Twelve months is a long time in motorsport. Plenty has changed since the last time the World Endurance Championship descended on Spa a little over a year ago. There’s a new system for calculating the Balance of Performance, Peugeot now has a vastly revamped 9X8 Le Mans Hypercar, Ferrari and Porsche have proven winning pedigree, while new LMDh protagonists from Alpine, BMW and Lamborghini have helped swell the Hypercar grid to 19 cars.
Much has changed too in the Jota camp. One year on from the debut of its Hertz-liveried customer Porsche 963 LMDh, it has expanded to run two Hypercars with a driver line-up headlined by 2009 world champion Jenson Button, and achieved the first outright podium for its 963 in Qatar. With Button and four more new drivers to bed in, as Ye Yifei joined Ferrari and Antonio Felix da Costa prioritised his Porsche Formula E drive, the significance of its sole remaining driver from Jota’s first season in Hypercar has grown further.
