What Team Jota must still achieve to become a sportscar great

There’s winning in class and winning overall. People will tell you that LMP2 was the most competitive category at the Le Mans 24 Hours and in the World Endurance Championship, as entries at the front of the field dwindled in the dying days of LMP1 and took time to pick up on the onset of the Hypercar era.

But even so, any team, P2 powerhouse or not, still has to prove itself on stepping up to the sportscar big time. And Jota, the self-styled boys and girls from the farmyard, has definitely done that. 

The British team, which has no fewer than 10 class podiums at Le Mans to its name, has turned the Cadillac programme around. The General Motors brand was the big underachiever in Hypercar in the two years that it fielded a single full-season entry with Chip Ganassi Racing from 2023 and the first influx of LMDh machinery into WEC. Ganassi and Caddy V-Series.R promised much, but delivered little in terms of concrete results. Cadillac and Ganassi parted company at the end of last year with a single podium to their collective name. 

Now, belatedly to my mind, Cadillac has chalked up a victory, just five races into Jota’s tenure as its factory representative in the WEC. What’s more, it did it in some style at Interlagos last weekend. Will Stevens, Alex Lynn and Norman Nato dominated as they led home a marque 1-2 completed by the second V-Series.R shared by Earl Bamber, Jenson Button and Sebastien Bourdais. 

What we shouldn’t forget is that it was the first outright victory for Cadillac, but not for Jota. It triumphed at Spa last year with one of its customer Porsche 963 LMDhs driven by Stevens and Callum Ilott. (Nato, a regular member of the crew, was on duty in Formula E that weekend.)

It means that Jota has become the first team in the current era of world championship sportscar racing, stretching back to the rebirth of the WEC in 2012, to win a race outright with two different marques.

Jota has now won with both Porsche and Cadillac in the WEC

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

You might think that is a spurious statistic given that in a series where the top class has always been dominated by manufacturers, there aren’t too many teams to have flown different flags. Only the one actually: Rebellion Racing competed with Lola chassis as a true privateer and then its own ORECA-built LMP1s, the R-One and the R-13 as a kind of garagiste. 

And I’m not counting Joest’s involvement in the Glickenhaus Racing squad, in case you were wondering, nor ByKolles running cars badged CLM and then a Vanwall that it developed itself. That Jota has got the most out of two different LMDh machines, and both in double-quick time, undoubtedly says something about the team. 

Victory at Spa with the Porsche came exactly one year on from its debut with the car, though don’t forget its starring performance in only its second race in Hypercar at Le Mans in 2023. Nor its heroics at the Bahrain finale that year. Yifei Ye’s speed there in Jota’s 963 had a lot to do with Ferrari signing up the Chinese driver to a factory contract. 

Lynn talked about the sky being the limit for Jota and Cadillac after taking the laurels in Brazil, which means winning world championships and, most pertinently, Le Mans. That will be important for Jota’s legacy, if it is to be counted among the greatest British sportscar teams down the years

Should we be surprised that Jota has made the most of the Caddy? Probably not, given that it did it with the Porsche. It’s a free-thinking team ready to embrace new technology – it had already invoked the use of artificial intelligence in its P2 days – and to push the boat out strategically.

Lynn used that word “powerhouse” after the Interlagos victory, prefacing it with “engineering”. It may have its headquarters on team boss Sam Hignett’s family farm in deepest Kent, but there’s nothing quaint or old-fashioned about Jota and the way it goes about its racing.

Lynn talked about the sky being the limit for Jota and Cadillac after taking the laurels in Brazil, which means winning world championships and, most pertinently, Le Mans. That will be important for Jota’s legacy, if it is to be counted among the greatest British sportscar teams down the years.

Despite success through the years, Jota must still win either Le Mans or a world title to be considered one of the greatest

Photo by: Emanuele Clivati | AG Photo

And for me as an old Le Mans hand – 35 editions and counting – it’s important that a British operation returns to the top step of the podium. It struck me in the wake of Lynn talking about his aspirations to win the French enduro with Jota how few teams from the UK have triumphed overall in my time. Just three actually.

That’s TWR Jaguar in my debut year back in 1990, the Kokusai Kaihatsu McLaren squad, an amalgam of Lanzante Motorsport and factory or factory-contracted personnel in 1995, and Team Bentley in 2003, though lest we forget that the winning Speed 8 LM-GTP racer was pretty much run by Joest personnel in a kind of loan deal from Audi after the end of its factory programme with the R8 LMP. Bentley and Audi, of course, were and are both part of the Volkswagen group. 

I’m not saying that I’ll be cheering for Jota when we get to Le Mans next year. I try to remain impartial, and what I hope for prior to every event on which I report is good racing and something interesting to write about.

But if the team from my bit of the world – I was born and raised in Kent – does end up winning, I’ll be secretly smiling. And chuffed to bits for the boys and girls from the farmyard. 

Will Jota eventually win at Circuit de la Sarthe?

Photo by: Rainier Ehrhardt