How a British privateer hopes its customer Porsche can become a Le Mans icon

Porsche customer racing cars have a habit of becoming known by their sponsors. The ultimate example is the ‘New Man car’, Joest’s 956 Group C machine that did the double at the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1984-85. Richard Lloyd’s ‘Canon car’, a 956 that was a race winner in the old world sportscar championship and the more obscure ‘Tic-Tac car’, a 962C entered by Jochen Dauer, are others. The hope for the British Jota team is that its new World Endurance Championship contender from the German manufacturer will come to be described in the same way – simply as the ‘Hertz car’.

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That was part of reigning World Endurance Championship LMP2 title winner Jota’s pitch in its bid to lure the US-headquartered car hire giant into what is a highly significant deal. Not only has it allowed one of the most successful teams in LMP2 in the WEC to make the graduation to the Hypercar class for 2023 with the first customer Porsche 963 LMDh to race in the series, but it points to a rosy future for top-line sportscar racing.

The WEC has, since its rebirth in 2012, been largely devoid of commercial sponsorship deals. The privateers taking on the factories up to now have been funded by the patronage of wealthy individuals.

The deal that brought the Jota 963 onto the grid at the Spa WEC round at the end of April with Antonio Felix da Costa, Will Stevens and Yifei Ye has been put down to the “hard work and tenacity” of David Clark. Those are the words of Jota founder Sam Hignett, who is co-director of the team with Clark. Clark explains that he looked to America when seeking backing for the Hypercar programme.

“Who’s putting money into sport right now? It’s American companies,” says Clark, a British Formula 3 team owner in the late 1970s, sales manager and competition manager on the McLaren F1 programme in the 1990s and a well-known dealer in classic and historic racing cars. “I thought, who is going to invest in us? And then I started looking around.”

That led to an approach to the private equity groups that had rescued Hertz from administration, known as Chapter 11 in the USA, in May 2021. They included Knighthead Capital Management, which is also an investor in California-based Singer Vehicle Design. The company founded by singer-songwriter Rob Dickinson – hence the name – reimagines old Porsche 911s, brings them up to modern specifications and is another partner in the Jota project: it was responsible for the simple but striking livery of the team’s Porsche. “I sowed this little seed of an idea with Tom Wagner [boss of Knighthead] and one day he rang me up and said, ‘I like it’.”

“Being able to call the car the ‘Hertz car’ is an important part of the deal, that’s what we sold to them,” adds Hignett. “I don’t think there’s another Hypercar that will be known in the same way.”

Jota's new sponsorship represents more of a mentality than just a product

Photo by: Paul Foster

The WEC is the right place for Jota’s new sponsor and its distinctive livery in what it calls ‘Hertz Racing Gold’. It represents not so much a product as an ethos or mentality.

“The WEC offers an interesting option for us,” says company CEO Stephen Scherr. “Technology is being pressed hard here in the WEC; they are minded to be innovative and so are we. Putting ourselves on Team Jota with what we think is going to be a very iconic car seemed very obvious to me.”

Clark and Hignett explain that they had to get creative to fund their aspirations to move up to Hypercar. It was time to put the business model they have pursued in LMP2 with programmes funded by wealthy or well-backed drivers – the likes of Simon Dolan, Roman Rusinov and David Cheng – on the back burner.

“We’re over that, it was time to move on,” says Clark. “We’re going into the top class and have three paid drivers. That’s how you’ve got to do it at the level we’re moving into.”

“We really do believe it is going to be a level playing field between us and the factory Porsches. A lot of the walls to entering the top class have been knocked down by the new rules, particularly LMDh. We know we’re getting equal equipment,” Sam Hignett

Jota has been a participant in the top class at Le Mans and its associate series before, both under its own name and as a service provider. It’s where it started out when it entered what was then known as the Le Mans Endurance Series in 2004 before making its debut in the 24 Hours the following year. It fielded a Zytek 04S built to the LMP675 rules in LMP1 for two seasons, ran an updated version of that car for the works Zytek team in 2006 and then a Lola-Judd B07/10 P1 under the Charouz banner over the following two seasons, taking a top-10 finish in the first of those two years in 2007.

The team was also on course to re-enter P1 in its own right with the Aston Martin AMR-One in 2012. A multi-year programme funded by British amateur Dolan started in 2010 with the British manufacturer’s GT4-spec Vantage and took in the Aston Martin V8 Vantage GT2 the following year. The next step had to be aborted when the AMR-One project was abandoned, and Jota instead started what turned out to be a long and successful foray in LMP2.

But the ambition to return to the top class never went away.

“We’ve always been looking, keeping our eyes open and talking to manufacturers,” says Hignett. “We wanted to work with a factory rather than remaining a customer team.

