Hignett: JOTA/Cadillac Tie-Up Will Take Time To “Perfect”

JOTA Sport co-founder Sam Hignett believes it will take until this year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans for his team’s new partnership with Cadillac to fully gel, as the new-look squad prepares for its first FIA World Endurance Championship race in Qatar.

Next week’s season-opening Qatar 1812km will mark the first race outing for Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA, coming ten months after the possibility of the two parties uniting was reported by Sportscar365 and almost seven months on from the deal’s announcement.

Hignett believes that the long lead time has allowed the British outfit to go into the new season with its new factory partner better prepared than it has done in either of its previous Hypercar campaigns with customer Porsche 963s.

However, he concedes that fine-tuning the integration between the existing JOTA crew, led by technical director Tomoki Takahashi, and the new team members that have joined the squad from Cadillac will not be the work of a moment.

“It’s taken a lot of work to get to this point, but I would say we have turned up here for race one of the season in better shape than we have in our Hypercar history,” Hignett told Sportscar365. “We’ve managed to achieve a lot in that long period of time.

“In 2023, the car was very late [to be delivered] as we knew it would be. And in 2024, we were a step behind where we are now.

“We are very positive about the condition we’ve turned up in here, and that’s reflected in all sorts of things – the parts supply, the volume of bits and pieces we have around us, the knowledge of the car and things like that.

“It’s exactly the same group of people, the only difference is an influx of GM staff that we didn’t have in previous years. It takes time to work out who’s doing what, and it will take until Le Mans to perfect things.

“That’s the nice thing about this calendar as opposed to IMSA [the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship], which is that you get three races to figure stuff out before the big one, whereas in IMSA, it’s happening [first] whether you like it or not!”

Prior to this week’s Prologue in Qatar, the new-look squad undertook tests at Paul Ricard in December and at the Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi last month, but Hignett accepts more time is needed to fully get on top of the V-Series.R package.

“When we started 2024, we had a season’s worth of knowledge of the car,” said Hignett. “We have not got that this time.

“But we understand how the car works, we have ideas, and we have knowledge that has been handed to us from GM and the other teams [in the WeatherTech Championship]. That’s the fantastic thing about how this is set up.

“While we weren’t at Daytona, we had drivers and crew supporting remotely and we have access to the knowledge that was learned.”

Hignett wouldn’t be drawn on specific targets for Qatar, where JOTA enjoyed one of its strongest showings in 2024 with a second-place finish for the No. 12 car.

“For this first weekend, the goal is just to achieve a decent result,” he said. “What a decent result looks like, I couldn’t tell you at the moment.

“Hopefully it will be good for us, but there is an awful lot to learn in the next six days before the race.”

The new-look Cadillac/JOTA alliance got off to a strong start in the opening day of the Prologue, as Alex Lynn paced Friday evening’s second session in the No. 12 Cadillac V-Series.R ahead of Sebastien Bourdais in the sister No. 38 car.

“I think we had a positive start to the week,” commented Will Stevens, who shares the No. 12 car with Lynn and Norman Nato. “We rolled off the truck with a good racecar and I feel quite comfortable with everything we have at the moment.

“We have a lot of things we want to cover in the Prologue and then we have time before next week starts for us to go in and analyze everything.

“The six of us are giving similar feedback and that’s positive point that we’re going to push in the same direction.”