DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Through various types of cars and automotive brands, the Taylor family has enjoyed a lot of success in Detroit. And upon its return to General Motors in 2025 after a four-year hiatus, the mission heading into the Chevrolet Detroit Sports Car Classic on May 31 is clear: keep it up.
Jordan Taylor is a five-time winner and Ricky Taylor a four-time winner in Detroit, including last season with Filipe Albuquerque in the team’s No. 10 car, then an Acura ARX-06. Ricky Taylor and Albuquerque now co-drive the No. 10 Cadillac Wayne Taylor Racing Cadillac V-Series.R.
“It’s obviously one of the biggest races of the year for us,” explained Jordan Taylor, who shares the No. 40 Cadillac V-Series.R with Louis Deletraz. “Cadillac kind of prioritizes this race and Daytona as the two big ones on the IMSA schedule, and then obviously Le Mans.
“We know the pressure’s always on when we go to Detroit. All the big bosses are there, all the eyes are on us, and it’s a super intense race — only 100 minutes and the track is very unique.”
The current 1.645-mile, heavily 90-degree-turn laden downtown nine-corner circuit posed a different challenge than the faster, more flowing 2.3-mile Belle Isle Street Course that hosted IMSA races through 2022. The IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship made its first visit to the new track last year, where Ricky Taylor pulled off the ultimate winning move on Mathieu Jaminet into and out of the Turn 3 hairpin with 26 minutes remaining.
Its previous Detroit win at Belle Isle in 2017 was, in many respects, one of the most important within the Wayne Taylor Racing and GM history. In the first year of Daytona Prototype international, the No. 10 Cadillac DPi-V.R won the first four races across the Rolex 24 At Daytona, Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring, streets of Long Beach and Circuit of The Americas.
Then Detroit happened, the first time the WTR crew was racing a Cadillac on these streets. The degree of difficulty became inadvertently ratcheted up after qualifying. Ricky Taylor picks up the story from here.
“I started that race. That year was just amazing,” he reflected. “But like Jordan said earlier, the biggest two races by far on the schedule are Daytona and Detroit as far as GM are concerned. These are the two big races of the season that we just put so much effort into.
“So even if we had won the first four, not winning Detroit would have been a letdown. So, we were really motivated at the time, or always motivated when we come here, racing for GM.
“And I actually crashed in qualifying and lost my best lap time. I had to start at the back, and so we thought it wasn’t going to happen. But it had a happy ending.”
Wayne Taylor watched as the incident occurred and immediately shifted the mindset towards how quickly they could exact a fix.
“I actually watched Ricky in qualifying and saw him crash,” Wayne Taylor said. “The car looked like it was sliding and hit the wall sideways. And whenever you hit the wall sideways with that kind of speed, there’s going to be a lot of damage. And when we went back to the pits and looked at it, there was clearly a lot of damage.”
Jordan Taylor explained the development process and synced relationship across Wayne Taylor Racing, Cadillac and Dallara made a rebound easier than it might have been otherwise.
“I think after the qualifying crash we thought that our win streak was going to be over, but I think that year we were so strong,” he said. “It was the first year of DPi back then, and I felt like as a team working with Cadillac and Dallara developing the car and we felt like we were in such a good position performance-wise all through those races.”
Ricky Taylor started strong to get up to seventh, and the car made it up to second place by Lap 37 of what was a 65-lap race over 100 minutes courtesy of strong pit strategy.
“Ricky made a couple positions on track and then the guys made a good strategy late in the race,” Jordan Taylor said. “We stayed out and the (No.) 31 (Whelen Cadillac DPi-V.R) stayed out a long time as well. And we did our last stop a little bit earlier, and we were able to jump them in that last cycle.
“I think the team often liked to brag that we didn’t make many on-track passes as drivers and most of the positions were made in the pits. Those years that we won championships I think we were happy to rely on them to make those calls.”
Wayne Taylor added, “Between him and Jordan and the team we just made up those places and won the race, which was actually a perfect ending for us.”
Winning would be a nice tonic for Cadillac Wayne Taylor Racing in 2025 after a less-than-desirable start to the season with only a single top-five finish across its two Cadillac V-Series.R cars (a fifth-place finish at Daytona by the No. 10).
Perhaps it’d be fitting for the team that last won five races in a row to start that championship-winning 2017 campaign in IMSA’s Prototype class with the then-new DPi formula to stop this year’s singular winning Grand Touring Prototype class team, Porsche Penske Motorsport, from equalizing that streak.
Even if the results haven’t shown it, Jordan Taylor believes the team is turning a corner as he prepares for his 180th IMSA career start in Detroit.
“I think we knew it was going to be kind of a tough start of the year, no matter what,” he said. “These cars are very complicated with all the different systems and every car is different, obviously. Every manufacturer builds a car to the homologation, into the ruleset, but there’s so many different ways of doing it.
“From a driver’s perspective, you’ve got to kind of learn that from an engineering side. You have to learn how to set up the car around that. We’re learning. I think we were a little bit behind the Action Express car the first couple of races, and then this weekend (at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca) seemed a little bit stronger.”
