The 24 Hours of Le Mans is a famously unpredictable race. Nobody knows this better than modern-day endurance veterans Jota Sport, who’ve seen their fair share of both triumph and heartbreak at the Circuit de la Sarthe. This is the story of their 2023 race, as they re-enter the top category after a 15-year break.
Five hours into the 2023 24 Hours of Le Mans, as murky evening light was beginning to set in over a damp Circuit de la Sarthe, Hertz Team Jota were doing the seemingly impossible. Running the sole customer entry in the top-flight Hypercar category, their Porsche 963, driven by Yifei Yi, was leading the race. This was remarkable considering that car had started the race right down in 60th out of 62 entries, after an electrical gremlin in qualifying meant they’d failed to set a time.
At the same time, Jota’s other entry, one of 24 identical Oreca 07s in the LMP2 category, was leading its class – by their reckoning, the first time in the 24 Hours’ 100-year history that a team has simultaneously led two different classes. Of course, Le Mans can upset even the best laid plans. Just after 9pm, Yi ran wide at (ironically) the Porsche Curves, the sweeping bends where bumpy public roads transition back to glass-smooth purpose-built racetrack near the end of the lap.
The 963 went skittering across a gravel trap, sliding sideways into a tyre barrier. The entire rear clamshell of the car was torn free, but mechanically, it was largely solid, and Yi was able to limp short distance back to the pits. Twenty minutes and one big team effort later, it was back on track.
We pick this story up just over a week after Le Mans, Jota’s cars back in their workshop in a nondescript unit off a back lane in rural East Sussex. Both the 963 and the Oreca LMP2 car are stripped back to their very cores: just the tiny structural tub, and the teeming mass of pipework wrapped around the familiar shape of a V8 engine. The Porsche’s pair of turbochargers, wrapped in heat-reflective gold foil, nestle proudly between the engine’s cylinder banks.
The cars are sitting in this raw, stripped-back state, completely torn apart as individual components are checked over, repaired, replaced where necessary, ahead of the next round of the World Endurance Championship at Monza in July. Upstairs, the bits of bodywork torn free in Yi’s crash sit scarred and obviously unusable, but in remarkable shape nevertheless.
How did we get here? Jota Sport – currently known as Hertz Team Jota – was founded in 2000 by drivers Sam Hignett and John Stack. Hignett drove for the team until stepping away from racing after 2005 and concentrating on management. With a long-time focus on sports car racing, they first entered Le Mans in 2004, and have run every race since besides the 2009 and 2010 editions. Since 2012, they’ve run in the ever-competitive LMP2 class, winning it in 2014, 2017 and 2022.
This year, though, is the first time since 2008 they’ve entered a car in the top class. “[The chance to run the Porsche 963] came about at the last World Endurance Championship race of 2021 in Bahrain,” Sam tells us. “We sat down with Porsche, and got a deal together that allowed us enough time to seek the commercial funding to make it happen.” 2021 was a big year for the WEC – it was the first season for the new Hypercar class, introduced after costs had spiralled and manufacturers had abandoned the old top-flight LMP1 regulations.
This class had been sparsely populated in 2021 and 2022, but we’d known for a long time that more entries were coming, and 2023 was the year they arrived. For this year’s Le Mans, 16 Hypercars took the start, a mixture of Cadillacs, Porsches, Toyotas, Ferraris and Peugeots, plus the plucky minnows: a pair of Glickenhauses and a sole Vanwall.
15 of those 16 were entered by their constructors. The one that wasn’t was Jota’s no. 38 Porsche 963, in its distinctive gold livery. What’s remarkable is the timeframe for getting that entry turned around.
From that initial meeting with Porsche in late 2021 came a search for backing, which was found in the form of title sponsor Hertz and Singer Vehicle Design, of ‘reimagined’ Porsche 911 fame. An announcement of the programme came after 2022’s Le Mans. Then, supply chain issues meant that any customer deliveries of the 963 were delayed on Porsche’s end until the middle of the 2023 season.
“We took delivery of the car about eight or nine days before [the 6 Hours of] Spa,” continues Sam. This is where the car first turned a wheel in competition. Taking place on 29 April, in what Sam describes as “horrendous” wet weather, the Jota car, driven by Chinese racer Yifei Yi, Briton Will Stevens, and 2019-20 Formula E Champion, Portugal’s António Félix da Costa, qualified seventh. Four Hypercar entries were scuppered by a series of frightening incidents at the fearsome Radillon corner, as well as electrical issues. The Jota 963, however, survived for a sixth place finish, impressive for a machine the team had had possession of for barely a week.
The World Endurance Championship, though, is a bit like the IndyCar series. Yes, it’s a full points-paying season, but there’s one flagship event that arguably matters more to every entrant than the championship as a whole. IndyCar has the Indianapolis 500, and the WEC has the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
There’s a reason it’s often referred to as the greatest endurance race of all. Certainly, it’s the most famous, the oldest – 2023 marked the event’s centenary – and one of the most punishing.
“Before Le Mans, we did a two-day, two-night test at Paul Ricard, so we had a good chance to evolve the car then, and then it was straight into Le Mans and the test day. Le Mans is very different – you can test all you like at Aragón, Monza, Paul Ricard, but Le Mans is just a very different place,” says Sam. “We had a good run into the test day – nothing spectacular, but learnt an awful lot that clever people were able to turn into some speed. We came out of the box fighting in the free practice sessions in the week.”
