Why Le Mans is a crucial aspect of a landmark IMSA reunion

Wayne Taylor is describing it as a “homecoming”. After four seasons flying the flag for Acura in the IMSA SportsCar Championship, his eponymous team is back with Cadillac. That’s a return to the marque with which, prior to his defection for the 2021 season, Wayne Taylor Racing had won the Daytona 24 Hours season-opener three times in four years.

And, just as pertinently, Taylor is back with General Motors. His deal to run a pair of GTP class Caddy V-Series.R LMDhs starting this weekend at Daytona renews a relationship with an automotive giant with which he has been inextricably linked across a span of more than 30 years as a driver and team owner.

Taylor the driver raced and won with Chevrolet, Oldsmobile and Pontiac. As an owner with WTR he has done the same with Pontiac, Chevrolet and Cadillac. Nor should it be forgotten that he was part of the organisation that built and ran Caddy’s Northstar LMP prototypes that raced at the Le Mans 24 Hours and beyond in 2001 and 2002. He reckons he’s back where he belongs and he’s feeling the love.

“It’s been a very long relationship when you look at all the GM brands I’ve driven for or raced with as a team owner,” explains Taylor. “It’s pretty much all of them. They’ve welcomed me back into the family and put their arms around me.”

And quite rightly so, given the successes he has delivered. With Oldsmobile he did the Daytona-Sebring double – sometimes referred to as the Florida 36 Hours – in 1996 driving a Riley & Scott MkIII run by the works under the Doyle Racing banner. There was also an IMSA World Sports Car title the same season.

For Pontiac he delivered a Daytona victory and a Grand American Road Racing Series crown in 2005 with a Riley MkXI Daytona Prototype. To that can be added his successes after the establishment of WTR for 2007: another Grand-Am title in 2013 with the Dallara-Chevrolet Corvette DP, and victory in the IMSA championship in 2017 with the Cadillac DPi-V.R Daytona Prototype international.

Taylor (left) was part of winning line-up at Daytona in 1996 with GM and has now brought his team back into the fold

Photo by: William Murenbeeld / Motorsport Images

It was a wrench for Taylor to leave the GM fold in the first place and switch over to Honda’s Acura brand for four seasons that straddled the end of the DPi era and the introduction of LMDh prototypes. He’d never been slow to make clear his frustrations with the level of financial support he was getting.

“I couldn’t afford to continue as I wanted to without more factory backing,” he says. “But it wasn’t just money: there didn’t appear to be anything on the horizon that mapped out our future.”

The Acura relationship yielded a straight-out-the-box Daytona victory with the ARX-05 DPi – a fourth in five years and win number six for Taylor in both his roles – plus another victory in the Sebring 12 Hours, nine race wins in total, three runner-up positions in the championship and an IMSA Endurance Cup title. Not a bad haul, but Taylor hints that it wasn’t an entirely happy relationship. Which is why Taylor doorstepped old ally Mark Reuss, GM’s president, as long ago as March 2023.

Taylor makes no secret of his desire to take his team to sportscar racing’s biggest race. A victory there is the one thing missing from the Taylor CV

“I asked if there was any chance of getting back together,” recalls Taylor of the impromptu meeting at the Amelia Island Concours. “His question to me was when was I thinking of, and I said 2025 because I was under contract to Acura until then.

“My next question was how long a deal was he thinking of? He said for ’25, ’26 and ’27. ‘That’s perfect,’ was my reply. I left there thinking, ‘Is this real?’ But on the Monday morning I got a call asking me to confirm all the dates.”

There were multiple reasons Taylor was motivated to return to GM. He doesn’t want to go into detail about any dissatisfaction with Acura and Honda Racing Corporation USA (formerly Honda Performance Development), which masterminds the ARX-06 LMDh programme. But he talks about divergence of goals. And one of them concerns Le Mans.

Acura is a North America-only brand and has no plans to expand into the World Endurance Championship – and wouldn’t be able to race at Le Mans unless it did. Taylor makes no secret of his desire to take his team to sportscar racing’s biggest race. A victory there is the one thing missing from the Taylor CV, not counting a class victory in 1998 when the Ferrari 333 SP he was driving was the first car home in LMP1 in eighth.

Tie-up with Acura yielded another Daytona 24 Hours victory at the first attempt in 2021, but Taylor is glad to be back with GM

Photo by: Richard Dole / Motorsport Images

“I so want to go there to try to win that one,” says South African-born Taylor. “The chance to go to Le Mans was a big part of making the change because Acura has indicated that it has no plans to go, and that race is central to Cadillac’s programme.” Don’t expect WTR to be missing from the Le Mans entry list when it’s published next month.

Developments at GM also played a part, most significantly the establishment of the Charlotte GM Technical Center in Concord to the north-east of the city. It’s from where the LMDh project is managed and where its normally aspirated V8 engine has been developed – and where Cadillac’s forthcoming Formula 1 engine will be built.

“It’s an impressive facility,” Taylor acknowledges. “It gives GM an engineering resource that it didn’t have before.”

Engineering resource was something that Taylor talked about when it was announced late in 2022 that WTR would be partnering with Andretti Autosport ahead of the team’s first season with the ARX-06 hybrid. The Andretti name was missing from the official statement announcing WTR’s return to Cadillac, and it has since emerged that the partnership has now ended. The shareholding Andretti took is now held by TWG Global, the group that owns what is now known as Andretti Global.

