Wayne Taylor – Syndication Server

How doubling up is paying off for WTRAndretti

If this were 2023 and Wayne Taylor Racing with Andretti only had a single car, the No. 10 Acura ARX-06, they’d be looking at a DNF at Daytona and a fifth-place finish at Sebring to show for their efforts. But it’s 2024, WTRAndretti is now a two-car team and the sole operator of Honda Racing Corporation’s GTP efforts in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, and with a victory in the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring and a podium finish at Daytona, the team has a car tied for the championship lead.

The No. 10 team with core drivers Ricky Taylor and Filipe Albuquerque, with endurance addition Brendon Hartley and Marcus Ericsson on board for Daytona, has not had the best of luck so far this season, quitting in the night at Daytona and suffering a fluid leak at Sebring, and is currently eighth in the standings. Conversely, the new No. 40 with Jordan Taylor and Louis Delétraz, plus Colton Herta and Jenson Button, soldiered to a third-place finish at Daytona and won Sebring in style with a late-race push to the front.

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“It’s a huge win for the team,” said Jordan Taylor after Sebring. “I think it’s their first win in the GTP class for Acura. First time as a two-car team as well. Our car, we stayed at a triple [stint] all day, didn’t have any big issues. The 10 car was extremely quick, drove to the lead at one point but had their little issue that they recovered from and recovered to a top five.”

Delétraz, Jordan Taylor and Herta are now tied for the championship lead with the Porsche Penske Motorsports No. 6 squad of Dane Cameron, Felipe Nasr and Matt Campbell after their 963 won Daytona with Josef Newgarden also on board. From that perspective alone, taking on the second ARX-06 previously run by Meyer Shank Racing has been a blessing.

“We are recognized now as a bigger team,” said team principal Wayne Taylor as the season began. “Ganassi and Penske have always been at that level — we haven’t. I think now is basically us starting from ground zero. But I can already tell, listening to the drivers and mechanics and engineers of all the different options we have on how we’re going to run … that’s the most important part. When you’ve got one, it’s always a risk. When you’ve got two, you’ve got two chances. That’s what we wanted, that’s what we’ve got, and now we have to execute.”

Filipe Albuquerque and the No. 10 team have had the speed, if not the fortune of their new teammates thus far, but are still already benefitting from the expansion. Jake Galstad/Motorsport Images

Albuquerque, of course, would like to have been spared the bad luck the team has experienced so far this season. Last year, he and Ricky Taylor were in the championship fight to the end, despite not visiting victory circle. But he recognized the value of having a second car from the beginning.

“It’s a big change, for sure,” he explained. “When you have options of trying things, you can spread them out. That’s the good thing having two cars — one car tries this, and the other one tries that to validate what we tested in the simulator. And when one car is faster than the other, sometimes we don’t know why, and then we get to learn about, ‘Oh, it’s this, causing a reaction to the car we were not expecting.’ All these things are important.”

In the second year of WTR’s union with Andretti’s motorsports empire, the benefits of the partnership are evident. As Wayne Taylor notes, it’s a short trip if they need some machining that requires tools they don’t have. And in 2025, all of Andretti Global’s North American teams will be under one roof in its new headquarters in Fishers, Ind.

WTRAndretti brought on one of Andretti’s IndyCar Series engineers in its expansion to more than 100 team members. It takes eight transporters to move the team’s three cars — the team added a Lamborghini Huracán GTD effort for Kyle Marcelli and Danny Formal as well in 2024 — its equipment and the massive pit stand. That pit stand houses 66 screens, 32 workstations, thee crew for the three cars, 12 drivers at Daytona, and some 40 Honda Racing Corporation personnel.

WTRAndretti is now fulfilling the vision that Wayne Taylor had for the team from its beginning, running two cars in a top factory program. And he’s happy that now that he no longer has to race another Acura team.