Jota has a long history at Le Mans in various classes, but its longest participation has been in LMP2

Photo by: Eric Gilbert

“There wasn’t a privateer-friendly rulebook in the P1 days. The budgets were crazy and if you were a customer you never knew what the manufacturer who’d sold you the car was going to turn up with at the next race. It would have been impossible for a team like us to compete at that level.”

That changed with the advent of a category in Hypercar where development is strictly limited. A car is homologated at the beginning of its life cycle with little scope for performance modifications thereafter.

“We really do believe it is going to be a level playing field between us and the factory Porsches,” says Hignett. “A lot of the walls to entering the top class have been knocked down by the new rules, particularly LMDh. We know we’re getting equal equipment.”

Hignett describes Porsche as “the best option” for Jota when it came to getting its hands on a Hypercar contender, though he adds that Ferrari’s 499P would have been “the ultimate”. The German manufacturer committed to selling cars to customers from the get-go, which was key for Jota.

“We wanted to be an early adopter, to get in at the beginning,” he says. “That served us well in P2.”

Jota was among the first wave of ORECA customers to get its hands on one of the new 05 coupes, which came on stream in 2016 and shared its monocoque with the 07 built to the next-generation P2 rules that kicked off the following year. Under the G-Drive Racing banner, the team secured a run of three late-season victories, two with Stevens at the wheel of the car.

“It was bloody hard in the beginning, but the knowledge we gained proved invaluable,” continues Hignett. “It definitely set us up for when the 07 arrived the following year.”

The Porsche deal hasn’t gone quite according to plan, however. Production delays meant Jota’s 963 wasn’t delivered until the third week of April, which forced it to run a second LMP2 ORECA-Gibson 07 in the colours of its new sponsor at the opening two WEC rounds. It then went into the Spa round at the end of April with the Porsche after only the briefest of shakedowns. But it was important to begin racing as soon as possible, insists Hignett.

Delays in the production of the Porsche 963 meant the team didn't get its car until the end of April

Photo by: Eric Le Galliot

“We knew Spa was going to be painful and Le Mans isn’t going to be easy, but it was important to get out there racing,” he explains. “You could decide to wait until you think you are ready, and before you know it it’s 2024. We’ve got a massive commercial partner and have to get out, but we’re also gaining experience. We’ll be the most experienced Hypercar privateer next year.”

Jota is confident it will be able to compete with the factory Porsche Penske Motorsport squad, probably not straight out of the box, but certainly in the fullness of time. It believes it has a driver roster to match anyone else in class. “The driver line-ups in Hypercar are insane, but we believe we stack up on that front,” says Hignett. “We’ve ranked the best drivers in LMP2 over the past three years, and we’ve got three of the top five in our car.”

Hignett suggests it might be a “year too early” for Jota to have a shot at a top result at Le Mans, particularly given Porsche’s travails in the WEC so far this year, but he’s not ruling anything out.

“The new safety car rules mean you don’t necessarily have to be the fastest car,” he says. “It will be all about staying on the lead lap, and then you never know.”

Jota's humble beginning led it to call itself “boys from the farmyard”

Photo by: Motorsport Images

From farmyard to chequered flag

They call themselves the “boys from the farmyard”, a moniker that hints at the humble roots of a team based in a series of buildings on a farm owned by Jota boss Sam Hignett’s family in Kent. It took its first steps in endurance racing with his co-founder’s company car.

John Stack, an amateur racer, estate agent and former showjumper, linked up with Hignett in 2000. A campaign at the Spa and Nurburgring 24-hour tin-top enduros with a Honda Integra R built up from his road car was a precursor of a move into the Renault Clio V6 one-make series in Europe the following year. That was followed by a move into sportscar racing 12 months later with a Pilbeam-Nissan MP84 SR2 car in the FIA Sportscar Championship.

The Zytek followed in 2004, but it was the return to that marque’s fold in LMP2 in 2012 that kickstarted a phenomenal run of success at Le Mans and beyond. Jota notched up a first class victory at the French enduro in 2014 with the long-serving Zytek Z11SN chassis, dubbed ‘Mighty #38’ after the race number that the team’s Porsche now carries.

The same car, renamed a Gibson 015S and run under the G-Drive Racing banner, won the European Le Mans Series during a highly successful 2016 in which Jota took three victories on its graduation to the WEC.

Jota’s tally of Le Mans P2 wins now stands at three: it took second overall and very nearly won the race outright in 2017 racing as Jackie Chan DC Racing, then added another victory last year as Antonio Felix da Costa, Will Stevens and Roberto Gonzalez swept to the WEC title.

There have been a further seven podiums at the French enduro, 2018 proving the only year it failed to finish in the top three in class since its first win. But the team still got two cars home in the top 10!

Jota's LMP2 wins at Le Mans now stand at three, including last year

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images