Tincknell: It’s all in our hands

Harry Tincknell is confident that the Jota Sport team will have enough in hand over the competition to seal the European Le Mans Series title at Estoril this weekend, despite the team’s setback at Paul Ricard.

In one fell swoop, Jota not only lost their hard-won victory to a post-race penalty applied for overrunning Filipe Albuquerque’s drive time, but gifted maximum points to their chief title rivals Greaves, who now go into the final round at Estoril just one point behind. 

This weekend is now-or-never time in Jota's ELMS title challenge (Jota Sport).

With TDS suffering brake problems at Paul Ricard, the French squad need a large slice of luck to fall their way at Estoril, effectively rendering the title battle a head-to-head showdown between the Jota and Greaves squads. But despite having won only once this season at the Red Bull Ring, the Jota-Gibson package has finished on the podium at every round, and it is this relentless consistency which Tincknell believes will give them the edge.

“The pole lap was probably one of the best I’ve ever done, we absolutely nailed the strategy in the race and I was just cruising around at the end thinking about what I was going to say on the podium, so it was obviously gutting to get the penalty; it was an honest mistake and definitely by leaving Filipe out it hindered us rather than helped us, but rules are rules,” he said.

“It’s a shame that we won’t go to Estoril with an 18 point lead, but we still go in there leading the championship, so it’s all in our hands and it’s a track that we know well. I think before we could finish fifth and win the championship whereas now we have to beat the other cars, but Estoril is a good track for us, we tested there at the start of the year and did well there last year, so there’s no reason why we can’t. It’s been a fantastic year for us, we’ve been on the podium every race, so we’ve just got to go and finish it off now, we’ve got one more race and we’ll see what happens.”

23-year-old Tincknell, who is also on Nissan’s factory roster and made his GT racing debut in the Blancpain Endurance Series at the Nurburgring, is open to the possibility of continuing with the team next year, but wants to end the season on a high if it does turn out to be their last together.

Albuquerque, Tincknell and Dolan hope to add to their
victory in Austria at the ELMS finale this weekend (Jota Sport).

“All of last year we were playing catch-up when we crashed out of the first race, whereas this year we’ve been really consistent, which has been massively important. I think along with Greaves and TDS we’ve been the stand-outs of the season, although the SMP cars have been getting stronger, so it will be interesting in the race.

“It’s been a fantastic championship and I’ve loved every second of it, I’m really enjoying driving with Jota and hopefully we can continue next season. We obviously won Le Mans last year which is the pinnacle of LMP2 racing and just missed out on the championship, so hopefully we can put that right this year – in two seasons to be a Le Mans winner and an ELMS champion would be absolutely awesome and it’s everything the team deserves. But we’ve just got to forget all that, it’s a one race shootout at Estoril, we’ve got to qualify well and get the race sorted.”