Since it took delivery of its Porsche 963 ahead of the 6 Hours of Spa, it’s been all-systems go for the first privateer Hypercar effort in the FIA WEC from Hertz Team JOTA.
Once the build of the 963 was finished and the car was shaken down at Weissach in April, the team went straight to Belgium to race it. Since then it has spent time analyzing data, rebuilding the car, testing at Paul Ricard and hosting a pre-Le Mans event in London. Now the team finds itself in Le Mans for the centenary event and with the test day complete, race week is finally here.
It was a risk for the team to cram so much into such a tight timeframe, and opt to make the 24 Hours just the second race weekend for its Hypercar program. But team boss Sam Hignett feels that in hindsight it was definitely the correct decision.
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“It was a very challenging period, but I think it was the right thing to do,” he told RACER. “It was risky to go straight out and race. But a lot of hard work and a dose of luck meant it played in our favor.”
The Porsche 963 is a very new race car to JOTA, but not to Porsche itself. The car racked up over 19,000 miles of testing in its development program and already has a pole position and victory to its name in IMSA competition. Therefore, the main task for Hertz Team JOTA is getting up to speed with the car’s nuances.
“There is lots of learning to be done,” Hignett explained. “It’s easy to forget how much we have learnt about running the ORECA over the years. This car is three times as complex as the ORECA, from an electronics, and sensors point of view. So we have three times as much learning to do.
“It’s a lot more complicated to start and run. We went from missing the first fire-up of the weekend by 36 hours, to missing the last fire-up by half an hour, to give you an idea of the scale of improvement over the six days at Spa.
“There is a level of training that’s needed (in terms of safety and operating the hybrid system) which we have gone to an extreme on. We have had all our front-of-house staff learn it, which is over the top, but there is a level of detail and understanding from the car crew that is needed compared to a P2 car.”
JOTA didn’t go into Spa entirely blind though, as it had members of staff at the Porsche facility in Weissach helping with the build and learning how it operates.
“We built the car with Porsche, we had people in Weissach during Sebring (race week) building the car,” Hignett said. “We had a member of JOTA staff over there for six or seven weeks prior to us taking delivery. There must have been a dozen of us there for the rollout. It was a big operation for both us and Porsche to get it done.”
The team’s race weekend in Belgium as a whole was hugely encouraging. It qualified seventh, ahead of both Peugeots and one of the Penske-run Porsches, and continued to mix with factory cars throughout the race. Finishing sixth overall was hugely impressive considering the entire meeting was one big test for its staff.
“The feedback post-race was actually typical driver frustration,” Hignett said. “Six hours previously they were read the riot act, with us telling them we needed the car back because we had no spares, to being frustrated at the end of the race because we started messing around with fuel strategies to learn more about the car.
“We took the pace out of the car and they felt they could have finished better than sixth. It was a rollercoaster of emotions for them, though I’m sure they feel proud now looking back because we achieved so much. And just seeing Antonio [Felix Da Costa] overtake the Toyota at the beginning, that was very cool.”
Then came the Le Mans Test Day last weekend, where it completed 55 laps during the six hours of track time and set a best time of 3m31.290s, 1.7s off the No. 51 Ferrari that set the pace. It was an encouraging start.
“The Porsche was good,” Hignett said after the test. “The morning session, we were the fastest Porsche, and in the afternoon we ran out of time to do a quali run with Will [Stevens], which he couldn’t complete, so it was a shame. In the end, our time was set by Yifei [Ye] after two stints on the hard tire. We were just focusing on long runs, trying to get two sets of tires up to temperature for two to three stints.
“What we are focused on in reality is procedures and reliability. Finding niggles. There are more gains to be made in procedures than there is in finding three or four-tenths a lap.
“Performance is likely going to have to wait until after Le Mans. But I think with what we made happen at Spa, we are in a reasonable window, we are privileged not to have to worry about performance too much because we have a car developed by Porsche and Multimatic.”