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How to stand out in IMSA? AO Racing has Rexy and Spike. | Articles

How to stand out in IMSA? AO Racing has Rexy and Spike. | Articles

Daytona represented a good-news, bad-news weekend for AO Racing.

Bad news first. While both cars–the No. 77 GTD Pro Porsche 911 GT3 R and the No. 99 LMP2 Oreca-Gibson–were in contention for almost the whole race, the Porsche finished eighth in class, while the other car came home in sixth.

The good news? Saturday evening, less than a third of the way through the race, the team posted this on its Facebook page: “SOLD OUT: Our entire stock of merchandise at Daytona is sold out. If you missed out, please continue to shop at aoracing.com/store. We’ve got lots more stock coming and are fulfilling orders as fast as our little T-Rex arms can go!”

T. rex arms? Oh yes. That would be Rexy, the bright-green Porsche 911 with huge teeth in the front of the car. The purple team car is named Spike, a dragon, sporting a dragon nose and teeth up front and big, orange dragon wings behind the cockpit.

The livery is cartoonish–and that’s a compliment–resonating with kids and therefore adults who are pleased their children have found something to connect with in the motorsports world.

And as for that merchandise, AO Racing has commissioned T-shirts, hoodies, stickers, posters, plush toys, hats, flags, keychains and pins. It’s brilliant, really–so effective and so cheap: Most every car in IMSA is wrapped, and unlike in NASCAR, many teams don’t have to make space to plug a big sponsor.

If you’re wrapping your car anyway, why not have some fun with it? They’ve even created Roxy, a pink T. rex, which occasionally replaces Rexy in the lineup. Both Rexy and Roxy have been turned into Hot Wheels cars.

It’s all the result of team driver and co-owner P.J. Hyett’s modest way of honoring his children: He had his helmet painted with a dragon on one side for his son and a unicorn on the other side for his daughter. It was a small step from there to make characters out of their cars.

AO Racing–that stands for Autumn Oaks, the name of Hyett’s car collection–was formed by Hyett, a 41-year-old software developer who co-founded a company that was acquired by Microsoft in 2018, and Gunnar Jeannette, a championship-winning driver and the son of Kevin Jeannette, a legendary Porsche specialist who crew-chiefed cars for Mario Andretti, A.J. Foyt, Bob Wollek, Derek Bell and Paul Newman.

While AO Racing’s cars look like they were created by Disney, this team is serious about competition. Rexy won the 2024 IMSA GTD

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