Pipo Derani is entering 2024 as a champion — a position he’s not unfamiliar with, after he and Alexander Sims took the inaugural IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship GTP title for Whelen Engineering Cadillac Racing. He also finds himself with a new full-time co-driver, another situation that he’s becoming used to, having come into the last three seasons with someone new. But with Jack Aitken sliding into the full-time driver role from his endurance addition position, the transition isn’t as big.
With the 28-year-old Aitken joining him, though, it means a transition of another sort. The 30-year-old Brazilian is now the senior member on the team to a less experienced co-driver. With previous teammates Mike Conway, Felipe Nasr and Alexander Sims, all of whom had a wide range of experience in sports car racing and other disciplines of the sport, Derani had little to teach and some things to learn. Now his role becomes less student and more mentor, even if his former Formula 1 reserve and test driver teammate is widely experienced.
“Jack came to the top of all the categories when we started late last year researching the various drivers who would be available for our endurance role,” says team manager Gary Nelson. “Being young, to me, for an endurance driver says you can build experience at the endurance races the first year. The opportunity came and he’ll be our full-time driver next year. They get along very well.
“What’s interesting is that Pipo will be in a different role with Jack coming on board. Before, we had Mike Conway kind of working with Pipo when he was younger and we got wins and championships with Mike as our endurance driver. I think it’s a great transformation to see him mature and grow into the top driver on our team and a young guy coming along getting the advantage of Pipo’s experience.
“I like the idea of having that small age difference because I saw how Conway and Pipo advanced through their years working together. Same with Felipe Nasr,” Nelson adds, referencing the partner with whom Derani won the 2021 DPi title.
Derani acknowledges that while he is the more experienced endurance sports car racer, he doesn’t really feel like there’s much to teach his teammate. Not only has Aitken raced with the team in the Michelin Endurance Cup races in 2023, including the victory at Sebring and at Le Mans, but Aitken was the reserve and test driver for Renault and Williams in F1. Derani, though, has been with the team for a long time, and has many more years racing in the WeatherTech Championship; that experience may prove valuable in helping Aitken integrate and perform at a high level more quickly.
“I think it’s going to be the first time that I am actually older in the team,” Derani says. “I think more than the age factor is the fact that I’ve been with a team for so long now that I can try and help here and there. But Jack was racing with us this year and doing a fantastic job. So I don’t see myself as, let’s say, a tutor or a teacher or anything, but trying to complement each other because he brings youth, talent and speed. And I would like to say I bring a little bit of experience in the series in general, because he’s also very experienced in in Europe and in other forms of racing. So it’s going to be an interesting combination, I think, with different different experiences that we’ve had. He got up to Formula 1, so he understands a lot of the high-tech cars that we are racing here, and he did a great job since the beginning of the year.”
Embarking on a season with a younger driver still a relatively fresh to sports car racing give Derani occasion to reflect on those that aided him when he was moving from single-seaters to endurance racing.
“When I first joined this sport, moving from Formula 3 and then doing European Le Mans Series races, but then I immediately went into WEC in a two-car team, and in the other car was a very experienced driver — Sam Bird, who’s currently in Formula E. I think having his reference that year was a massive help. At that time, he had already been a Formula 1 test driver, Formula 2 for several years, had already had sports car experience. And so at that time, having him as a reference made me grow a lot. Not in terms of speed, because I think speed was there from the beginning; but understanding how to approach a long race and how to approach a long stint, which was completely new to me. So I would say that 2015 was a season where I learned massively. I grew so much, but along the way, there are always situations you find yourself in that make you grow. So, for example, when I joined Whelen Engineering, Felipe, obviously being a year older than me, having just won the championship, put him in a different mindset than I was when I was joining. And so you end up learning as well from those situations.”
Now a two-time IMSA champion himself, Derani has the opportunity to fill the role of helper and, like his younger self, realizes there may not be much to impart to Aitken regarding pace, but much to bring him up to speed on in terms of the different style of racing.
“Throughout my career, I’ve had moments where I where I’ve encountered people that were in different phases of their career that helped shape my career into what it is today. And so I think perhaps, where we’re going with Jack, it’s more or less the same thing. He’s relatively new to IMSA, to the sport here in the U.S. I would like to think that having won the championship myself and experienced that and what it takes to win the championship, that I would be able to pass along some of that experience to him. In terms of of speed and talent, there is absolutely nothing that I can do for him because he’s massively talented himself, but I think those kinds of experiences that you go through in your career might help someone else as they join a new series or a new form of the sport.”
While Aitken already has had the opportunity to gain much of that knowledge in his stint as endurance driver with the team, the British driver says Derani has been a great help to him in acclimating to WeatherTech Championship competition.
“Pipo is very established with the team, so it would have been easy for him to throw his weight around and make sure I knew I was number two,” Aitken says. “But there has been none of that. He’s shown me the ropes, given me advice on track and on the American culture. He’s one of the best teammates I’ve ever had. I love the circuits. I love the paddock and the team. I can’t ask for more, so I want to be there for a while and make my mark there.”