While much of the focus surrounding Cadillac’s 2025 GTP plans has centred on Wayne Taylor Racing taking over from Ganassi, Action Express’ return as part of what will be a new-look three-pronged V-Series.R attack in IMSA’s top class deserves its fair share of attention.
With today’s news, Action Express is back for a third season of V-Series.R action in GTP and a ninth campaign as a Cadillac team. With an off-season of change coming for the GM brand in top-level sportscar racing, Action Express’ renewed commitment represents stability and continuity.
The highly decorated outfit – run out of Denver, North Carolina – is on the hunt for more success. It already has 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2021 and 2023 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Team and Driver championships to its name, as well as a set of seven North American Endurance Championship titles. But it’s as motivated as ever to add to its trophy cabinet.
The potential for AXR to scale up and run a second V-Series.R in 2025 is understood to have been considered around the time that Ganassi made its split with GM public. But in the end, the team decided to stick with a single-car programme, which will run alongside Wayne Taylor Racing’s new two-car effort.
That is by no means a reflection of the team’s ambition though. As ever, the expectations internally will be sky-high from the moment the team’s hauler rolls into Daytona in January.
With longtime driver Pipo Derani following Alex Sims out the door this off-season, the team will be out to prove that it can fight for wins and titles without either of the full-time drivers that were at the core of its hugely successful 2023 campaign. That year it took a clean sweep of titles, helped Cadillac secure the manufacturer’s crown and won the Sebring 12 Hours overall.
Team manager Gary Nelson, the driving force behind the organisation and a key architect of its rise, is someone who rarely positions himself in the spotlight. He lets the results do the talking for him.
“He’s a great man,” current AXR driver Jack Aitken explains. “He’s everything you imagine an old-school crew chief, with pearls of wisdom, to be. He’s quiet in the way he goes about things and he doesn’t like to attract attention. He likes being under the radar. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t involved in the day-to-day. He helps everyone, gives advice and sees things in a slightly different way.”
Reflecting on the team’s history in conversation with DSC, Nelson made it clear his role often requires him to ‘squeeze the orange’ when it comes to resources. He prides himself in maintaining the same tight-knit atmosphere he helped create when the team began racing as Action Express in 2010.
“We were the Brumos team before we became Action Express, run under a guy named Bob Snodgrass,” Nelson reflected. “And I got involved because I was introduced to him after I retired from NASCAR. He passed away and he was managing the Brumos side of it, so we started transitioning to Bob Johnson running the team, before making the switch of name in 2010 and winning the Rolex 24 first time out.
“Bob is a businessman in Daytona, he does a lot of business with the France family, and J.C France (the grandson of NASCAR founder Bill France) was one of the drivers of the Brumos cars. And as we developed the programme, and the connection stayed close and evolved from there.
“We kept pushing for sponsors together, sometimes we ran two cars, sometimes one depending on finance. And we just went after championships and wins.”
It’s been quite the journey for the team through Grand Am and into the current post-merger, converged era for IMSA’s premier sportscar championship.
In the IMSA paddock and beyond, Action Express’ is often referred to as ‘the team backed by NASCAR’, due to its close ties with the France family and Jim France acting as its owner, but Nelson doesn’t feel that reputation makes for a fair portrayal of his effort.
AXR, he explains, benefits from its relationship with the France family and NASCAR, but generally acts of its own volition.
Essentially, Nelson says, it has operated as a privateer and despite a roll of honour and management structure that suggests otherwise, doesn’t benefit from the same resources that many of its top-class competitors like Penske, Andretti and RLL do.
“We are absolutely autonomous. Jim France, who pretty much runs NASCAR, which owns IMSA, is a huge supporter of ours because his son drove for us. Bob Johnson does business with the France family, and it’s just stuck.
“As sponsor money comes and goes over the years, we’ve had to battle to stay in business, keep our employees and help them with their families. We are a family organisation, we look at our people as assets and a lot of teams in this business think of them as commodities.
“We developed long-standing relationships with our people and sponsors. That’s the key to fighting for championships.
“We don’t have the funding that others have in our class, our team operates with a lot of heart and extra personal effort. That’s why we’ve won six championships in the last 10 years and a lot of races, against teams with bigger budgets.
As sponsor money comes and goes over the years, we’ve had to battle to stay in business
“The question about NASCAR and their position with regards to our team is a question that people think they know the answer to. The reality is our biggest supporters when we are in a year where we are trying to figure out how to make payroll and make it to the next race, is the France family. They’ve helped us find ways, whether that’s sponsorship or introducing us to companies, like the Whelen connection, at the right time.
“But we are a modest team, there are no marble floors in our shop and somehow I wonder how we’ve made it through all these years.”
Right now in GTP and Hypercar, tectonic plates are shifting and some of the changes have been seismic. Meyer Shank is back in IMSA to race with Acura, WTR and JOTA are moving to Cadillac from Acura and Porsche respectively, Ganassi has departed stage left, Aston Martin’s programme is coming on apace and additional manufacturers appear close to joining the party.
With so much change, particularly at Cadillac Racing, was Action Express’ position ever in doubt? It would appear not.
The team, which previously competed as a Corvette DP team in Grand-Am before the DPi era began, has roots that run deep with General Motors. And Nelson takes an enormous amount of pride in representing it at the forefront of sportscar racing.
