Wayne Taylor Racing with Andretti Autosport announced Tuesday morning (May 16) that they will be expanding to two full-time Acura ARX-06s in the 2024 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship with Acura factory backing. Current full-time drivers Filipe Albuquerque and Ricky Taylor will remain in the No. 10 Acura for next season. The new car does not have a number or drivers as of yet.
“It has always been our plan to go to a two-car program,” said Wayne Taylor, co-owner of Wayne Taylor Racing with Andretti Autosport. “There are so many advantages in being a two-car team and now, going up against all the other factory backed two-car efforts, it is vital. [Honda Performance Development] and ORECA have built an amazing race car. When you look back at the season so far, we’ve proved to be quickest almost wherever we go and I believe we now have the car to beat. With the combination of HPD, ORECA, Andretti Autosport and all our corporate partners, we have a really strong organization.”
2023 is the 20th season for WTR in motorsports. In that time in Grand-Am and IMSA, the organization has always been a single-car team. Ricky Taylor believes that the move is a big step for the team.
“Being a two-car team will allow us to really lean on our teammates to push us to be better, whether on the driver side or engineering side,” Ricky Taylor stated. “The IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship weekends are so compressed now that getting multiple drivers through the car is difficult. Being able to take different paths and learn from each other is so important. Especially when everyone else has two cars. For us to get on the same program will be so beneficial. We have been dreaming about this for some time now. We have so many ideas on how to use it in a productive way and make us that much stronger.”
Assuming none of the current full-time operations scale back for 2024, this announcement would mean that there would be nine full-time factory-backed GTP teams on the grid for next season. Acura would be the only manufacturer with three factory-backed vehicles as Meyer Shank Racing with Curb-Agajanian’s team. In addition, there is the customer Porsche for JDC-Miller MotorSports and potential additional customer entries. That would result in the largest full-time grid in the top class in WeatherTech since 2019, when there were 10 full-time teams.
Lamborghini does currently plan to be on the grid in 2024 with their currently unnamed…
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