How an American racing team used to winning in the US adapts to the challenge of Le Mans

Wayne Taylor has been talking about taking his eponymous team to the Le Mans 24 Hours for years. With victories at the Daytona, Sebring and Petit Le Mans enduros under its belt, a win at the French race is the next box to be ticked by Wayne Taylor Racing.

But taking a successful operation over from the IMSA SportsCar Championship to compete at the World Endurance Championship blue riband isn’t as simple as it might sound, even with common regulations across the two series. 

WTR won’t be rolling one of its Cadillac V-Series.R LMDhs straight from an IMSA event onto a plane destined for France. The schedule involved in the team’s maiden Le Mans assault and subtle differences in the specification of the cars racing in IMSA and the WEC preclude that, says WTR general manager Travis Houge.

He explains that there have been a lot of what he calls “moving pieces” in bringing together the team’s one-car bid for Le Mans glory.

The schedule means that WTR will have at least one V-Series.R on track four weekends in a row: the race and the Test Day the preceding weekend sit between rounds of the North American series in Detroit and at Watkins Glen.

That would mean it would need a dedicated car for Le Mans, even if the specs were the same. It also has implications on the duties it will assign to staff across a busy month.

IMSA calendar means a dedicated car was needed for WTR’s Le Mans assault

Photo by: Michael L Levitt / Motorsport Images via Getty Images

WTR kicked off its preparations in earnest on the confirmation of its Le Mans grid slot at the start of March. “That’s when we started to assemble the parts and pieces in order to build the car for Le Mans,” Houge explains.

“The differences are mainly aero bits [a knock-on from the different wind tunnels used for the respective homologations in IMSA and WEC] and then the different wiring harness and scrutineering looms. They are long lead-time items, and most of the stuff didn’t show up until 12 May.”

That was just four days before WTR’s Le Mans racer, fully decked out in the livery of Mobil 1, its new sponsor for the race, was given a shakedown in WEC spec at Putnum Park near its Indianapolis workshops. Three days after that, the car was in the air headed for Europe. 

“We have to have equivalent to what we have at Le Mans back at base to turn the cars around for the next IMSA race” Travis Houge

“It feels like we’ve been building cars since November,” reckons Houge of the workload that has followed WTR’s return to the Cadillac fold at the conclusion of last year’s IMSA campaign, after four years with Acura.

The schedule was complicated by a crash at the season-opening Daytona 24 Hours in January. What became the Le Mans car briefly replaced the shunted chassis in testing for the run-up to the Sebring 12 Hours. That was important, he says, “so we weren’t taking something to Le Mans that hadn’t run before”.

WTR will have 40 personnel at Le Mans, with around 25 of them operational staff working in its pitbox. They haven’t all come from its two-car IMSA V-Series.R squad: crew members have also been brought from its Lamborghini programmes in GT Daytona in IMSA and the one-make Super Trofeo series in North America.

“We’ve been able to use people from our other programmes to fill our Le Mans roster and our workshop roster,” explains Houge. “We have to have equivalent to what we have at Le Mans back at base to turn the cars around for the next IMSA race. We need the same calibre of people building up the IMSA cars because the rest of the crew aren’t going to see them between Detroit and Watkins Glen.”

Driver trio’s combined 29 Le Mans 24 Hours starts should be a boon

Photo by: Wayne Taylor Racing

Houge points out that the majority of the Le Mans personnel will only get one night in their own beds after Detroit prior to crossing the Pond. After the race, it will be straight to upstate New York from France. 

The team has had what might be termed ‘a fixer’ in France for a couple of months. “A pair of boots on the ground to help us with the logistics,” is how Houge puts it. He is not foreseeing any problems with the language barrier: a junior engineer on WTR’s GTD and Super Trofeo teams was born and bred in the Le Mans region and will be shadowing Houge through the week. 

WTR has opted not to bolster its staff with a WEC or Le Mans specialist to smooth its transition. Instead it will be leaning on the experience of Jota, Cadillac’s full-time representative in the WEC, and fellow IMSA team Action Express Racing, which is back for its third consecutive Le Mans, in what is being billed as a “one-team” approach.

There’s also the experience of its drivers: Ricky and Jordan Taylor (Wayne’s sons) and Filipe Albuquerque have 29 Le Mans starts between them. 

“Those Le Mans participations will come in handy,” predicts Houge. “We do have a couple of guys who’ve worked at Le Mans before, and Brian Pillar [WTR technical director] was over there a couple of years ago with Ricky when he was driving for Tower Motorsports in LMP2.

“We’ve been watching past races and reading the rules, and then it’s going to be about flicking a switch, turning off IMSA rules in our minds when we leave Detroit, and turning on European rules when we arrive in France.”

Wayne Taylor is also an old hand at Le Mans. He raced at the Circuit de la Sarthe 13 times, scoring a best result of fourth aboard a Kremer-run Porsche 962C on debut in 1987 and winning the LMP1 class aboard a Doyle-Risi Racing Ferrari 333SP in 1998.

That, he says, is “one of my favourite wins”. There have also been multiple visits to witness his sons racing. Yet he can’t hide his excitement at taking his team to the big race for the first time. 

“This really is a big deal,” he says. “It’s hard to believe that I can still be this excited and so passionate about something after so many years in the motorsport business. This is definitely one of the highlights of my career.”

Given that this is WTR’s first season with the V-Series.R, the question has to be whether he considered waiting a year before heading for Le Mans?

“I’m not sure anyone is betting on us as a team new to Le Mans - it’s a tall order to win first time out,” he says. “But if we sat out this year, then next year would be our first year. You’re not going to learn anything by staying home. We’re gonna take what we learn this year for our second go next year. I see this as a long-term thing.”

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The #101 Cadillac WTR Cadillac V-Series.R is shared by Ricky Taylor, Jordan Taylor and Filipe Albuquerque

Photo by: JEP