Making its second outing in the WEC Hypercar Class with the 963 LMDh, the German team proved competitive, as the car shared by Jani, Harry Tincknell and Gianmaria Bruni cruised among the top five in the first two hours.
However, the team’s hard work was undone when Tincknell returned after the opening double stint to pass the baton to Bruni, due to a seatbelt problem which forced Proton to garage the car for more than five minutes.
As a result, the #99 lost seven laps to the leaders, ending up in ninth place and eight laps behind the winning #7 Toyota GR010 HYBRID.
After the race, Jani regretted the missed opportunity to beat the Ferraris, as Tincknell had given James Calado’s #51 499P a run for its money before his pitstop.
“It was possible to obtain an excellent result – the Swiss told Motorsport.com – When I got into the car I found myself behind the Porsche [#6] and the two Toyotas, and I stayed with them for the whole stint.”
“But the belt came out of the buckle where they tighten, it basically came out of the guide. We couldn’t tighten them anymore, so we had to change the whole belt. It was really strange, I’d never seen anything like it.”
“It’s a shame, because I’m sure we would have finished fourth. We were faster than the Ferraris. We had their pace. But if you consider that the car was new this weekend, these are precisely the things that can happen when you don’t make test first.”
“We have the riders and the pace. Now we just need to sort out the details that are logically not yet in place with so little time available.”
The Porsche 963 chassis that Proton raced at Fuji was different from the one it made its debut at Monza in July, then shipped to the United States to compete in the IMSA championship.
As was the case with the team’s first chassis before Monza, the only outing before Fuji was a 10-lap shakedown at Porsche’s Weissach headquarters.
Tincknell added: “It’s a shame because everything was going well. I was right behind Calado before I stopped. I had a great second part of my stint and we were close behind the Ferraris. The pace of the car was incredible, given that we didn’t we’ve been testing. We’re continually making progress and I think our Top5 in FP3 was real.”
“I really think we’re biting off more than we can chew considering Proton is not an established prototype team and we’re at this stage of the program.”
Proton’s other Porsche customer team, Jota, also regretted the chance of beating a dull Ferrari at Fuji.
This was after Antonio Felix da Costa received a drive-through penalty for making contact with another car – ironically, Jota’s LMP2 car – at Turn 10 in the second hour, while fifth.
Due to the penalty, da Costa, Will Stevens and Yifei Ye dropped to sixth place behind both 499Ps, 22 seconds behind the #51 car, which placed fifth.
Jota boss Sam Hignett told Motorsport.com: “Without the drive-through, we would have been fighting for fourth place with the first Ferrari. The final result is also distorted because they did the FCY for less than a lap entire, while we did the entire straight under FCY.
“We lost 15″ at that point, so we were actually about 10″ behind the #51. We could have been fourth but we were a little slower than the #6 Porsche, so there’s some work to do.” .
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