It’s worth looking closer at the 963 itself. It’s the latest top-level endurance racer from the manufacturer that’s won 19 Le Mans 24s, more than any other. Like all the other Hypercars built by major OEMs, it’s a hybrid, and squirts stealthily out of its pit box on electric power alone before its 4.6-litre twin-turbocharged V8 fires angrily into life. Technically, it’s an LMDh car, meaning it uses an off-the-shelf chassis (built by Multimatic, in this case), and is eligible to run in the North American IMSA series as well as WEC.
Factory efforts in both series are being run by Porsche in conjunction with Team Penske, two outfits with plenty of success under their belts, so the 963 should have been an instant shoo-in for success. This hasn’t been the case, though. The car chalked up its first and so far only win at a chaotic Long Beach IMSA race in April 2023 (it would take a second win at Watkins Glen in late June, only to have the victory stripped for a technical infringement). So far though, it’s yet to finish higher than third in a WEC race. Going into Le Mans, the clear favourites were Toyota, who had nearly two years’ worth of development over most of the new entries for 2023 and had won the first three races of the season; and Ferrari, who’d taken a vast and sudden motorsport budget surplus brought about by the Formula 1 cost cap, and applied it to one goal: reclaim the Le Mans glory they hadn’t seen for over half a century. As you’ll have no doubt seen by now, they succeeded.
We’ve found a suitable car visit Jota and learn about their experience running the 963 – Porsche’s Panamera Turbo S E-Hybrid Sport Turismo. While making any active comparisons between a 2.3-tonne (dry!) leather-clad Autobahn express and a fully-fledged endurance prototype would be totally meaningless, there’s a clear bloodline between these cars. Like the Le Mans car, the Panamera features a twin-turbocharged V8, and will glide silently away from standstill on electric power alone (unlike the 963, it’ll then run engine-free for a claimed 30 miles).
With electric motors and combustion engines working together for maximum output, the big Oak Green estate car actually produces more power than the Le Mans racer – 690bhp to the 963’s approximately 670. Porsche’s hybrid technology was honed on their old LMP1 car, the hugely successful 919, and trickled down into cars like the Panamera. It’s entirely likely that the 963 will inform the direction of Porsche’s next generation of hybrids, especially as it looks to electrify its sports car range.
Unfortunately for Jota, it would be glitches with that hybrid system on the still weeks-old car that put paid to their qualifying efforts and sent them to the back of the field for the race. We now head back to where we started, with the car having reached the opposite end of the standings a few hours in. “We knew there would be a safety car reasonably early on,” says Sam, “and with the way the safety car rules work now, you get put to the back of your class, and that would work for us. Sure enough, there was a safety car very early on, and so in António’s first stint, we got bumped to the back of the Hypercar class. He worked the car up into the top three or four… then Yifei got in and was running well. What we’d really worked on was the capability of the car off the safety car restarts, which paid dividends, because he was able to go from fourth to fifth into the lead and pull out about a 15-second lead.”
Then, of course, the tiniest error that sent the car wide and into the tyres. In a shorter race, the 20 minutes needed to repair the car wouldn’t have been worth it, but anything can happen with another 19 or so hours to go. “We’d only lost four laps,” recalls Sam. “We carried on into the night, and the car was pretty good. It’s never going to be as good as a car that hasn’t been rattled down the wall, but we were still one of the quicker Hypercars at that point.”
Whether it was a result of the shunt or separate gremlins, a data recorder in the car started playing up during the night shift, triggering a flickering blue light that would normally indicate a heavy impact and a mandatory trip to the medical centre for the driver. The FIA required the team to change this part, which was buried in the floor, costing the team another half hour or so.
“Then, it was just a case of finishing,” says Sam. The Jota 963 would ultimately finish 40th overall, the two big stints in the pits meaning it had covered the least distance of any of the finishing cars when the 24 hours was up. But finish it did, unlike the 22 cars – over a third of the entire field – that didn’t. “On the one hand, you’re disappointed because of what could have been. Would we have been in that Toyota and Ferrari one and two battle at the end? I think that’s probably a big ask, but I think we would have easily been third on the pace that the car had if we’d stayed out of trouble. You have to have a reality check – at that stage we’d had the car six weeks, it was the quickest Porsche on track, the guys had done a great job. At the stage of having the accident, I think [we’d led] every measurable performance metric in the Hypercar class.” So, a promising if not exactly satisfying result, but it’s often said that merely finishing at Le Mans is an achievement all in itself, regardless of position.
Even though the big focus this year was naturally on the influx of new entries in Hypercar, we shouldn’t forget about the ever-competitive LMP2 class, where the team fared a little better, finishing 24th overall and 13th in class.
Jota’s Hypercar effort, then, has hit the ground running, and shows real promise. There are three races to go in this year’s World Endurance Championship, at Monza, Fuji and Bahrain, and Sam is confident that there’s more to be extracted from the programme by season’s end: “the goal with the [963] has to be to get on the podium at one of the remaining three races – not easy up against Ferrari, the factory Porsches, Cadillac, etcetera – but that’s got to be what we try to achieve. And the [LMP2] car has had a rough year – it’s been the quickest P2 car pretty much every race, but we’ve never managed to capitalise on it, so that car’s got to win a race at some point.”
Then, of course, there’s the big one: next year’s Le Mans. It’s set to be even more competitive, with the likes of Alpine, BMW, Lamborghini and Isotta Fraschini planning to add to the already swollen ranks of the Hypercar class (it’s getting so busy that it’s come at the expense of the LMP2 class in every WEC race except for Le Mans next season). It’ll be an even taller order, then, for privateers like Jota, but they’ll be going into it with another year’s experience and development, and one aim: show the big factory teams how it’s done in a small industrial unit in rural Britain.
