Cadillac Racing’s 2025 WEC Partner Is Hertz Team Jota

Five months ago, news broke that Cadillac was ending its partnership with Chip Ganassi Racing after the 2024 season of the World Endurance Championship (WEC). Today, the automaker has announced the outfit that will campaign its two factory-backed Hypercars in the 2025 WEC season with Hertz Team Jota.

Next year will mark Cadillac’s third straight season of competition in the WEC, a global series that incorporates three classes of cars, with varying degrees of similarity to production cars. Cadillac is racing in the top class, in which cars are built from scratch with hybrid powertrains using purpose-built race chassis supplied by a limited number of manufacturers. The Dallara-based Cadillac V-Series.R prototype shares just a few visual cues with the Cadillacs you can buy—upright taillights and headlights, a pointy nose—but the strongest connection to the V-Series production cars is the format of its powerplant: A 5.5-liter V-8 called the LMC55.R, infused with secrets that Cadillac guards very closely indeed.

If you’ve been watching racing at all since the 2000s, you’ll know that Cadillac has been slowly, consistently upping its commitment to motorsport: from 2004 to ’07 with the CTS-V in the SCCA’s World Challenge GT Championship; from 2011 to ’17 with the CTS-V.R and later ATS-V.R in Pirelli World Challenge GT. Then it made an exponential jump to the top tier of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, from 2017 to 2022, where Cadillac claimed nine manufacturer championships in the series’ top class. In 2023, Cadillac jumped again, to global prototype racing, with the #2 car in the World Endurance Championship. In the 2024 season, Cadillac Racing is represented by two cars in IMSA—a red one campaigned by Action Express Racing and a yellow one run by Chip Ganassi; a third car, also campaigned by Ganassi and wearing blue livery, runs in the WEC.

A team with many ties to GM across many different race series, Chip Ganassi entered the Cadillac picture in 2021, the last season of the DPi program before the transition to the LMDh ruleset, which meant a new car: the V-Series.R. That’s the model you saw at Le Mans this year, when all three of the Cadillacs received invites to run at the famous French enduro. When this season concludes, Ganassi will have been the factory partner of Cadillac Racing for four seasons.

And when 2025 begins, Hertz Team Jota will partner with a factory for the first time.

“Jota has always strived to become a manufacturer team, so now joining forces with Cadillac is the realization of this goal,” says Sam Hignett, director and founder of Hertz Team Jota. “Having competed against the Cadillac V-Series.R for the last two seasons, we have experienced how competitive it is and we are genuinely honored to be entrusted with fielding its cars from 2025 onward. We are in the privileged position to have enjoyed record-breaking success in the FIA World Endurance Championship, especially at Le Mans, and we are very much looking forward to continuing this success with Cadillac and Hertz.”

A new team means new numbers, and the Cadillacs will adopt the numbers currently worn by the two Porsche Hypercars that Hertz Team Jota runs as a customer team: 12 and 38. Drivers will be announced in the future.

Hertz Team Jota is technically Jota Sport, whose principal sponsor is the rental giant Hertz. (It’s not the only rental giant on the Hypercar grid; the title sponsor of Porsche’s factory-backed effort is Penske). Team Jota is a British outfit founded in 2000, whose first-ever race car was actually a Honda. Team Jota first competed in the crown jewel of the WEC calendar, the 24 hours of Le Mans, in 2005. It has extensive experience in the LMP2 class, the one immediately below what used to be LMP1 and is now Hypercar, campaigning at least one entry at Le Mans ten years in a row, from 2012 to 2022. In the last four years of that stretch, it got on the class podium each time. For the last few years, Jota has expanded its focus to include Hypercar, campaigning both a Porsche 963 and an LMP2 car, and only dropping the latter this year.

Team Jota has proven itself quite capable of being competitive in WEC prototype racing as a customer team. How will it fare as Cadillac’s factory partner in that series, especially when GM is growing increasingly hungry for an overall win? That’s the story we’ll be watching after the 2025 season kicks off in Qatar in late February of next year.