Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA rolls into Imola this week for the 2026 FIA World Endurance Championship opener carrying genuine momentum from a breakthrough 2025 season and a notable hole in its driver lineup.
Alex Lynn, who helped deliver Cadillac Racing’s first-ever WEC victory in Brazil last year and anchored the No. 12 car to points in all eight races, will miss both Imola and the following round at Spa. He’s undergoing a planned procedure for a lingering neck issue. No timetable has been given beyond those two absences.
That leaves Norman Nato and Will Stevens to carry the No. 12 V-Series.R through the season’s critical opening stretch without the driver who finished fifth in the 2025 Hypercar Drivers’ Championship alongside them. It’s not a crisis, but it strips a proven lineup of a third of its firepower at exactly the moment the WEC’s stacked Hypercar field resets to zero.
The No. 38 car has its own roster gap. Earl Bamber and Sebastien Bourdais won’t be joined by IMSA GTP endurance champion Jack Aitken until Spa. Aitken is running a dual program with Cadillac Racing and will be at Long Beach this weekend for his IMSA commitments.
So Cadillac shows up to one of the most demanding tracks on the calendar with both cars effectively short-handed compared to the full-season plan. That’s the tension underneath the optimism.
And there is real optimism. The team banked nearly 450 laps during a two-day test in Qatar, with the car running reliably throughout. Bourdais specifically called out a new aero package that he says is working well.
The Prologue on April 14 gives both cars a full day of running before race week begins in earnest. Imola’s 4.909-kilometer layout is old-school punishing: 21 turns, narrow, bumpy, and notoriously hostile to overtaking.
Bamber was blunt about it. “Traffic is always a factor at Imola and overtaking is tricky due to the narrow, high speed bumpy nature of the track, so a strong qualifying run will be key,” he said. Cadillac proved it can qualify last year with three poles, but converting track position into race results at a place like Imola, where clean air is currency, demands the kind of endurance discipline the team is still building.
The 6 Hours of Imola goes green at 1 p.m. local time on April 19, with qualifying and the 10-minute Hyperpole shootout on Saturday. Two free practice sessions on Thursday frame the competitive week.
Stevens acknowledged the long gap since Bahrain. “It seems so long ago now,” he said. Nato echoed the sentiment, noting the delayed start to the season has made simulator work the primary development tool through the winter months.
This is the second year of the Cadillac Hypercar program in WEC, and the benchmarks shift accordingly. A maiden victory and three poles in year one announced the brand’s legitimacy. Year two demands consistency against Toyota, Porsche, Ferrari, and the rest of a Hypercar class that doesn’t hand out grace periods.
Starting the campaign with incomplete driver lineups in both cars isn’t ideal. But the 2,500 kilometers of reliable running in Qatar suggest the V-Series.R itself is ready. The question at Imola is whether Cadillac’s remaining drivers can compensate for what they’re temporarily missing, and whether the car’s new aero package translates from desert testing to the unforgiving curbs of Enzo Ferrari’s home track.
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