Why Hertz Is Getting Back Into Racing

Last weekend, Hertz Team Jota debuted its Porsche 963 Hypercar at the World Endurance Championship's 6 Hours of Spa. The No. 38 qualified seventh on the grid and went on to finish sixth on race day, putting it right in the mix with heavyweight factory teams from Ferrari, Peugeot, Toyota, and even Porsche. Surviving 148 laps on a track that's famously torturous on hardware was enough reason for celebration, but as a privateer team with minimal testing under its belt and a fraction of the resources of a factory team, the squad walked away elated. For Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr, this kind of David-versus-Goliath attitude was the reason why the rental car company signed up to be the team's title sponsor to begin with.

"We want to make a bold statement that Hertz is back in racing," Scherr told me ahead of the race. "We're a brand that's been around for 104 years, and we've had a long history in auto racing. Our sponsorship of Team Jota is now bringing us back in a very edgy way with an iconic car that pops in that Hertz racing gold. Auto racing embeds all of the elements of what we want to be as a brand."

Hertz has previously been involved in other racing series in the U.S. and abroad, having sponsored everything from NASCAR stock cars to WRC rally cars and MotoGP bikes. Last summer, however, the car rental giant announced its return to global auto racing with their sponsorship of Team Jota in the WEC.

Jota is a British privateer team that isn't a stranger to success, having won at the highest levels of the FIA's WEC series, including an LMP2 victory at Le Mans in 2022. A privateer team differs from a factory team in that it's a separate entity from the engine and chassis manufacturers. They're often called "customer teams" because they literally buy equipment from these suppliers and then set out to race on their own—and often against those very same manufacturers’ factory teams. Such is the case with Jota, who must race its Porsche 963 Hypercar against Stuttgart's own Penske Porsche outfit.

For Jota co-owner Sam Hignett, it's this monumental challenge that pushes him and his team to achieve more with, in many ways, less.

"It's an honor to be able to compete against the might of Penske, and it's just a privilege that we're able to be able to come into this [Hypercar] class and race against people like Penske and Ganassi," Hignett told me. "We're very humble and proud of what we've achieved. Penske [and Porsche] have been very gracious in helping us get started [with some software help due to the late delivery of Jota's 963] but Penske is our competitor, and we are their competitor."

Auto racing is a ruthless sport, and like all global competition, it's also a ruthless business. In a nutshell, it operates like this: a sports team has its own fans and it reaches those fans (along with the opposing team's fans) every time it goes on the field. If a match is broadcasted on TV then it reaches even more fans and makes that team more appealing to brands. The bigger and better the team, the more it can charge sponsors—and, in theory, the better the sponsor's return on investment. If you want the extended version of this, you can read my deep dive into the business of racing.

As a company with more advertising dollars than most big companies' entire operating budgets, Hertz gets this concept, and it certainly did its homework before choosing WEC and Jota. I specifically asked Scherr if it had considered Formula 1—especially given its recent boom in America—and he explained that Hertz had a wide range of options to make its return to racing. There was something about WEC that made it extra appealing, he said, having as much to do with the series' categories and technology as much as it did its global reach.

"We considered all of them, but honestly, we felt that the WEC gave us an opportunity to be more experimental, to put a hybrid car out there, and that was exciting to us," Scherr told me. "Hertz is dominant in the United States and we'd love to [leverage that to] bring the influence of auto racing into the U.S. [from Europe] as it's a very, very popular sport here. We also felt that expanding our exposure into Europe in a series of races in Portugal and Belgium and France and Italy and then moving on to Bahrain and Japan.