Gass: Teammate Collision “Nightmare Situation” for JOTA

Image: FIA WEC

Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA team principal Dieter Gass described the collision between teammates Jenson Button and Alex Lynn  as a “nightmare situation” for the team in its first start as a factory outfit in the FIA World Endurance Championship.

The pair of Cadillac V-Series.Rs collided while running in first and second under safety car during the season-opening Qatar 1812km, causing damage to both cars that forced them to pit and relinquish the lead to Ferrari.

The No. 12 car, which Lynn shared with Norman Nato and Will Stevens, eventually came back to finish eighth, while the No. 38 machine crossed the line in 16th overall.

Speaking with Sportscar365, Gass indicated that further analysis would be needed to “make sure that we don’t have a repeat” of the incident, which occurred when Button and Lynn were preparing to return to green flag racing.

“It is obviously a nightmare situation,” Gass said.

“Obviously, I think we need to look a little bit better in all the data as well.

“I mean, in a very superficial way, obviously they were warming up brakes and tires and I say for the acceleration that Jenson did in the car, I think Alex was just surprised and maybe a bit too close in that moment .

“Very unfortunate, the whole thing. At the end of the day, that has happened. I can’t turn time back. I want to make sure that we don’t have a repeat.”

After the collision, Lynn stated over team radio that Button “absolutely brake-checked me,” with Gass rationalizing the nature of the message as a high-stress situation for the British driver.

“That’s the normal thing,” Gass said.

“But he just said that he somehow didn’t expect that happening in that way.

“It was unfortunately as well a difficult situation because we had an error message on the screen in Jenson’s car. So we were trying to deal with that situation as well.

“Obviously, it was all happening at the same time.”

Button and co-drivers Sebastien Bourdais and Earl Bamber later also encountered a throttle issue that cost further time in the garage, eventually leaving the No. 38 car eleven laps off the lead in Hypercar.

“By that time, for the 38, the race was over,” said Gass.

“So that was not that bad. Obviously, again, something that we need to look into and make sure we don’t have that again.

“But after that, the car was running faultless again until the end. So we used that just to gather some data, to test some things and to give the team, the drivers together a little bit of mileage.

“I think Jenson is probably the one who would appreciate more mileage since he’s doing only the one program.

“Earl knows the car inside out, so does Seb and so, yeah, we’re just carrying on to get us there.”

Gass went on to say that JOTA needs to “take away the positives” from its first race with Cadillac, pointing towards the building of the working relationship of the new alliance between team and manufacturer as an example.

“I think we have to look back at the whole two weeks that we have been here now and take away the positives,” said Gass.

“The positives are that we are thinking of a very good way to get the team to work together with a good cooperation and everything.

“We did show some pace in the car on the short runs as well as in the long runs. I think that was very important for everybody.

“Obviously after all we would have liked to have come away with a different result but it is what it is.

“We’re going to look into what went wrong and make sure that we’re not going to repeat it.”