Aitken: Sao Paulo Weekend “Bittersweet” For JOTA Cadillacs

Jack Aitken described the 6 Hours of Sao Paulo as being a “bittersweet” FIA World Endurance Championship event for Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA as pit stop woes prevented it from converting a 1-2 on the grid into victory.

The No. 12 Cadillac V-Series.R led the early stages of the race from pole until Will Stevens was delayed at his first stop by a stuck wheel nut.

The sister No. 38 machine that Aitken shared with Earl Bamber and Sebastien Bourdais slipped to third in the first hour but was still firmly in contention until Bamber locked up entering his pit box, causing the mechanics to need to readjust their positions and also costing him around 10 seconds.

This dropped both cars into the pack and ultimately handed the advantage to the victorious No. 15 Team WRT BMW M Hybrid V8 as the Cadillacs had to settle for third and fourth.

“As a team we came away with a podium, and third and fourth is really solid points for the championship but, of course, when you start first and second you hope for more,” Aitken told Sportscar365.

“I think the start of the race we looked quite strong — even dropping to third behind the BMW, we looked like we would really be in the mix to fight for the win.

“But we both had issues at the first stop and that dropped us a long way back.

“We were even out of the top-ten but then managed to fight back through to fourth.

“It was a very tough race — we saw the field was very tight and we were impressed that some guys seemed to find a bit of pace overnight, like the Ferraris particularly on the second half of the stint they were a lot better than they showed in practice.

“The track cooling down probably didn’t play to our strengths massively but we were still quick and would’ve been there were it not for issues.”

Aitken said the tight nature of the Interlagos circuit made it “very tough with the traffic” and difficult to recover the lost time.

“We saw a lot of interactions between the GTs and the Hypercars, because you have so many corners that go from left to right, you’re crossing the line of the track quite often and that naturally makes it very difficult to have a clear idea of where the car in front is going to go,” he explained.

“I had a misunderstanding with one when he was trying to block the Peugeot so I went the other side and he turned in on me so I had a bit of contact. Luckily, it didn’t affect our race in the end.”

Aitken was given a five-second penalty for the contact with the No. 32 WRT BMW M4 GT3 EVO but he was still able to maintain fourth.

The two Cadillacs did swap places in the final 20 minutes to see if a quicker Aitken fared any better than Stevens in the No. 12 machine at catching the second-placed No. 50 Ferrari 499P ahead, but was unsuccessful and they returned to their original order.

“The No. 12 and No. 51 had been somewhat static so they let me through to see if I could make inroads on the No. 51 knowing that if I couldn’t, and because of the penalty, we would happily swap the places back if it wasn’t the case,” Aitken said.

“We tried it for a handful of laps and I didn’t really make enough ground so we swapped it back.”