For the first 17 races of Wayne Taylor Racing’s return to Cadillac, it’s fair to say that the six-time 24 Hours of Daytona-winning operation (four for the team, two for Taylor as a driver) experienced more downs than ups.
2025 saw its flagship prototype programme fail to win a race for just the second time in the team’s 19-year history, and across the first six races of this year’s IMSA SportsCar Championship, and at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, despite showing improved performance, it only had a single podium finish to its name.
That all changed at Road America last month, as incremental improvements in its pair of V-Series.R GTPs finally yielded a double podium with a 1-3 finish. With the team’s longest-ever winless streak now snapped, the goal is a return to title-contending form in 2027.
“Last year was horrendous from the standpoint that the team, our partners and staff basically started from ground zero and had a lot of engineering support that hadn’t really worked in this industry,” Wayne Taylor explained to DSC.
“And then coming into 2026, we all felt pretty good that we’d figured this car out and how to navigate through all the control systems and stuff with Cadillac and the drivers. We were in contention at Daytona, and then lost an engine, and then at Sebring we were third, but they took it away from us because of a minor infraction.
“We went to Laguna, got the pole, led the race, and then got passed by the Whelen car [the #31 Action Express Racing-run Cadillac], and we dropped back again. And Watkins Glen was really a disaster in terms of strategy. A mistake was made, and the only thing you can do from that is come back, go back and say this could have been avoided.”
What these opening six rounds did provide, at least, was that even if WTR was lacking behind its fellow championship- leading Cadillac squad in terms of results, it was making headway in unlocking pace with the V-Series.R, and was executing at the level required to pounce when the opportunity to win presented itself.
“As far as the execution with the team, anywhere we went, we did really well,” Taylor stated.
In part due to its challenging IMSA SportsCar Championship campaign, Taylor’s first highlight of 2026 came at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, where its #101 Cadillac qualified fifth on the grid on its way to a ninth-place finish in a major improvement from the team’s Le Mans debut 12 months earlier.
“I wanted to go to Le Mans because I knew that nothing had changed from a competitive standpoint with WTR, from an engineering standpoint and execution in the pits, and we built the car for Le Mans,” Taylor explained.
“And we got totally unlucky. We were right there, and we had two driver errors. Both of them were speeding in the pits, so we had those two. We had one with Ricky [Taylor] at the beginning, but we were able to get ourselves back. And then later with Filipe [Albuquerque]. But then in that same session, he got called three times that had nothing to do with him, basically destroying our race.”
“I truly believe we had a podium car; I was really happy, actually. I think we really put on a good show there.”
Le Mans is the only race of the year where all nine of Cadillac’s full-season prototype drivers compete aboard a V-Series.R, which also brought with it reassurances for Taylor in terms of his line-up’s quality and cohesion.
“The other good thing was that we were able to have all the different Cadillac drivers in Le Mans together,” he continued.
“You’re always wanting to make sure that all the drivers are [close], and they’re all great drivers with great relationships, and everybody was the same [performance-wise], really.”
Part of this knowledge base comes from Cadillac’s unified approach to the V-Series.R programme, which sees its three partner teams co-operate with one another.
“All the executives are like friends, and they are fully supportive and constantly bringing in really good people. We spend a long time going through all the things that we need help with, and there are things that they need help with on their end. We’re constantly building it as a real partnership.
“It’s really all gelling,” Taylor further explained. “The relationship between JOTA and WTR is really, really good. With Action Express, we’ve competed against one another for years. They are a great team with special drivers. They certainly understand the fact that this is a Cadillac Global initiative, and though we compete in the same series, they share with us, we share with them. They have been the only Cadillac team that has been in from the beginning of the hybrid, so you know they’ve got a little more time than we have.”
Though WTR also podiumed at Detroit earlier this year, Road America was an emotional affair for the whole WTR operation, with any potential doubts about its quality as an organisation amongst its members reassuringly silenced.
Filipe Albuquerque and Ricky Taylor triumphed in a chaotic affair aboard the #10 V-Series.R, and as a bonus, Jordan Taylor and Louis Deletraz finished on the podium in the sister entry despite picking up a pair of penalties.
“The #40 car was actually faster than the #10 car,” Wayne Taylor reflected. “The #40 should have won the race, but got penalised for something that I still don’t understand based on the footage and everything we have. [The win] was the biggest sigh of relief, and it could make us now move on positively.
“It’s not like suddenly these guys that work for us are no good,” Taylor said. “They’ve been successful for so long and showed it at Road America.”
“Filipe started having tears. In the car on the last lap, coming around, he got emotional, and then when I saw Ricky, tears coming out, I just lost it.”
“The emotion was so huge that it’s hard to put it into words, because all the previous races this year have been just absolutely taking their toll on me emotionally. We’re a team that for the last 19 years wins races every year; we’re on the podium all the time, and it’s like the wheels just fell off. It’s been very odd, and so it had to come out, and it came out in tears, but they were happy tears.
“What was really nice about the whole thing was I definitely got the feeling everybody in pit lane was happy for us, and that was a big deal for me. I’ve been in the series since I started in IMSA 35 years ago, never missed a race, and sometimes you have competitors, and you’re arguing and fighting. But I truly felt that everybody in pit lane was probably happy for us, and that said a lot to us as well.
“When I compare it to winning Daytona three times in a row, which was huge, this is how I felt after those. So you can imagine how big a deal this was to me, especially in Road America, which I love so much, and the fact that we won this fair and square. There were no cars that caused this to happen, and we had drive-throughs on both cars, so we really had to work for the win. Our guys executed so well. The engineers did a great job. The strategy was perfect. So it ticks all the boxes, and that caused it to be just so emotional.
“We’ve all had a rough time, but we’ve also got to have a good time with this because think about how many people in the world are as lucky as us to have this as our main form of income. It’s our sport, and it’s risen to such a level that all the big car manufacturers are there, so that pressure is always going to be there. But honestly, everybody just did their job perfectly.”
Taylor is under no illusions, however, that in a class as competitive as IMSA’s GTP category, the floodgates might not necessarily open to a run of victories. In fact, across the last 13 GTP rounds, no team has won more than three races.
“It’s so competitive now,” he stated. “But I think that we can genuinely look forward to going to be competitive at every race, and it’s time to win another championship next year. It’s time to win another [Daytona] 24 Hours and Sebring 12 Hours, and we feel that we can do that.”
The championship, in particular, has been a frequent source of frustration for Wayne Taylor Racing in recent years. Its last title came in 2017, with a run of four consecutive runner-up finishes after heartbreaking, and at times controversial, near-misses from 2020 to 2023 to its name.
“Indy, our home race, has never been a fantastic event for us,” Taylor admitted. “But coming off a win, I think we’ve now got a really competitive car, so I’m pretty excited. I’m looking forward to Petit Le Mans as well. My focus now is to get through this as competitively as we can and come in in ’27 and become the WTR of old.”
Images courtesy of Indianapolis Motor Speedway, IMSA, Dailysportscar and Jack Webster
