No. 5 Cadillac Finds Silver Lining in Recent Results - Speedway Digest

By Mark Robinson

IMSA Wire Service

Spirits remain high with the drivers and crew of the No. 5 Mustang Sampling/JDC-Miller Motorsports Cadillac DPi, despite disappointing finishes in the last two IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship races.

That’s because the No. 5 Cadillac has shown a renewed competitiveness and is now set with a stable lineup of all French drivers for the 2021 season.

Tristan Vautier and Loic Duval are the full-season pilots of the No. 5, with Sebastien Bourdais going from a full-time driver last season to endurance-race addition this year as he returns to a full-season gig in the NTT IndyCar Series. The trio ran strong throughout the 2020 finale, the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring Presented by Advance Auto Parts, but finished fifth after forced into a late pit stop to replace a damaged rear wing section.

Then in last month’s season opener, the Rolex 24 At Daytona, the No. 5 was in the hunt again, leading 106 of the first 226 laps. Just under nine hours into the 24-hour marathon, however, Vautier was the innocent victim when two other cars made contact and one careened into him. Lengthy repairs in the garage ensued, relegating the No. 5 to a seventh-place finish in the Daytona Prototype international (DPi) class and 34th overall.

“We’ve been feeling good with the car since Sebring last November,” Vautier said. “It seems like we made a big step forward there and we were hoping it was not just luck and we could conserve it at Daytona.”

It appeared that way as well. Vautier and Duval drove the car to a third-place finish in the Motul Pole Award 100 qualifying race a week before the Rolex 24. Along with Bourdais, they were running strong and biding their time in the Rolex 24, until a pair of cars collided on the frontstretch and the No. 16 Wright Motorsports Porsche hit the No. 5 in the aftermath.

“It seemed like since the moment we unloaded (at Daytona), we were very competitive, during the qualifying race in both mixed and dry conditions and for the first part of the (Rolex 24) race,” Vautier recalled. “Yeah, it’s just unfortunate the way it happened. There was nothing we could do because it was actually not even the (No.) 16. He got hit in the back by another Porsche and sent into me spinning.”

Despite the depressing result, the JDC-Miller team is finding a silver lining. The newfound pace has John Church, JDC’s CEO and managing partner, excited. It wasn’t necessarily the case earlier last season, even when the No. 5 opened the year with a trio of third-place finishes. Those results, Church said, were accomplished more on “perseverance and strategy” than outright speed.

“We definitely didn’t ultimately have the fastest car or one of the faster cars,” Church admitted. “Now we’ve got, I think, one of the faster cars. We just need to convert it into results. I’d rather be where we’re at today than always hanging on, waiting for everybody else to have some bad luck or misfortune for us to have the results.”

After spending the first half of 2020 in JDC-Miller’s second DPi entry, the No. 85 Cadillac, Vautier joined Bourdais and Duval in the No. 5 for the latter half of the campaign. With the team running a single entry this year, all focus can be on optimizing the No. 5 Cadillac for each race. Competing against some of the WeatherTech Championship’s powerhouse teams in its premier category sometimes makes for JDC-Miller to an afterthought, but Vautier is fine with that.

“Yes, some people tend to overlook us because maybe you have teams with big names and also huge resources and huge support behind them that we don’t necessarily have,” he said. “We need to make each dollar go a longer way than many others, but the team is run really well.

“We showed that we can do it in Daytona. As I said, if we keep doing what we’ve been doing, it’s going to click.”

Church agreed, especially since the next race is a return to Sebring International Raceway for the 69th Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring.

“I’m encouraged by our pace. Our pace was good, the team is working really well together right now,” Church said. “We just hit two kind of heartbreaking races in a row. We were in good position at Sebring when we got hit late in the race (in November), which did a fair bit more bodywork damage than it looked like. We’re putting ourselves in position to have good results, we just need to be there at the end.

“We just keep going with what we’ve been doing and eventually the luck is going to go our way. It’s going to come to us eventually.”

Action for the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring begins Wednesday, March 17. The 12-hour race on the 17-turn, 3.74-mile road course starts at 10:30 a.m. ET Saturday, March 20. Tickets are available at SebringRaceway.com.

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Adam Sinclair

NHRA, IHRA, Motocross and other forms of motorsports Staff writer
About Me: Adam has been a race fan since the first time he went through the tunnel under the Daytona International Speedway almost 30 years ago. He has had the privilege of travelling to races all across the state of Florida (as well as one race in Ohio), watching nearly everything with a motor compete for fame and glory, as well as participating in various racing schools to get the feel of what racecar drivers go through every week. Adam has spent the last three years covering motorsports for Examiner.com., where he had the opportunity to see the racing world from behind the scenes as well as the grandstands. He invites everyone to follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus, and looks forward to sharing his enthusiasm for all things racing with the readers of SpeedwayDigest.com.Be sure to tune in for his weekly sports talk program, Thursday Night Thunder, where he discusses the latest in motorsports news with drivers, crew members, and fans. The show takes place every Thursday at 8:00 pm EST on the Speedway Digest Radio Network.