Crew principal Sam Hignett insisted that fourth place for its Porsche 963 LMDh shared by Will Stevens, Yifei Ye and Antonio Felix da Costa was nonetheless a powerful outcome, though the automotive successfully lost a top-three finish to the best of the Ferrari 499P Le Mans Hypercars as the result of a drive-through penalty.
He identified that the Bahrain 8 Hours on Saturday was solely the fifth begin for Jota’s Porsche, which got here on stream two races into the 2023 season at Spa on the finish of April.
“For those who’d requested me again then that we’d be preventing with Ferrari for a podium and ending solely 9 tenths behind after eight hours of racing, I might have taken that,” Hignett advised Autosport.
“It is a good outcome for us, and everybody within the crew ought to be happy.”
He then made reference to the standard location of the crew’s workshops.
“We’re the boys from the farmyard racing towards the may of Maranello on perhaps a tenth of its finances,” Hignett added.
“I feel our automotive did an overtake on a Ferrari 5 instances throughout the race, so how can we be disillusioned?”
Stevens briefly ran third within the opening hour, Ye established the automotive in fourth after which da Costa started a cost that took him previous Nicklas Nielsen in #50 and in the direction of Mike Conway within the second-placed Toyota GR010 HYBRID LMH.
Picture by: Shameem Fahath
Jota struggled with its brakes within the Bahrain warmth
He closed to inside 12s of Conway earlier than the pitstop in the course of his double stint, then going off at Flip 1 shortly afterwards.
The Jota automotive was given a drive-through penalty for an unsafe rejoin in entrance of the D’Station GTE Am Aston Martin.
Hignett stated he had “no complaints that Antonio went off as a result of he was making an attempt onerous”, however questioned the penalty he obtained.
“We’re not proud of the penalty as a result of it’s tough for a driver to see out of those automobiles sporting a HANS Gadget,” he defined.
He additionally identified that the directions within the drivers’ briefing for automobiles going off at Flip 1 was to rejoin the observe instantly reasonably than persevering with on the asphalt and bleeding again onto the circuit at a much less acute angle on the exit of Flip 3 on the finish of the opening sequence of corners.
Stevens returned to the cockpit of the Jota Porsche for the run to the flag, closing a spot that stood at over eight seconds after the ultimate pitstops to 0.962s on the chequered flag.
Hignett additionally revealed that the Jota Porsche had been experiencing braking points within the latter phases of the race however that the crew had determined to “simply go for it” reasonably than making an attempt to nurse the brakes.