“We’ve got great drivers, a great crew, we have a great partnership with HRC and all our commercial partners,” he said. “Being the sole Acura team is really the best it could be — we don’t want to race against [other Acura teams], because when that happens, you start racing each other and forget about everybody else. Now, there’s a factory program that is focused on these two cars. All the resources of HRC, all our team, can focus on beating everybody else, and we’ve got nobody else to beat in an Acura.”

GTP then vs now: Bobby Rahal and Wayne Taylor on past and present

GTP – it’s a name that is designed to reflect the past while looking to the future. The past was a time when the likes of Porsche, Jaguar, Nissan and Toyota dueled it out on America’s great racetracks and a few city streets. But there were also …

GTP — it’s a name that is designed to reflect the past while looking to the future. The past was a time when the likes of Porsche, Jaguar, Nissan and Toyota dueled it out on America’s great racetracks and a few city streets. But there were also chassis from Spice or Intrepid mated to Chevrolet and Cosworth engines.

Where today we have drivers the likes of Filipe Albuquerque, Tom Blomqvist, Colin Braun, Sebastien Bourdais, Connor de Phillippi, Pipo Derani, Mathieu Jaminet, Felipe Nasr, Ricky Taylor, Renger van der Zande, back then it was Derek Bell, Geoff Brabham, Juan Manuel Fangio II, Al Holbert, Chip Robinson … and let’s not forget Bobby Rahal and Wayne Taylor.

Yes, two of IMSA’s current GTP team owners were there for the original GTP, which had its last race in October of 1993 at Portland International Raceway. The original GTP had lasted for 12 years. Thirty years after its demise in favor of the World Sports Car formula, GTP was reborn in IMSA’s WeatherTech SportsCar Championship comprised of LMDh cars and, should they choose to join, FIA Hypercars. How do they compare, and is the current battle of Acura vs. BMW vs. Cadillac vs. Porsche worthy of the GTP name?

“They’re, relatively speaking, the most sophisticated [sports racing cars] just as the old GTP cars were,” says Rahal. “The cars were much simpler than they are today, but just the fact that they were very exciting cars to watch, and exciting cars to drive. Fast, obviously. Great names like Porsche, Jaguar, March — it wasn’t obviously a production car manufacturer, but still produced great race cars. It was just an exciting time, back in the ’80s, with GTP. And here we are, 30, 40 years later, and resurrected the class again. The fans certainly love them, because they’re very dynamic cars to watch. Aside from that, they look right, they’re fast, they tick all the boxes — very similar to what the the original GTP cars did.”

Having witnessed both eras of GTP, Bobby Rahal appreciates the finer points of each. Motorsport Images

Rahal may have cemented his reputation as one of America’s great racing drivers in Indy cars, where he won three CART championships and the 1986 Indianapolis 500. But after his fledgling open-wheel career, and before and during his IndyCar years, he raced sports cars to great effect, including stints in Can-Am, GT and culminating in GTP. Since 2008 he has been BMW’s partner in IMSA, with the Z4, M6 and M8 GT3 and GTLM cars, and now the M Hybrid V8 GTP cars. The Nos. 24 and 25 are campaigned full time by Philip Eng/Augusto Farfus and Connor de Phillippi/Nick Yelloly.

Wayne Taylor, on the other hand, has made his fame in sports car racing, first as a driver and now team principal of Wayne Taylor Racing with Andretti Autosport, which fields the No. 10 Acura ARX-06 for son Ricky Taylor and Filipe Albuquerque. Most of his success as a driver, including a pair of championships, came during the World Sports Car era. However he had many years in GTP cars, most notably the Intrepid RM-1 Chevrolet, in which he scored the only victory for the car in New Orleans. If there’s one glaring omission for Taylor from the original GTP era to today, it’s the fact that a car like the Intrepid couldn’t exist in the modern world of factory-supported prototype racing.

“But then again, you couldn’t make this happen then, right?” he says of the current LMDh cars. “Now with the amount of technology and aerodynamics, these cars are clearly better cars than those cars were. But if you think that was, what, 1991 — some 30 years ago — to do the speeds that we did in those cars, compared to today is pretty amazing.”

