Aitken: Revised Cars Make Le Mans “Tricky to Predict”

Jack Aitken believes predicting who are favorites heading into this year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans is trickier than usual because of the raft of updated Hypercars introduced into the FIA World Endurance Championship for this season.

The American manufacturer is one of several squads to have deployed Evo jokers for this year to revise its cars, while other brands were forced into subtle tweaks over the winter amid the re-homologation of all the Hypercar class entries following spells in the Windshear wind tunnel facility in Concord, N.C.

Factory pilot Aitken, who races a Cadillac V-Series.R in both the WEC and IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and is coming off victory in last weekend’s Chevrolet Detroit Sports Car Classic, says these tweaks combined with the new Michelin Pilot Sport Endurance tires for this year mean that making predictions is very tough.

“So far this year, both in IMSA and in WEC, going into race weekends I’ve had a view of thinking, ‘Oh, we might have a good chance here this week,’ or conversely, ‘Maybe this will be a struggle for us,’ and I’ve been proven completely wrong as soon as practice gets under way,” he told Sportscar365.

“It just goes to show, with a lot of the manufacturers bringing Evo updates to their cars, the table has shifted around a little bit, the cars don’t have the same strengths and weaknesses they had before, they don’t suit the same circuits so it has been quite tricky to predict.

“That’s why I’m exercising a bit of caution going into Le Mans because the favorites from previous years may not be the favorites anymore and even the form guide that we’ve seen from Spa for example may not prove to be the case at Le Mans.”

Despite the uncertainty surrounding the pecking order, Aitken believes that the Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA squad is in a “good position” for Le Mans after Alex Lynn headed a 1-2 for the squad in qualifying last year.

The team completed a two-day test at Silverstone last month where final preparations were made ahead of the event, including honing the exact setups needed for the car.

“I’ve got a lot of faith in the people in this team and at Cadillac and at GM that have done a lot of hard work to get the car to where it is now,” he said.

“We have been strong in the past so the potential is there, the foundation is there, but we really need to see how practice goes and even into the first couple of hours of the race itself that’s usually when things start to become a bit clearer.

“In previous years, the Cadillac has performed relatively well at Le Mans but we’ve probably not been able to really put ourselves in the fight for the top spot and that’s something we’re obviously quite keen to fix.”

Aitken believes that the upgraded V-Series.R for this year, with a focus on improving the car’s drivability, will help in that quest to score a strong result around the Circuit de la Sarthe.

“Its ability to manage the dirty air behind other cars is something that we’ve improved, so that’s all made it a more raceable car and hopefully qualifying doesn’t have to be such a focus for us and we can move forward in the race as well,” he said.