Da Costa: "Humble" Jota will treat 963 debut at Spa as test weekend

The British squad is due to shakedown its new LMDh machine at Weissach this week ahead of the third round of the 2023 WEC at Spa on 29 April.

Porsche factory driver da Costa will form part of the squad’s line-up for Spa alongside Ye Yifei and Will Stevens, although Matt Campbell is expected to perform shakedown duties.

The Portuguese explained that he will miss Thursday’s two practice sessions due to Formula E simulator preparation before arriving at Spa on Friday for final practice and qualifying.

The lack of time to prepare the car for the final WEC race prior to the Le Mans 24 Hours means Jota is employing realistic expectations, da Costa explained.

He told Autosport: “We’re going to basically land on a parachute in the middle of the track with new equipment.

“We have to be super humble. We’re going to take Spa as a test, learn as much as we can about set-up, about systems, about running procedures on this car.

“Then it looks like we’re going to have two good tests before Le Mans and I think we can actually arrive in Le Mans with decent knowledge.”

#48 Hertz Team Jota Oreca 07 - Gibson: David Beckmann, Yifei Ye, António Félix da Costa

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Da Costa, Ye and David Beckmann finished fifth among the LMP2 entries in Sunday’s 6 Hours of Portimao, bringing down the curtain on Da Costa’s involvement in the category.

The defending LMP2 champion said he was “a little bit sad” with his muted race on home turf as “it would have been good to have a nice goodbye” to the ORECA-Gibson 07.

“As a team I think the last 12 races we’ve done together we’ve nailed every single one of them on car balance, on strategy and today we kind of missed out on both,” he added.

“It’s just a shame, being a home race, so many people here watching, supporting. I really wanted to give these guys a great result today and that wasn’t possible.

“We made a few mistakes along the weekend that led to what we had today, but no finger-pointing. We’re one team, we won a lot together, today we lost together.

“I know it’s the last race with this car. Still I want us to analyse exactly what went wrong, especially because we can help the sister car.”