Jaminet: Genesis Topping FP2 Good Motivation For Team

Mathieu Jaminet has described Genesis Magma Racing topping an FIA World Endurance Championship session for the first time as a great source of motivation for the team as it’s getting “closer and closer” to the ultimate pace in its debut season.

Jaminet set the benchmark during Friday’s second practice session at Interlagos with a 1:24.271 lap that was just 0.060 seconds ahead of the opposition.

Genesis has enjoyed a positive start to its maiden season in the WEC’s Hypercar ranks with the GMR-001 scoring its first points in the second round at Spa with an eighth-placed finish and then achieving an impressive sixth in qualifying for the 24 Hours of Le Mans last month.

This positivity continued with Jaminet’s Brazilian FP2 lap, which was particularly encouraging given that the team had never been to the track before and had no real-world data to work from.

However, Jaminet cautioned that Genesis had been “quite transparent” and the pacesetting time was achieved on a “proper quali sim” early in the session without traffic.

“It was a very clean and good lap and I just hope I can repeat a few more for the rest of the weekend,” Jaminet added.

While Jaminet acknowledged the table-topping result was a nice milestone and said “it’s another box ticked,” he added that “for me, as a driver it doesn’t really matter.”

“The only thing I care about is winning,” he explained. “It’s clear that having some light at the end of the tunnel and seeing you’re progressing and getting closer and closer, as a driver you get excited.

“Where it’s really nice is for the guys in the garage. The engineers are spending a crazy amount of hours to make this car better and then the mechanics for them it’s pretty tough to start from scratch — we had no race team, no facilities — so it’s not just working on the car, they’ve been working on pretty much everything to have a base.

“They work extremely hard and these kind of moments bring motivation for all the team and just encourage everyone to keep pushing to finally stand on the podium.

“We have a knife between our teeth and any opportunity we can fight, we will fight. This is our strategy and this is how we want to approach the race as a team, as a company.”

In terms of the fight for pole position at Interlagos, Jaminet reckoned that other manufacturers had not shown their true potential yet.

“We’ve seen in the past guys really making a step in quali compared to free practice,” he said.

“It isn’t really our strategy so far because we’re trying to learn about the car — we’re too early in the program to just try to hide or play around.

“It’s hard to tell, but for sure it’s been the best practice we’ve had this year so our first target is to try to get through Hyperpole and, if we’re starting around the Le Mans position, when we were starting P6, if we can match that it would be pretty good.”

Jaminet added that despite the headline-grabbing FP2 time, the GMR-001 did not always feel particularly good to drive around the Sao Paulo circuit.

“Sometimes in the car today I felt a bit lost and it doesn’t feel right sometimes and then you follow another Hypercar and they seem to struggle even more than you!” he said.