Beating the Cadillacs at this year’s IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship’s traditional season opener, the Daytona 24 Hours, will be hard, Neel Jani told MotorsportWeek.com.
“I think it’s going to be hard against the Cadillacs, but in IMSA and in a 24 hour race at Daytona, you never know what’s going to happen,” said the veteran sportscar driver.
Jani will drive the #5 Proton Competition Porsche 963 alongside Gianmaria Bruni, Alessio Picariello, and Romain Dumas at this year’s race. It didn’t get off toi a good start, with a practice session crash necessitating the car needed repairs, meaning they missed qualifying.
Subsequently, they will start 10th in class, alongside fellow Porsche customer JDC-Miller in the bright yellow #5 Porsche 963.
Asked whether he thinks the Cadillacs have the pace to win at the moment, Jani was emphatic in his response.
“It looks like that, at night and during the day. But you know never what happens. It’s a tough track, it’s not easy with traffic. A lot of things can play into it.
I think if it was pure pace race, yes. But obviously IMSA is not always just about pace. There’s also other things playing into it. Not making mistakes, staying on the lead lap. So there is other things playing into it. So it is a real endurance race actually.
Asked where he thinks the other two manufacturer competitors — Acura and BMW — stand, Jani wasn’t entirely sure.
“It’s hard to judge where the BMWs are, where they are to put. Clearly Cadillac we feel are ahead. Acura… they look a little bit behind, but I don’t trust it yet to be honest, because always been here in the last four years. I don’t trust it.
But yes, the rest is quite close, Cadillac ahead then the rest… but in which I order I wouldn’t be able to say.”
Jani, though, is keen to complete his roster of big race wins at Daytona.
“Daytona is always a target of mine, because it’s really the only race I haven’t won yet, from all the long ones. So I’m very happy to be here.”
Herta: Cadillac and Porsche look strong
However, negating Jani’s assessment that Cadillac were strongest, WTRAndretti Acura’s Colton Herta had, maybe unsurprisingly, came to a different conclusion.
“It looks like the Cadillac and Porsche are very quick,” he said.
“We’re not bad, but we’re definitely not on the level of one-lap pace they’re on. We’ll need to find a little bit, although there’s no time to find a little bit.”
The young American will drive the #40 WTRAndretti Acura ARX-06 with full-season drivers Jordan Taylor and Louis Deletraz, plus 2009 Formula 1 world champion Jenson Button.
“So we’ll need to be smart about how we use our pace., because the Porsche and Cadillac seem to be good. But we’re not far off, we can’t complain too much. We can still race it, we can still do what we want to do with it,” he concluded.
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