WTR may have changed marques, but the driving squad for 2025 is very much business as usual. Taylor’s sons Ricky and Jordan are paired respectively with Filipe Albuquerque and Louis Deletraz as last year, while the drivers who will join them for the enduros, Toyota WEC aces Kamui Kobayashi and Brendon Hartley included, are all familiar faces at the team.

WTR blooded its V-Series.R at the official IMSA test at Daytona in November. The three days were the only running the team undertook with its new cars ahead of last weekend’s official pre-event Roar test.

“There has been a lot of preparation going on behind the scenes,” says Taylor. “We know GM and we know Dallara [which co-developed the LMDh like the DPi before it]. I have full confidence in my team that we are going to Daytona to race for the win.”

Taylor looks set to continue going to races at the helm of his team trying to claim yet more victories for the foreseeable future. “I never thought I would still be doing this at my age,” reckons Taylor, now 68. “But I’m more excited about this deal than anything in the past. I’m so focused and motivated.”

Three decades in the making

Taylor's long GM affiliation stretches back to his involvement in the Intrepid programme

Photo by: William Murenbeeld / Motorsport Images

The Wayne Taylor odyssey with General Motors began in 1991 when he was part of the Chevrolet-backed Intrepid programme in the IMSA GT Championship. Taylor had raced a Spice with amateur driver Jim Miller the previous year, and moved across to the new car Miller commissioned from the Pratt & Miller organisation he’d established in 1989.

The high-downforce machine designed for the rough and tumble of the IMSA sprints ended up winning just once, Taylor triumphing in horrendous weather on the streets of New Orleans. It should have won more had the project not lost impetus after team-mate Tommy Kendall broke his legs at Watkins Glen and the car was robbed of its edge when IMSA banned carbon brakes.

“In that first year it was an amazing car to drive,” he recalls. “I remember at Lime Rock it was flat all the way through Big Bend, that double right-hander. It had so much downforce they had to strap our legs up to the dashboard to keep our feet on the throttle.”

Taylor had stood down from driving duties by the time WTR renewed its GM links with Chevrolet in 2011 after two years running Ford engines in its new Dallara DP01

Taylor was already an IMSA champion (with a Jim Downing-run Kudzu-Mazda DG3 in 1994) and a multiple race winner (in a Momo/Doran Ferrari 333 SP in 1995) when he put a new operation together for 1996 with Oldsmobile and Riley & Scott. It triumphed at Daytona and Sebring straight off the bat.

“Right from first practice at Daytona I knew that we were going to win that race so long as we could keep the car together,” he remembers. “We were down on the Ferraris on straightline speed, but we more than made up for that with mechanical grip on the infield. Winning Daytona for the first time and then following it up at Sebring was the highlight of my career as a driver.”

Cadillac offered Taylor a new and different opportunity for 2000: “They gave me the chance to just be a driver – by that point I was pretty tired of putting deals together.” It didn’t work out quite as planned.

After a disastrous Le Mans debut with the original R&S-built Northstar LMP, Taylor was summoned to Detroit by GM top brass: “They asked me what was being done wrong and could I put something together to make it better.”

After two disappointing attempts at Le Mans with R&S-built Caddy, the rebooted project with Taylor at its heart only lasted one more year before being canned

Photo by: Motorsport Images

The result was 3GR, formed with designer Nigel Stroud and Jeff Hazell, who’d run McLaren’s F1 GTR project. An all-new car for 2002, the LMP-02, was just starting to come good in the American Le Mans Series when the programme ended. “That car had potential to be really competitive,” says Taylor.

Pontiac was relaunching its GTO muscle car in the mid-2000s and Taylor brought it together with Riley Technologies to field one of its new MkXI Daytona Prototypes in Grand-Am for 2004 as SunTrust Racing. A Daytona victory and championship success followed in 2005. “That was a great time, up there with ’96,” reflects Taylor. “We won a lot of a races, but eventually the time was right to go my own way and start a team.”

Taylor had stood down from driving duties by the time WTR renewed its GM links with Chevrolet in 2011 after two years running Ford engines in its new Dallara DP01, which was clothed in Corvette-style bodywork for 2012. In 2013 Jordan Taylor joined WTR in place of brother Ricky and won five times to seal the title with Max Angelelli, a stalwart of the team and a key player in its history.

“That was a special year,” enthuses Taylor. “Jordan was so young, just 22, and most of his experience was in GT cars. But I never doubted that he’d do the job – I wouldn’t have put him in the car otherwise.”

Staying on board with GM at the start of the Cadillac DPi programme in 2017 was, says Taylor, “a natural move”. WTR started the new era with a Daytona victory, followed it up at Sebring, and went on to take the title with Jordan and Ricky paired together.

“If you ask me what the biggest highlight of my time in racing is, it has to be that year,” says their dad. “It’s better than anything I did as a driver.”

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Winning at Daytona, Sebring and claiming the first title of the new DPi era with sons Jordan and Ricky driving remains the high point for Taylor Sr

Photo by: Richard Dole / Motorsport Images