Jack Aitken is making his fourth appearance at the 24Hours of Le Mans with Cadillac, though first time in a full season WEC entry. Speaking exclusively to Motorsport Week, the Brit summarized the differences between doing Le Mans as one-of race and full-WEC entry.
“It makes it a little bit easier because every year when I’ve come with Action Express in Whelen, you have to recalibrate to the new rule set, remember all the differences between the series.
“There are also some very small differences between the two cars that you have to be on top of. So now, okay, we’re only a couple of races into the season, but it’s still easier as an adjustment coming to Le Mans from Imola and Spa than it is from Detroit and Laguna and places like that.”
Aitken, who replaced Button in the #38 JOTA Cadillac for this season, missed the new opening round in Imola due a clash with a race in IMSA: “Yeah, I missed Imola and we didn’t get Qatar, so for sure I haven’t had as many race laps as I would have liked.
“At least in Spa, I did the whole weekend, so we did practice, we did qualifying, and I got a feel for the race. I’m more integrated with the team, which is probably the more important thing. I know how to race the car at this point, so that was quite the secondary thing, but yeah, I think we’re still in good shape.”
Despite IMSA and WEC having the same rule set in the shape of LMDh, there are minor setup differences. When Whelen brought their #311 Cadillac to Le Mans in the past years, there were adjustments to be done.
“You were homologating the cars in different wind tunnels. In America for IMSA and here for WEC.
“Okay. So because there are differences between wind tunnels and how they read a car, there would be very small differences between the bodywork packages for each car. That’s less the case now because they’ve moved to just having one wind tunnel for all the series, so actually now the cars are the same everywhere, which is good,” explained Aitken.
Together with Aitken, teammate Earl Bamber is also participating in the full season of both WEC and IMSA. Having a good relationship is key according to Aitken, and being teammates with Bamber in both championships has been a benefit: “We have a really good relationship off the track, which helps a lot, and we get to spend a lot of time together. So you definitely get to learn the little tendencies of each person and their strengths, their weaknesses, how they like the car, what they really mean behind the words.
“That makes things easier for sure, so it’s good. It’s not something that you can really plan because at the end we get told where to race and who’s going to be our teammates, but yeah, it’s working really well for us.”
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