Wayne Taylor and the Intrepid RM-1 Chevrolet on the streets of New Orleans in 1991. William Murenbeeld/Motorsport Images

The original GTP was mostly privateers until Nissan with Electramotive and Toyota with Dan Gurney’s All American Racers began dominating with factory efforts — the thing that effectively killed the class, along with GTP-similar Group C fading in the FIA World Sports Car Championship. Today all but JDC-Miller Motorsports and, soon, Proton Competition, are factory-backed teams.

“There really weren’t factories involved in the ’80s, until probably the Electramotive showed up, and that was clearly funded by Nissan,” notes Rahal. “And, of course, then Toyota came in with Gurney, same thing. Those were factory efforts similar to what we’re doing with BMW and Wayne and Mike [Shank] are doing with Acura, and now we’re factory efforts. And, you know, that kind of killed IMSA originally, because there was maybe only one or two factories involved, but now you’ve got five or six.

“I know, they’re supposed to be able to be run by privateers and what have you, but knowing what I know about these cars… it’s a very different level of expectation now, because of the complexity and the fact that the factories are actually designing and building these cars. We have BoP now, which we never had back in those days. And I’d love to see a series without BoP but I guess that’s just not going to happen anytime soon. So that just comes down to hoping that the regulators are able to rule fairly and ensure that there is competition within the category. But for the first year, I think GTP has been unqualified success.”

Wayne Taylor has seen both sides of GTP as a driver and now as car owner for son Ricky and Filipe Albuquerque. Michael Levitt/Motorsport Images

Both men tasted success in the original GTP era, although neither claimed a championship during the period. While most of Taylor’s success as a driver came in the World Sports Car era that followed, he looks back on the GTP days, and especially the Intrepid, as a great — if dangerous — time.

“The intrepid was a very special racing car,” Taylor remembers. “It had over 750 horsepower normally aspirated. It had 4000 pounds of downforce on the nose at 150mph. At Lime Rock through Big Bend, you could literally go flat through there. Because of the G forces, I remember that we had to strap our legs up, me and Tommy Kendall, because we physically couldn’t hold our legs up because of the speed.

“But in those days, we had no telemetry, we had no track overlays, we had no electronics. Although when we were doing it at the time, we thought, ‘Wow, this is like really modern stuff,’ you know. But now, when I look back, compared to what my sons are driving today, it’s so, so different. And so much more input comes from the driver — the driver has many more tools inside the cars to make them faster and make them do different things for them. Whereas in our day, you know, we had a steering wheel (and) a gear lever. We had no paddle shifters, we had no HANS devices, we had no no-lift shifts. And the engineers and the mechanics had to believe what we told them. Today you can’t just tell them you’re flat through that corner … they look on the computer and they can see, ‘Well, no, he’s talking BS.’”

Rahal’s best GTP moments came in what is arguably his best season as a race driver, 1987. A victory at in the Twelve Hours of Sebring, plus wins in his hometown and at his home track, coupled with his second of three Indy Car Series titles, made it a most memorable year.

“Winning Sebring in ’87 with Jochen Mass in the 962 Porsche, which was a fantastic race car,” he recalls. “In ’87 I did five IMSA races and I won three of them and I was second in the other two. So winning in Columbus, winning at Mid Ohio … that was a special year, special season, special summer, because in ’87, I also won my second IndyCar championship. So we won a lot of races that year, and three of them in the 962. That was just a wonderful car to drive and Bayside Disposal was a great team, good people.”

Bobby Rahal’s first IMSA GTP era exploits included a memorable stint in the Bayside Disposal Racing Porsche 962 in 1987. William Murenbeeld/Motorsport Images

The original GTP era, as Taylor notes, is one to remember: “It was certainly an era that people won’t forget, because there were some beautiful cars. Racing against Geoff Brabham and Chip Robinson I remember was fantastic. We had a lot of great fun together racing against the Toyotas, Dan Gurney’s All American Eagles. It was really good racing.”

The first four races of the 2023 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship — with four different winners across three marques — suggest that this era of GTP, as different as it is from the first, may be remembered just as fondly.