Henri Dubois · Endurance Correspondent
After a neck injury that cost him the first six rounds of the season, the Briton is back in the Cadillac V-Series.R for the last two WEC races.
Alex Lynn will be back in the No. 12 Cadillac V-Series.R, run by Hertz Team JOTA, for the last two rounds of the 2026 WEC season in Barcelona and Monza. The Cadillac factory driver missed the first six rounds of the season with a neck injury and, as the team announced, went through a rehab program after surgery in June that has apparently brought him back to the point where a race over the full distance seems justifiable.
From injury to surgery
For an endurance driver, a neck injury is no trivial problem. Over a stint of an hour and a half to two hours, considerable lateral forces act on the cervical spine in a Hypercar, amplified by braking zones with heavy deceleration and long night phases in which concentration is already stretched. That Lynn had to sit out the entire 2026 season up to Fuji suggests that the injury simply did not allow for this kind of load at first.
The surgery in June and the rehab program that followed were therefore not a short intermediate step, but a process lasting months, at the end of which clearance for a race of six hours or more could only then be given. That Hertz Team JOTA has now confirmed him for Barcelona and Monza is likely also a signal that medical clearance for the full load of a WEC race distance has been granted.
What the return means for Cadillac
For Cadillac, every factory car counts in the manufacturers’ standings, which is why it matters which driver lineup contests the remaining rounds, regardless of which of the factory cars ends up scoring the points.
Lynn’s return brings a factory driver back into the trio for Hertz Team JOTA, which runs the No. 12 car for Cadillac, after the team had to contest the season up to Fuji without him, most recently with Ricky Taylor in Austin and with only two drivers at Fuji. How resilient Lynn really is over a full race distance is likely to become clear only in Barcelona, where a double stint under real conditions is a different test from a rehab program in the simulator or on short test runs.
