Last time out at Red Bull Ring, it was Porsche Junior driver Matteo Cairoli making his GTE debut alongside Gianluca Roda and Christian Ried in the #88 Proton Competition Porsche (below).
David Jahn, the driver filling the same seat this weekend at Paul Ricard, has a similar story, he’s another driver with plenty of experience in GT3 and Porsche Cup cars who hasn’t before sampled GT racing’s top tier.
“After my first five or six laps, it was great,” he told us after free practice on Friday. “It felt a little different to the GT3, but it’s still a 911, so I feel at home. The first sector with tight corners is good for us, on the long straight we don’t have the best top speed, but the faster long corners in the third sector will be the most difficult for us.”
The 25-year-old is coming off a run of strong results in his ADAC GT Masters campaign, scoring a win at each of the last three meetings with co-driver Kevin Estre. And although Jahn doesn’t share Estre’s works driver status, he does work full-time for Porsche as an instructor at its Leipzig facility.
“I’ve been racing Porsches here and there over the years in Carrera Cup Germany and GT Masters,” he explained. “This year I feel I have the best package I’ve had so far with Team75 Bernhard (owned by Porsche LMP1 factory driver Timo Bernhard) and Kevin as my team-mate.”
Jahn has spent his entire racing career since graduating from karting with a roof over his head, starting out in the VW Polo Cup and then graduating to Carrera Cup Deutschland.
“I tested single-seaters but I didn’t have the budget,” he said. “I can only say to everyone I know who’s trying to do F4 and things like that, don’t do it! So few of them will get to where they want to go. They should spend their budget in GT racing, you can do a lot more for the same money here.”
Alternating between the ultra-close one-make sprint races of the Carrera Cup and the slightly longer performance-balanced GT3 format of GT Masters has turned Jahn into a well-rounded driver.
“Porsche Cup is very hard, qualifying is everything there and the races are short,” Jahn says, “Whereas in GT Masters you can work a little bit with the strategy, like we’ve done in the last two races by pitting at just the right time. With a longer race like ELMS it’s all about consistency, doing one fast lap after another to make the difference in the end.”
He’s also made appearances at VLN races for the Black Falcon and Walkenhorst teams, as well as four starts at the Nurburgring 24 Hours, including outings last year in the unique Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus SCG003. “I tried to help develop the car,” he says. “It was a fun thing, but not really something where you could get good results, we were just racing to be there. But it was fun, it was a nice programme.
“I’ll race VLN when and if I get a chance,” he continues. “I’ll do two or three a year maybe, but I won’t focus on the full season, because it’s more important to have a good seat in GT racing than to be good there.”
One of the highlights of Jahn’s GT3 career so far was his 2014 GT Masters season in the RWT Corvette, which saw him “Four races were planned initially, but the team boss said ‘yep, you’re good, you can do the rest of the season!’ We managed a win and another podium, which was great for such a small team and for my own profile. I would’ve liked to do another year with Daniel [Keilwitz] but then the Glickenhaus opportunity came up, so I went for that.
Jahn’s time with RWT also included the 2014 GT event in Baku, Azerbaijan. “The city wasn’t so nice, but the track was okay. It was obviously difficult with walls everywhere, it was hard to be fast around there as you really had to be on the edge. We had some issues that prevented us from making the to five where we probably should have been, but I think we were eighth in the main race, which wasn’t bad.
Having raced only a few times in 2015, Jahn is relishing his full-time programme in the Bernhard Porsche (above) this year. “It’s great to back in a good cockpit in what I think is the best GT3 series around,” he went on. “Timo is working behind the scenes between the races trying to make everything perfect, but we also have Klaus Graf there as team manager, and a great engineer, so it runs fine when Timo’s not around, but he built it up, so it’s thanks to him we’re there right now.”
Jahn hopes a second year with the squad is on the cards, but admits “you can’t really make two or three-year plans these days. From my side I’ve done the best I can and so far they’re happy, especially with the second half of the season. I hope I can do another year.
“Over the next two or three reasons I want to go from being a full-time instructor who does a bit of racing to have things the other way around, a full-time racer who still does some instructing. It’s good to be working at Porsche and always being in contact with the right people, so let’s see how it goes.”
