Cadillac Wayne Taylor Racing Seeking Strong 2026 Bounce Back 

Optimism Abounds After November Test in Daytona

December 2, 2025

By John Oreovicz

IMSA Wire Service

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – The second half of the 2025 season was very good for the Cadillac V-Series.R. 

The Cadillac Whelen No. 31 entry shared by Jack Aitken, Earl Bamber, and Frederik Vesti won the last two races of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, elevating Aitken to second place in the final Grand Touring Prototype (GTP) class driver standings, with the team also moving into the runner-up position at season’s end. Meanwhile, both V-Series.Rs fielded by Team Jota finished 1-2 to earn the brand’s first FIA World Endurance Championship top class victory at the Sao Paulo 6 Hours.

Conspicuously absent from the list of 2025 Cadillac race winners are Wayne Taylor Racing. Much was expected from WTR’s reunion with the General Motors racing program and the Cadillac brand, which in 2017 produced a Prototype class championship for the driver pairing of brothers Ricky and Jordan Taylor in the then-new Cadillac DPi-V.R. 

Both Taylors subsequently left the team owned by their father, Wayne Taylor (himself a three-time IMSA champion as a driver) and won championships elsewhere – Ricky the 2020 Daytona Prototype international (DPi) title with Acura Team Penske, and Jordan a pair of GT Le Mans (GTLM) crowns with Corvette Racing in ’20 and ’21. Ricky returned to WTR in 2021, followed three years later by Jordan as the team expanded to run two cars for the first time, in conjunction with Acura and the Andretti Global organization.

There were growing pains. Both WTR Acuras took race wins, but the No. 10 car shared by Ricky Taylor and longtime co-driver Filipe Albuquerque dropped from second in the 2023 DPi standings to sixth in ‘24, one spot behind the team’s new No. 40 entry driven by Jordan Taylor and Louis Deletraz. 

The switch to Cadillac for 2025 was intended to feel like a homecoming for the Taylor family and many longstanding members of the team. But GTP prototypes are complicated racing cars; the learning curve was steep, and two years of philosophies, habits, and procedures accumulated running the Acura ARX-06 had to be purged from the memory banks. The drivers and crews sometimes struggled to get the best from the Cadillac V-Series.R, as neither of the WTR cars qualified higher than fourth or finished better than fifth in the season’s first four races.

Still, the second half of the ’25 campaign left WTR with plenty of reason for optimism, even if it went winless in GTP (it did win a race in GTD and also secured the Lamborghini World Final Pro title in addition to Pro, Am, Team and Dealer titles for Lamborghini Super Trofeo North America).

Wayne Taylor was able to celebrate his team’s first double podium at the Sahlen’s Six Hours of The Glen at Watkins Glen International, as the No. 40 and No. 10 Cadillacs finished second and third respectively. The No. 10 notched additional second place finishes at Detroit at Indianapolis, as Albuquerque and Ricky Taylor scored the third-most points from Rounds 5-9 of the WeatherTech Championship, just 50 points fewer than the No. 31 Whelen Cadillac collected over that span of races.

Potential is clearly there, and the Taylor brothers came away from the recent IMSA sanctioned test at Daytona International Speedway buoyed by optimism after their first laps experiencing the ‘Evo’ updates on the Cadillac V-Series.R.

“Everything was new last year, and we basically had just the Roar (“Roar Before the 24” test sessions) and maybe one other day of testing before the Rolex 24,” said Jordan Taylor. “The Rolex itself was kind of like a big test session for everyone to understand what the car does and how the tools influence it. Now having a whole year under our belt was important. Every time we go on track, we feel like we learn something new; we were learning all the way through Petit (the 2024 IMSA season-ending Motul Petit Le Mans at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta). 

“I think there’s only so much you can do away from the track with sim work and prep, but once you get it on track, you really see where you are.”

“When we came to this (November IMSA-sanctioned) test last year, it was chaos,” added Deletraz. “It was a good chaos, but you were learning all the time. Every track we went to, we needed to create a database and learn. To come back with the same car as 11-12 months ago is so much smoother and easier. And the upgrades are great. Everything targeted semes to be working, and it’s very positive to drive. It’s different but it definitely feels improved.”

Ricky Taylor was recently drafted in by Cadillac to drive at the WEC’s annual rookie test at the Sakhir circuit in Bahrain as part of an increased effort by the manufacturer to share information between its teams that compete in IMSA (Wayne Taylor Racing and Whelen) and the JOTA Sport team that runs the two V-Series.Rs in WEC. 

In fact, Whelen’s full-time IMSA drivers Aitken and Earl Bamber will also contest the full 2026 WEC slate in Jota’s No. 38 Cadillac, teamed with Sebastien Bourdais. There’s one weekend conflict between the two (Long Beach IMSA and Imola WEC in April), where Vesti is expected to reprise his substitute role for Bamber alongside Aitken in the No. 31 Whelen car. 

“It was just a good opportunity to drive the car more, and it was my first time on the Brembo brakes,” said Ricky Taylor. “Everybody else had had tested the Brembos but me, so it was a good chance for me to get a little taste as well as to create a bit of a crossover between Jota and WTR and just exchange some notes and see you how they do some stuff differently, how we do it. And just trying to make ourselves better.

“I think the unique thing about how Cadillac has set it up is there’s going to be three different teams with three different approaches, and you’re going to get to tackle the same problems,” he added. “(Whelen) does things so differently to the way WTR does things, and JOTA lives a totally different life than either of us. We push each other, but at the end of the day, everything is fully open - GM makes sure of that. It’s been interesting, and really good.”

There’s expected third driver consistency too for Michelin Endurance Cup rounds, with Will Stevens (No. 10) and Colton Herta (No. 40) on for Daytona, Sebring and Michelin Raceway. The No. 40 car cycled through three different third drivers in 2025 (Kamui Kobayashi, Brendon Hartley, Norman Nato) while F2-bound Herta, a Cadillac Formula 1 test driver, returns to the team after racing as its third driver in 2024. 

The 2026 WeatherTech Championship season opens with the traditional Roar Before the Rolex 24 test sessions at Daytona International Speedway Jan 15-18, followed Jan. 22-25 by the 64th running of the Rolex 24 at Daytona.