WRT BEATS JOTA FOR LMP2 GOLD
The best of the WRT and Jota ORECAS were separated by a dozen or so seconds on track at the top of the LMP2 order after six hours at Fuji. But the two teams opted for very different strategies to get to positions one and two in class.
The #31 WRT ORECA-GIBSON 07 driven by Sean Gelael, Robin Frijns and Dries Vanthoor took the victory by pushing as hard as possible from lap one to the end. The Jota car driven by Roberto Gonzalez, Antonio Felix da Costa and Will Stevens went off kilter on strategy in what turned out to be an unsuccessful victory bid.
But Jota’s decision to go onto an aggressive fuel-save regime to try to save a pitstop had logic to it. The crew of the #38 ORECA arrived at Fuji with a 19-point lead in the championship and much to lose in a tooth-and-nail fight with the WRT car languishing down in fifth in the points.
“As soon as we saw the #31 was going to be doing 27 laps, we went onto a 28-lap strategy,” explained Jota boss Sam Hignett. “When you are trying to win a championship, the last thing you want to be doing is racing out of the pits for the lead and banging wheels into Turn 1.”
Jota needed to find nine laps to avoid the required late-race splash. It got to six, but the team was left to rue a rare yellow-free race. That short Full Course Yellow virtual safety car that it needed to pull off the win never came.
WRT led most of the way, for 162 of the
225 laps it completed to be precise. Gelael got into the lead at the start and hung on to it until midway through his second stint when Jonathan Aberdein came past in the #28 Jota car. Frijns jumped the leader in the middle of his first double after which WRT only lost the top spot during the pitstop cycles.
Vanthoor, standing in for Dtm-contesting Rene Rast, lost time when he got hemmed in during his pitstop, but apart from that the only worry for the WRT team was if Jota or Prema, which also opted to save fuel, got the required yellow. It was still much closer than it looked in the results after Stevens pitted #38 with four laps to go. The victorious Toyota finished between the top two in P2, meaning the winner completed a lap more than the chasing car.
The second Jota entry Aberdein shared with Ed Jones and Oliver Rasmussen took third after the last-named fought a solid rearguard action to hold off Norman Nato in the Realteam by WRT ORECA, which had the benefit of much fresher tyres on the all-important left side of the car.
The race for Nato and team-mates Ferdinand Habsburg and Rui Andrade was compromised by two unscheduled stops, one for a damaged tyre and one for a slow puncture. The #28 Jota, meanwhile, had to fight back from the rear of the field after Aberdein was assaulted on the first lap by the Algarve Pro entry of Steven Thomas.
The United Autosports ORECA shared by Alex Lynn, Oliver Jarvis and Josh Pierson was nowhere for two thirds of the race before coming alive in the final two hours and charging to fifth. Prema ended up sixth after abandoning its fuel-mileage strategy.