It will be a good mix of new and old stars at Wayne Taylor Racing in 2021.
The IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship team has been a GM team for years, running Corvette DP and Cadillac DPi cars, but the American cars will be switched to the Acura brand, which is the American leg of the Honda brand.
Ricky Taylor returns to the team after three seasons at Acura Team Penske. He will bring his car back to the family team. A fun fact about Ricky Taylor – he won the title with WTR in 2017, before changing to Team Penske for 2018. He won the 2020 title for Team Penske – before the team shut down and split the cars to WTR and Meyer Shank Racing.
He will be joined by Filipe Albuquerque as the full season teammate. Albuquerque already knows several of the American tracks, since he has been the third driver on the Action Express team at the endurance rounds. The Portuguese driver will join WTR as the defending LMP2 champion in both the FIA World Endurance Championship and the European Le Mans Series, along his 24 Hours of Le Mans victory in September 2020 – all for United Autosports.
Graphics: Wayne Taylor Racing
For three of the four Michelin Endurance Cup races, i.e. Daytona 24 hours, Sebring 12 hours and Petit Le Mans 10 hours, the Taylor and Albuquerque pairing, will have Alexander Rossi as their teammate. Rossi was teammates with Taylor at the endurance rounds at Team Penske, so they are already familiar with each other.
Taylor, Albuquerque and Rossi will have a fourth teammate for the Daytona 24 hours. Helio Castroneves has been teammates with Taylor for the past three seasons at Team Penske. The Brazilian will only do the Daytona race for the team.
The team will only run Ricky Taylor and Filipe Albuquerque at the fourth MEC race at Watkins Glen in June. That round is “just” 6 hours, so the teams have a free choice of two or three driver line ups.
The black Konica Minolta Wayne Taylor Racing Cadillac #10 was run by Ryan Briscoe and Renger van der Zande throughout the 2020 season, and was still in the title fight right until the final round, where a hit and subsequent puncture put them out of the running, since they lost many laps to their competitors. Scott Dixon and Kamui Kobayashi were helping out at the longer rounds, so it’s a whole change at WTR ahead of the 2021 season.
Konica Minolta will be back on the car again in 2021, and the car number will stay #10.
The 2021 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship season starts on 22-24 January at Daytona International Speedway, with the ROAR test bring run ahead of the 24 hours race, one week later.
