When Cadillac was announced to be joining the FIA World Endurance Championship from the 2023 season, I was ecstatic. The reveal of their LMDH challenger, dubbed the V Series.R, was brilliant and drummed up enough hype on its own. When long time partner Chip Ganassi Racing were announced to be running the team, it was genuinely a historic moment. 

Finally, the ultimate ambition of IMSA’s DPI category, in which Cadillac had been present from its inception in 2017 to its final race at the end of 2022, had been fulfilled. WEC and IMSA would converge, and Cadillac were immediately onboard.

On that day in Florida, Cadillac had quite the strong run, finishing fourth ahead of both Porsches and the two Peugeots. They had every right to be optimistic, and hopes were high going into the rest of 2023. Could they really take the fight to the likes of Ferrari and Porsche? Upon scoring another fourth place in Portimao and the marque’s first ever podium at Le Mans, you’d be forgiven for thinking they would. 

But the rest of 2023 left a lot to be desired, as Renge Van De Zande somehow emerged unscathed from a violent crash at Spa while their post Le Mans form vanished as they failed to finish higher than 10th in the remaining rounds. 

This continued into 2024, where the downward spiral continued. Unable to challenge even BMW or Alpine across the season, they could only beat a half-hearted Lamborghini effort and Isotta Fraschini, who pulled out of the championship entirely after Le Mans, in the championship standings after accruing a measly thirty-seven points. Disqualification from the opening round in Qatar never helped their cause, as they also suffered another horror crash at Spa and were involved in a controversial crash with the championship contending no.7 Toyota at Fuji.

All in all, 2024 really showed they had plummeted down the pecking order.

In 2025 though, there is a sense of renewed hope, nay, expectation, surrounding the team. It comes in the form of 2024’s worst kept secret: Chip Ganassi has been given the boot, and JOTA are to run not one but two Cadillac V Series.Rs in the 2025 FIA World Endurance Championship.

The deal comes after the British team’s success running a pair of Porsche 963s last year, performing admirably against the likes of Ferrari, Porsche and Toyota’s factory teams. They even scored a shock victory at the six hours of spa.

This is before mentioning their incredible success running LMP2’s before their jump to Hypercar. Three class wins at le mans and a further seven podiums speak for themselves, not to mention their LMP2 World Championship title in 2022 and wider success in the European Le Mans Series. If there was any team to rescue Cadillac, JOTA would surely be Cadillac’s best bet. And it won’t just be a new team running the programme, because Cadillac’s own factory drivers are piloting those two cars.

Driving for what is now officially named Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA will be some of motorsport’s most famous names. Four time CART champion Sebastian Bourdais will be joined by Jenson Button (no words needed) and ex-Porsche LMP1 star Earl Bamber who’s been part of Cadillac’s WEC operation since it began. They’ll be piloting what JOTA themselves dub ‘mighty 38’ so called because of the car’s race number (38) and its incredible lineup.

The no.12 Cadillac will have a more modest lineup, but don’t confuse that with a lack of talent. Ex- Marussia F1 man and 2022 LMP2 World Champion Will Stevens will feature alongside Norman Nato who drove for JOTA last year, with longtime Cadillac factory driver Alex Lynn completing their lineup.

All this optimism is great, and don’t get me wrong I think in 2025 we’ll see a completely new Cadillac team able to match its results from the first half of that 2023 campaign, but when you look at the rest of the field and the improvements being made across the board by those around Cadillac, it still feels like a make or break year.

To put things simply, this HAS to work. Cadillac have run out of excuses by this point and have nowhere to hide. They’ve a world-class team and some of the greatest drivers of the century on their hands to go with it. It’s up to them to finally put it all together and deliver the results the fans have been starved of since Le Mans two years ago. And if they do end up sinking to the bottom of the standings once again, I genuinely don’t see a way out for Cadillac.

2025 then is the year where the V Series.R will show its true capabilities. Will JOTA deliver amidst the most ruthless competition sports car racing has ever seen, or are Cadillac once again fated to reprise their role as the grid’s comedy of errors?

As the title reads, it truly is crunch time for Cadillac.

thumbnail credit – Martin Lee from London, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons