Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA waited until the final race of the 2026 FIA World Endurance Championship to win one. That’s how close it came.
The No. 38 Cadillac V-Series.R took the 6 Hours of Monza, the season finale, and with it the team’s first victory of the year. The win also kept alive a run JOTA clearly guards closely: twelve consecutive seasons with at least one win.
Lose Monza, and that streak ends at eleven. Instead, the team leaves Italy talking about next year.
Once the No. 38 got loose, the result was rarely in doubt. It qualified third after another tight session, then jumped to second by the end of the opening lap.
A few laps later it went up the inside of the Genesis for the lead. It never gave it back.
The No. 38 also set the fastest lap of the race. The chasing pack applied pressure at times, but six hours passed without the car surrendering the front, and Cadillac’s description of the drive as faultless is hard to argue with.
The three drivers who started the race did not all finish it together. Jack Aitken climbed out after his first stint and left the circuit for the birth of his first child.
His last words before leaving sounded like a man handing over the keys. “The car feels really quick and we’ve been able to stay towards the front so far,” Aitken said, warning that a day full of interventions and safety cars would test the strategy. “I’ll be watching closely and hopefully we can bring home a strong result.”
They did. He just watched it from somewhere else.
That left Sébastien Bourdais and Earl Bamber to close it out, and for Bourdais the finish meant more. Monza was his farewell to the GM program.
“I couldn’t have dreamt of a better way to finish this chapter,” Bourdais said. “Hopefully it’s not the end for me, but it is the end of a chapter with GM, and there really couldn’t have been a better way to go out.”
Few drivers get to write their own exit. Bourdais got a dominant win in a world championship finale, with his absent teammate still on his mind: “We’re missing Jack right now, but this was a three-driver effort.”
The other half of the garage had a far rougher afternoon. The No. 12 started seventh, struggled for pace at times, and fought its way to fifth in the closing stages.
Then, in the final moments, it tangled with a Peugeot. It went down as a DNF.
One car winning, the other out at the death. As snapshots go, it fairly sums up a season in which Cadillac needed every race to find its footing.
Bamber framed the win as the payoff for a long grind. “We’ve been working hard and chipping away at it all year,” he said, pointing to a strong car at Le Mans and the momentum built since.
He went further. “Today showed that we’ve got the composure, the team and all the ingredients to be a force to be reckoned with in the World Championship next year.”
Kristian Aquilina, VP Global Cadillac, looked ahead too, saying the win gives the team “inspiration to keep pushing for more success next season.”
That season begins without Bourdais in a GM seat. The streak now stands at twelve, and the chase for thirteen starts with a lineup still to be settled.
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