“Since Cadillac came on board with a factory deal a couple of years ago, it’s made things a lot easier,” Nelson explained. “The fact we have been able to keep the Whelen sponsorship makes us feel we have entered new territory for us. We have the ability to run parts in a realistic duty cycle, we aren’t stretching parts like we used to.
“In the past, we’d stretch things like gearboxes to 7,000 miles if they were supposed to be rebuilt at 5,000 and often it was a fight to make it to the end of the season.
“Now, with Cadillac, we see things differently and we are racing differently.
“I’ve been racing in the NASCAR world in the 70s, 80s and 90s and it’s always been GM aside from a couple of stints,” he continued. “I’ve had a relationship with them throughout my career. The connection has always been there, and it’s gotten closer and closer every year to where it is now to where we have the full strength of GM behind us.”
The sweep of titles in year one of GTP stand out, but it hasn’t been an entirely smooth ride for Action Express in recent years. The funding required to move from DPi to GTP was substantial and fresh from the pandemic, getting the programme off the ground was tough for all parties involved.
But Nelson’s drive to keep his team together during 2020 and 2021 – when lockdowns and pandemic-induced restrictions made going racing complex and costly – paid off. It also resulted in some interesting side projects.
“When COVID came, I wanted to keep our guys working, even though we couldn’t race,” Nelson reflected. “I didn’t want to lay everyone off. I wanted the team’s doors to stay open. So we made a plan with NASCAR, which had to shut down, their people couldn’t come into the office. My mindset was, let’s take half our crew and work two weeks, while the other half stay home, then rotate. This kept the paychecks coming.
“The plan had us working with NASCAR on the ‘Next Gen’ car, because NASCAR had to shut down in the county they were located in and they were falling behind. So Action Express actually kept that project going, took it to the track and tested the car. It was under the radar, but it worked for all sides.
“The most important thing, was that our family survived. The layoffs at that time were not pleasant for anyone trying to put kids through school or pay rent.
“And with that experience, the Garage 56 project came up and we built the first Camaro for that too. We then tested it at Road Atlanta, Sebring, we did all the early testing for that too. Then the Hendrick group joined and we stayed part of it on the sideline.
“I’ve always brought a way to get things done to this team. I find a way, figure it out.”
The team has also realised its dream of competing at Le Mans during this bold new era in GTP. But it’s fair to say the team is still waiting for a breakthrough result after two challenging starts in 2023 and 24.
The 2023 edition was particularly punishing, the car ending up in the barriers down the Mulsanne Straight at the start of the race after Jack Aitken lost the rear of the car in tricky mixed conditions.
That mishap cost the team a heap of time, multiple laps and effectively ruined its chances of victory before the end of the first hour. But, the reaction from the team’s higher-ups deserves plaudits. Rather than pack up early and pile on Aitken, it doubled down, putting him straight back in the car after a swift round of repairs.
“People make mistakes, accidents happen, I don’t search for the guillotine,” Nelson said. “People work harder if they know they won’t be whipped and held up as the one that messed up. So Jack didn’t mess up, we messed up, we hit the fence.
“We can’t make the same mistakes on a regular basis, but if someone pushes hard and makes the odd mistake, we’ll deal with it. And Jack is an amazing guy, I would put him in any car.
“Jack was really sad and everyone expected us to go home after we hit the fence. But we spent 18 laps fixing the car, I put Jack right back in, then we ran the rest of the race, that’s our DNA and we finished. We didn’t get lapped again.
People work harder if they know they won’t be whipped and held up as the one that messed up
“Anyway, before we got to France we knew we had a lot to learn, we knew we would make mistakes, but we wanted to grow. We immediately wanted to come back in 2024,” he continued.
Aitken, values the trust and camaraderie that Nelson describes, which ultimately led to him securing a full-time drive with the team for the 2024 season.
“It’s rare in motorsport to have a team that trusting,” he told DSC. “The easy option (after Le Mans) would be to look at the drivers on your wishlist that you know would be good that haven’t messed up yet and put them in a car, because ‘Jack had his chance and blew it’.
“But since the day I moved to Action Express, the team has been clear that they just want my best, and if you make mistakes it’s fine, as long as you are making errors through pushing yourself and you’re not making the same mistakes twice, it’s fine.”
So what does the future hold for Action Express? The end of the 2024 season beckons for the team in the short term, as it looks to fight for the GTP titles and score a first win in a campaign which has seen it claim multiple second-place finishes.
Then in 2025, in what looks set to be a boosted GTP class featuring an additional Cadillac and a Heart of Racing Valkyrie, the overarching goals remain the same.
The hardest trophy to get, is always the one I want
Does the team have further ambitions to race on the world stage in the WEC in addition to IMSA? “I’d never say no,” Nelson says. But for now, the team focused on its North American programme.
And the team clearly has unfinished business at Le Mans.
“Le Mans is special,” Nelson concluded. “I’d always heard about Le Mans before we came, it has history, a 100 years, we don’t have that history in America. I knew it was going to be a big deal to get to the race. I expected something similar to Daytona and Indy, but it blew me away how bit it all is. And everyone brings their best, everyone in the world brings everything they’ve got and puts it into this race.
“That’s why I wanted to come and it’s why we want to keep coming. We want to win it.
“For me, the hardest trophy to get, is always the one I want. I want to be in the top class. We want to be relevant going forward. That’s why we’re here in IMSA and racing at Le Mans.
“I’m excited about what’s coming, the way that GM is approaching this programme. It’s the camp we want to be in.”
Image credits: NASCAR, IMSA (Dole), Cadillac (Prince)
