Jani: “Work Starts Now” for Proton to Catch Factories

Neel Jani says the “work starts now” for Proton Competition to close the gap to the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship’s factory GTP teams after an encouraging showing in last weekend’s Rolex 24 at Daytona.

Proton’s No. 5 Porsche 963 shared by Jani, Gianmaria Bruni, Romain Dumas and Alessio Picariello ended up fifth in the twice-around-the-clock Florida classic, the last of the cars that finished on the lead lap and 44 seconds down on the winning No. 7 Penske Porsche.

The team finished two laps ahead of the other customer Porsche squad in the GTP class, JDC-Miller Motorsports, which dropped back in the closing hours due to an unscheduled pitstop to repair a loose right-side door after it worked its way open.

Proton’s top-five result came despite a lack of testing in the build-up to the event and the disruption of a crash immediately before qualifying in final practice during the Roar Before the 24 for Jani.

Jani said he was “surprised” of the pace of the No. 5 car at times, as he registered the third-fastest lap of the race, a 1:35.715, trailing only Tom Blomqvist in the No. 31 Action Express Racing Cadillac V-Series.R and Felipe Nasr in the No. 7 Porsche.

But he admitted that Proton has work to do to find a way to improve its long-run pace.

“We rocked up last weekend, the car came from Germany and we missed FP1 because the car was having the chassis fixed and it arrived late,” Jani told Sportscar365. 

“Then we had to figure out the setup somehow. Alessio and Romain had never driven the car, me and Gimmi hadn’t driven it since Bahrain. It’s amazing the engineer, Jeromy [Moore], was able to put the car in the window so quickly.

“On fastest race laps, we are there. It’s just we can’t keep the average [pace] because we lose the rear axle. That’s the thing we have to work on, but it’s also where you can see that testing helps a lot. I don’t know many days of testing Penske did here. 

“Even JDC-Miller tested here [privately in December], and we did literally nothing. We can do a 1:35.7, and the quickest race lap is a 1:35.5, it’s quite surprising.

“Considering all those circumstances we can be very happy. But when you’re at the sharp end, it’s all about details, and that’s where the work starts, to close that gap.”

Despite his satisfaction at Proton’s performance with limited preparation, Jani admits that the situation is unlikely to change soon while the team lacks the resources to go testing privately while it is busy racing in other series, including the FIA World Endurance Championship.

“It showed our limitations,” he said. “The thing is the team now goes directly to Asian Le Mans Series, and from there to directly to Qatar, and then to Sebring. 

“There’s no time [to test]. We will just rock up at the weekend again. That’s the reality of being a privateer team against the factories. To make the last step, we will have to change something on that side. 

“Hopefully we learned something about the rear axle we can use in Qatar [for the opening round of the WEC in March].”