Cadillac was actually the fastest car at Fuji—yet still only finished sixth and 13th—How things can go wrong when strategy and race conditions don’t match
First a double pole position, then a long lead, and finally sixth and 13th place: for Cadillac and the Jota team, the 6 Hours of Fuji were a bitter disappointment. What happened in the race?
Norman Nato from the sixth-placed Cadillac 12 (Lynn/Nato/Stevens) sees the reason simply as the loss of track position during the safety car periods. “We didn’t do anything wrong, we were just unlucky.”
In fact, the safety car periods threw both Cadillac V-Series.R cars off their stride. The beginning of the end of the race for the 12 was the safety car after Raffaele Marciello’s accident. The Cadillac had already made its pit stop, while other cars were able to make their stops under VSC conditions.
For Nato, that’s the crux of the matter: “When you’re driving in clean air, it’s a pretty big advantage. You could see that in Sao Paulo. You can control your speed and tires better.“
”On the other hand, when you’re in the middle of the field, you have to take risks to overtake. If you succeed, great. But if you don’t, you can quickly lose more positions. That’s why losing the lead is the crucial point for me. The bad luck with the VSC meant we ended up in a position we shouldn’t have been in.”
FCY with SC destroys hopes once and for all
Teammate Will Stevens explained desperately during the race: “I felt like we had the race under control. Now a few things are happening with the safety car and full course yellows.”
Nevertheless, there was still a chance to make up for lost ground. It was only the safety car for the Aston Martin crash that finally destroyed all hopes. The sticking point here was that the race control actually wanted to deal with the incident with a full course yellow. Under FCY, you are not allowed to stop, but only to perform an “emergency service.” This is precisely what distinguishes the FCY from the VSC. However, the cleanup took longer than planned, so they switched to the safety car. Now the Cadillac could only stop once the safety car was already on the track, losing even more positions to cars that had already stopped. Through no fault of its own, the 12 ended up outside the top 10.
In the end, Alex Lynn fought his way back up to seventh place, which ultimately became sixth due to the penalty against the 94 Peugeot. “The car felt good as always, but it just didn’t work out for us,” commented Nato.
Second car even loses the lead lap
Things went even worse for the 38 Cadillac (Bamber/Bourdais/Button), which only went backwards in the race. First, Bourdais received the used slicks from qualifying on the left side during the first pit stop and couldn’t cope with them at all. Then there was contact with a BMW, which damaged the aerodynamics.
When Jenson Button got in midway through the race, things went completely downhill. The former Formula 1 world champion was first sent off the track by the 12.
The 38 at the front of the SC train.
This meant that it effectively lost a lap to the entire Hypercar field. It was impossible to make up the lost ground, resulting in a frustrating finish outside the points.
Even more bitter for Cadillac: both cars were actually the fastest in the field. Will Stevens set the fastest lap of the race in 1:30.507 minutes, while Sebastien Bourdais set the third fastest in 1:31.006 minutes. This suggests that Cadillac will be penalized in the next BoP round despite its less than encouraging result in the BoP.
