INTERVIEW: The Jota drivers who stunned crowds at Goodwood

The Cadillac Hertz Team Jota V-Series.R is without doubt the most modern and most capable racing car to ever grace the tarmac here at Goodwood, so it was an electrifying moment when its 5.5-litre V8 roared into life for the first time on Saturday afternoon.

It’s an impressive party trick, when this hugely complex prototype transitions from pure electric power into combustion hybrid mode: a sound only comparable to a detonation as the car launches at scarcely comprehendible speed.

Jota’s attendance at Members’ Meeting was in celebration of its 25^th anniversary, and the gold Cadillac V-Series.R was headlining a broader showcase of the team’s glittering endurance racing history. There was no better demonstration of how far this small company, with a humble factory located deep in the Kentish countryside, has come since its earliest days racing a privately owned Honda Integra Type-R.

It was also a huge occasion for the wider landscape of endurance racing. This track moment represented the first time a Hypercar had been in action on a British race track, at a time of  speculation about a potential return to Silverstone for the WEC in the near future.

Current Jota drivers Alex Lynn and Will Stevens were the lucky ones behind the wheel at Goodwood on Saturday and Sunday respectively over Members’ Meeting weekend, and we caught up with them during the event to learn more about their experience.

Sat next to each other outside of the Assembly Area, the pair were clearly enjoying their time, and relishing the chance to showcase the potential of their machinery.

“It's been amazing to show the Hypercar off to the British public for the first time,” Lynn said. “It's a big honour that we as Cadillac and Jota have got to do that.”

It’s only when you get to see a car like this in the metal that you get an honest understanding of its capabilities. At two metres wide and more than five metres long, the Cadillac V-Series.R is enormous, but almost the entirety of its ten-metre-square area is dedicated to producing downforce, which means when you throw it into a corner, it sticks.

Seeing that level of performance first hand around the Goodwood Motor Circuit’s high speed turns beggars belief, especially when you consider this circuit was not a consideration during the car’s development.

“The cars aren't built to go around Sebring either,” Stevens said, weighing up his experience of driving at Members’ Meeting. “I think that was a good test prior to here, to have a little taste of what it would feel like, but honestly, the car felt pretty good out there.

“It is bumpy in places, but it's not any worse than Sebring is. So actually, we felt very comfortable pretty quickly.”

That a car as complex as this can get up to speed quite so quickly in what is an alien environment is testament to the versatility of the machine, its engineers and the drivers. Competitors in the WEC are a special breed, prepared for any and all situations, so turning up a Goodwood to send it round a circuit without any practice or warm up is what Jota does best.

“We're not hanging around,” Stevens continued. “But on the other token, we're not fully at 100 per cent. We try and leave a little bit of margin to not let it go wrong, but all the flat-out parts – we’re flat out.

“The main place you'd make up time if you needed to was under braking, which is hard to judge with the bumps. So there’s still a few seconds left in it I’d say.”

Despite leaving plenty of time on the table, the Jota Cadillac was still comfortably one of the fastest cars of the weekend.

“The problem is we're a danger to ourselves,” chips in Lynn. “It wouldn't take a lot for us to start really chasing a lap time, so it's probably good that it was capped at a few minutes each.”

It was all about speed at Members’ Meeting, though. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Jota over these past few weeks, it’s that few other world-class motorsport teams are as keen to have a good time.

The Cadillac V-Series.R is clearly an extremely focused and highly strung machine running to extraordinarily tight parameters, but that didn’t stop the team at Jota HQ from thinking big. What’s the use of running a Hypercar on a British race track for the first time if all you’re going to do is complete a handful of (admittedly astonishing) laps without any drama? So, the plan was to do something outside of the car’s considered capability.

“We were like, what are we allowed to do?” Stevens said, clearly enjoying the opportunity to put on a show. “Donuts were a grey area, but a burnout, we had a bit more of a green light for it.”

“We basically had a mode where we could put all the brake settings to the front axle, so we could hold some brake pressure, and then you go full throttle and you spin the rears up.”

But before Lynn had the chance to burn a bit of rubber on Saturday, the car suffered an electrical fault that left him stranded on the start-finish straight, and Steven’s own run on Sunday in jeopardy.

As if by design, however, this gave us an opportunity to gain an even deeper understanding of what makes Jota such a special organisation. Rather than call it weekend and leave their stricken car in the paddock for the rest of the event, the team set to work transporting replacement parts from their base in Kent to Goodwood. Under spotlights lent to the mechanics by the Goodwood Productions video team, the Cadillac V-Series.R was taken to pieces and rebuilt overnight, and ready to run again by Sunday morning.

Anyone arriving for Day Two of the 82^nd Members’ Meeting would’ve been none the wiser when Stevens set out on the second demonstration of the weekend.

“From not knowing how it would actually work to actually working relatively well, we were pleased that it ended up how it did,” he concluded. “It's always funny. These types of things we never actually try and do, we've got no experience with doing it, so freestyling in front of a lot of people, you're trying to do a donut, but sometimes you are the donut if it goes wrong. But we managed to do something, so it was good fun.”

“Whenever we go racing, it's always serious. Coming to an event like Goodwood where we can have some fun and try to put on a good display, it's always special to bring our modern technology to this place.”

Special indeed, and a memorable moment that will see Goodwood forever associated with the debut of this epic Hypercar on British soil.

Photography by Pete Summers, Jordan Butters, Joe Harding and Charlie Brenninkmeijer.