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Oh, the Irony! Porsche’s Lead Test Driver Wins Daytona—in a Corvette!
Low-key Lars Kern knows that, for a dedicated car guy, his life has been blessed with a family, an amazing job, and a hobby few get to experience. “I’m a happy, and a lucky guy,” he told Hagerty, a couple of days before he took that hobby to a whole new level, and he became a happier, even luckier guy.
On January 25, Kern and his three co-drivers won the crowded GT Daytona class in the Rolex 24 Hours at Daytona. In a Chevrolet Corvette Z06 GT3.R. Did we mention Kern is one of Porsche’s top test drivers? So what’s he doing in a Corvette? It just sort of happened, Kern said.
At the 2021 Rolex 24, he raced a Porsche 911 GT3R with the powerhouse Pfaff Motorsports, but for 2022 he signed with AWA Racing from Canada to drive an LMP3 Prototype car and also raced that car at the 2023 event. But IMSA canceled that class for 2024’s Daytona, and AWA moved to the Corvette. Kern liked his co-drivers, so he came along.
Just before this year’s race, Kern talked about the difference between the Corvette and the Porsche 911. Turns out, there’s not that much. “Nowadays, all GT3 cars are pretty similar,” he said. The Corvette is “a really good gentleman’s car—our gentleman driver [Orey Fidani, whose family founded the Orlando Corporation, a huge Canadian land management firm] really likes it—the Porsche can perform at a similar level, maybe even higher, but the setup window is narrower. We’re enjoying the Corvette. I haven’t had too many laps in it, but I think we’re going to have a good time.”
Yeah, and they did. And they got a lot of laps in the Corvette—719 of them. “I thought this is something that would never to happen to me,” Kern said after the race. “I lost out on a big win on the Nurburgring once where I was pretty sure that we had it. So I kind of thought I’m just the unlucky guy.”
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Helpful was, he said, that the Corvette “was just absolutely epic to drive. Loved it. That’s why all of us had great pace in the race. But then at end it was just pure carnage and chaos. The way he [co-driver Matt Bell, the team’s closer] managed it was incredible. The team had so many hiccups and so many gremlins with refueling and stuff, but we always found a solution. It’s unreal.”
So, until the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring in March, Kern is back at his boring old job, driving Porsches for a living. How did that happen?
Turns out his father, Jurgen, now retired, was a development engineer for Porsche in Germany, and Lars, now 37 and an engineer himself, grew up in the shadow of the Weissach Development Center. Lars hired on early in his career as a generic test driver. “My job at the beginning was to do 0-100 or 200 km/h tests with development cars to see if we were meeting our targets,” he said. “And driving dynamics like slaloms—the sort of things the press might do later on. Porsche needed someone who could drive at a decent level, but not necessarily a racing driver. I also had to prep the press cars by doing all sorts of quality tests before they went out. Random stuff that someone has to do.”
Before long he was introduced to the Nurburgring Nordschleife, the twisty, tree-lined, potentially terrifying race track that driver Jackie Stewart called “the green hell.” It’s nearly 13 miles long, and has between 154 and 170 corners, depending on how it is measured and configured.
“When I arrived there for the first time I was like, ‘I can never learn this track!’. But I had the opportunity to do so many laps that at some point I reached a good level and Porsche took notice. And almost by accident, they started using me for the lap records.”
And he has set many of them there, in Porsches ranging from the electric Taycan, which he loves, to the GT2 RS. That one, incidentally, is his favorite record. In was in 2017, and he was accompanied by Porsche factory racer Nick Tandy, who has won the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and, last January, the Rolex 24 for Porsche and team owner Roger Penske.
“I’d only been involved with the development a little bit at the end, so Porsche Motorsport also sent Tandy to do the record because they were sure he’d do the quick one. We each had three or four attempts, and I was quicker. Nick’s one of the greatest GT drivers in the world so I could not believe I was up on him.”
“GT2 RS is the fastest 911 of all time at 6 minutes, 47.3 seconds,” said the headline on the story posted on Porsche Newsroom. Both drivers lapped the street-legal GT2 RS in less than seven minutes, but it was Kern who posted the fastest time, which was 17.7 seconds faster than the engineers had predicted. “Being the guy who did that—just a normal guy who grew up 10 kilometers from Weissach—it was pretty special for me.” You can watch his lap here.
Kern returned the following year in a GT2 RS that had been fitted with a performance package from Manthey Racing, a skunkworks partly owned by Porsche, and dropped his time to 6:40.3.
Kern had always wanted to race, and he started out in karts, but fielding a competitive one was financially out of reach for his family. Eventually he got a shot at a Porsche race series, then began moving up. He has been racing in the longer IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship events, and he’ll be back with the AWA Corvette team for four more here in the U.S this season, plus one more that happens in June—the 24 Hours of Le Mans. It’s his first trip there, and participating in it will check off one big item on his bucket list.
“I can’t wait,” Kern said. Will he get lucky again? We’ll know in four months.
Call this payback. Zora drove for Porsche at Lemans in the 50’s while working for Chevy.
Forgot that! A cool detail.
USA! USA!! Oh, sorry, is my red, white and blue Chevy bias showing again?
Big Corvette guy here too. But remember it was a German driver racing with a Canadian team. Lots of Rah Rah to go around.
He is living quite a fun racing career. The GT2 RS is such a crazy car. How can you go wrong driving Porsches and Corvettes?