April and May were some of the busiest months in JOTA Sport’s history. Not only did the team take delivery of a brand new Porsche 963, it then went straight to Spa to race it, and has since spent time analysing data, rebuilding the car, testing at Paul Ricard and Monza, hosting a pre-Le Mans event in London.
The next stop for the team is the Le Mans 24 Hours itself, where the team and its stunning Hertz Racing Gold-liveried 963 will almost certainly attract a significant chunk of the fan attention all week long.
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 programme. But team boss Sam Hignett feels that in hindsight it was definitely the correct decision.
“It was a very challenging period, but I think it was the right thing to do,” he told DSC. “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 favour.”
The Porsche 963 is a very new race car to JOTA, but not to Porsche itself. The car racked up over 30,000 kilometres in its development programme 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.
It was a big operation for both us and Porsche to get it done
“We built the car with Porsche, we had people in Weissach during Sebring (race week) building the car. 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.”
Taking delivery of the car, becoming Prosche’s first customer with the 963 was a big moment for the team. But it didn’t sink in until JOTA began turning laps at Spa ahead of the race debut.
“The rollout itself though was not particularly emotional,” Hignett revealed. “More than anything because it started raining and it wasn’t one of our drivers, it was Matt Campbell. We were more terrified of it pounding around in the wet than we were emotional about seeing it move.
“Where we saw a real emotional response was when it went out for FP1. It got out about 90 seconds after the green flag at Spa. Dieter (Gass) came to me and said ‘That’s one of the most emotional things I have experienced in motorsport.’ My reply was ‘Let’s see if it comes back!’
“For Dieter to say that though, is quite a big thing.”
The race weekend as a whole was hugely encouraging for JOTA. 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 are privileged not to have to worry about performance too much because we have a car developed by Porsche and Multimatic
“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 I think, though I’m sure they feel proud now looking back because we achieved so much.”
“And just seeing Antonio overtake the Toyota at the beginning, that was very cool.
“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 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.”
