.
First, it’s fast.
It’s hard for sports car fans to miss it cutting through GT traffic or in victory lane after IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship races.
And second, it’s plaid.
What started as a tribute to an injured driver evolved through a series of missed deadlines and has emerged as one of the favorite cars in the paddock at IMSA Fastlane SportsCar Weekend at Road America, which runs through Sunday, or anywhere IMSA races.
Its front is black and red checkered, like a classic lumberjack’s shirt or a hunter’s jacket, a not-so-subtle nod to the team’s Canadian heritage.
“In ’18 we wrapped our wing plaid for the last race of our World Challenge season because Robert Wickens got hurt,” Pfaff general manager Steve Bortolotti explained. “It was a ‘Get well, Wickens’ thing, just a tribute to him.”
Wickens, a Canadian IndyCar driver, suffered life-threatening injuries in a crash at Pocono Raceway in Pennsylvania. Although he still uses a wheelchair, Wickens has since recovered enough to drive a race car with hand controls.
“Then we were at the shop one day getting ready for Daytona and didn’t really have any direction from our sponsor at the time on livery,” Bortolotti continued. “They wanted to change it but they didn’t really have a livery.”
Race cars are covered in a colorful vinyl nowadays, so paint jobs aren’t really paint jobs, and changes can be fairly easy. But in the moment, the Pfaff car was going to make its long winter trek to the preseason test in simple red.
“Then amongst all the preparations either myself or Laurance (Yap, marketing director) were sort of looking around and (noticed) everyone’s wearing plaid right now; maybe we ought to do a plaid car,” Bortolotti said. “Nobody wants to decide, we’ll decide for them.
“So Laurance mocked it up in Photoshop and … all right, we’ll give it a shot. We asked our wrap company, hey, can you execute this? And they were, no problem. So we went to (team President and CEO) Chris Pfaff and he was just like, ‘OK, don’t get it, but you guys have an idea.’ He trusts, thankfully, Laurance and I a lot, and when we both put our mind to something he usually just knows to trust us and let us go.
“He said do it, and the immediate fanfare was incredible.”
Tweaks requested by a sponsor resulted in several variations for 2019. When the French lubricants company Motul was talking to the team for 2020, it made it clear the plaid needed to stay. Merchandising was taking care of itself.
“It’s probably one of the most iconic liveries now in the IMSA paddock and obviously it’s been very successful in the past year and a half especially,” said driver Matt Campbell, who also drove for the team in 2019 and admitted it seemed a little goofy the first time he saw it.
“It’d be weird to go to something different now.”
The car will be on full display Sunday at Road America, the rolling 4-mile course in rural Sheboygan County.
The race is scheduled to begin at 10:40 a.m. – earlier than usual because of an opportunity for live television coverage on the USA Network – and run for 2 hours 40 minutes. The entry list includes 37 cars, six in the premier DPi class, six in LMP2, nine in LMP3, five in GTD Pro and 11 in GTD. Filipe Albuquerque put the No. 10 Wayne Taylor Racing Acura on the pole in qualifying Saturday.
Expect to see the plaid-and-silver Pfaff No. 9 Porsche 911 GT3R shared by Matt Campbell and Mathieu Jaminet at the front of the GTD Pro field in the race within a race.
The pair lead the championship with four victories in nine of 12 races and qualified second in class.
Pfaff won the title last year with Zacharie Robichon and Laurens Vanthoor, and the team has won in its past two appearances at Road America; it was stuck in Canada in 2020. Campbell also won last year with WeatherTech Racing in the since-eliminated GTLM class.
“Obviously winning the championship, you know they’re a high-level team,” said Campbell, a 27-year-old Australian.
“It’s been quite cool to see how much they’ve progressed since I first joined them. And now me and Mathieu are working extremely well with the team and we have good camaraderie and we can have a lot of fun.”
Although the Pfaff driver lineup has changed yearly, most of the rest of the team has been stable and that helps to explain the consistent high level of performance, Bortolotti said.
“Matt and Mathieu are just incredible drivers,” Bortolotti said. “They have a great amount of trust with each other when it comes to setting up the car and just the overall efficiency of the weekend because they do trust each other and they do know what the other likes so well, it helps us drive decisions and make setup changes and go forward a lot faster than frankly we would have in the past.”
The pairing will change again after this season as Campbell and Jaminet will join Porsche as it moves into the IMSA’s new GTP class and the FIA World Endurance Championship.
Who will drive for Pfaff – possibly a back-to-back class championship-winning team – has yet to be determined. But whoever the drivers are, they’d better look good in plaid, or at least a plaid car.
“Now we’re kind of stuck with it,” Bortolotti said with a laugh.
“The Canadiana is great, but as more U.S.-based partners come on board we’ve got to be careful about how much Canadiana we’re waving around.”
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Pfaff's plaid Porsche chases another Road America IMSA victory
