Stevens: Puncture Denied JOTA Chance to Fight For Win

Will Stevens believes a late puncture denied Hertz Team JOTA a chance at challenging Toyota for victory in the FIA World Endurance Championship’s Bahrain season finale, which was the team’s final race with Porsche machinery.

The No. 12 JOTA Porsche 963 shared by Stevens, Callum Ilott and Norman Nato had been running ninth heading into the final 90 minutes of Saturday’s eight-hour closer, one place ahead of the No. 8 Toyota GR010 Hybrid that went on to win the race, after the final safety car restart of two interventions in the latter half.

That was until Stevens ran wide at Turn 1 with a left-rear puncture, the result of contact with a GT car, which dropped the No. 12 car down to an eventual 13th place.

Up that point, the British squad had been trying to preserve as much of its tire allocation as possible for the latter stages of the race, a strategy that paid dividends for Toyota as Sebastien Buemi surged into the lead in the final hour of the race.

Stevens believes that, given he was running ahead of Buemi at the time of the puncture, he would have had a chance of fighting for the win on JOTA’s final outing with its customer 963s before it becomes the factory Cadillac WEC squad in 2025.

“We were in a good place,” Stevens told Sportscar365. “The whole strategy for the race was to save tires for the end, which we did well. In the first half we were using a lot fewer than tires than the others.

“When I was about to go into the car, we had the virtual safety car at the worst possible time, but we had to box to cover the No. 8. We knew still had a tire advantage for the end.

“At the restart, I was coming down towards Turn 1 trying to pass four GT cars and I think one of them didn’t see I was on the right and he tried to dive up the inside of one of the GTs and hit the rear-left of me, and gave me a puncture.

“We had to pit, and then pace-wise we were super-strong at the end. Obviously the Toyota was very strong at the end and we weren’t a million miles away. And that was with two [new] tires – without the puncture we would have had three.”

Asked if he believed he could have stayed ahead of Buemi without the delay from the puncture, Stevens replied: “If you look at the times Buemi was doing, they were very quick. We were in front of him at the restart, I think we had four or five GTs in between us.

“There’s no question we would have come through strongly like he did. I’m not saying we definitely would have won, but we would have been in the fight. I’m pretty confident we would have been in the top three at least.”

The puncture rounded off a frustrating second half of the season for the No. 12 JOTA crew, which scored a landmark victory at Spa in May but only managed one top-five finish thereafter at Fuji, leaving Stevens and Ilott seventh in the drivers’ standings.

“It’s just frustrating because the team deserved a good result,” said Stevens. “It’s another race where we should have been right at the front. It’s happened multiple times this year.

“But as a team we can be proud that we were strong again. Now on to bigger things.”

One silver lining for JOTA was that the sister No. 38 car of Jenson Button, Oliver Rasmussen and Phil Hanson scored victory in the FIA World Cup for Hypercar Teams by finishing eighth on the road, which became seventh after the No. 51 Ferrari’s penalty.

It means that JOTA achieved its pre-race target of securing a one-two in the World Cup classification, beating competition from the No. 83 AF Corse Ferrari and the No. 99 Proton Competition Porsche.

“It was a tricky race but we were able to keep out of trouble throughout,” reflected Button. “We just made a couple of calls at the end which didn’t play out, and I would say that we also got a little bit unlucky with the safety cars.

“In the end, I was on old tires whereas everyone else was on new, so it was just a fight backwards, really.

“But, in the end, we finished eighth and won the FIA World Cup for Hypercar Teams today as well which is a nice result to have to conclude the season with Hertz Team JOTA.”