JOTA Sport’s team principal, Sam Hignett, has told MotorsportWeek.com that he would not want to be BMW or Alpine, two of JOTA’s competitors in the FIA World Endurance Championship, as they have not tested at Qatar in the lead up to next season.
“Having been testing in Qatar, man alive I would not want to be Alpine or BMW, turning up for our first WEC race in Qatar, because I’ve never been to track that’s as unusual as that”, Hignett said when asked by MotorsportWeek.com about his team’s plans for next season.
JOTA has tested with the #12 JOTA Porsche 963 at the Losail International Circuit in Qatar, which will hold WEC 2024’s season opener in March, as well as holding the now-traditional pre-season testing event, titled The Proglogue, a few days before.
The team tested the car with its line up of three drivers, announced on Monday: Will Stevens, Callum Ilott, and Norman Nato.
“What we found [with Qatar] is that the laptime comes in a very, very different way, in a different part of the stint. It really is quite unusual. The temperature changes, the surface, the layout, it just makes it a very unusual circuit,” Hignett concluded.
The other car, meanwhile, will start testing very soon.
“The 38 car, with Rasmussen and Hanson, and a yet to be announced driver, will start its test programme in the new year, before The Prologue. So we should get a couple of days under the wheels of that car before the beginning of the season.”
JOTA will step up its Hypercar programme next year, from running a single Porsche 963 in 2023, to a full two car team in 2024. This, according to Hignett, is a big benefit for the team.
“With running two cars, there’s twice the learning,” he said.
“If you look at a WEC weekend, there’s not actually that much running prior to the race. Now, it seems like a lot. But there are what, two one and a half hour sessions and one hour session, that’s four hours.
“Now, with two cars, we’ve effectively got eight hours of knowledge to learn from. So you can say we’re going to double the learning potential. On top of that, we’ve just got so much more knowledge than we did.
Alpine and BMW, plus Lamborghini, are new rivals for JOTA in the Hypercar class. But a team principal of Hignett’s experience has learnt to never underestimate the competition.
“We cannot underestimate WRT-run BMW. They are a brilliant, brilliant team. Signatech running Alpine — never underestimate Signatech at Le Mans.
I think you can probably put JOTA and Signatech in the same boat there. We’ve all got a bit of an ace up our sleeves when it comes to Le Mans,” he concluded.
The 2024 WEC season begins on Saturday 2nd of March with the 1812km of Qatar.
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