Yahoo Autos The Taylors Are the Closest Thing America Has to Sports-Car-Racing Royalty
They aren’t as famous as the Andrettis or the Earnhardts or the Unsers. Their name isn’t easily trademarked, anyhow. But the Taylors, the first family of the International Motor Sports Association, are the closest thing America has to sports-car-racing royalty. And right now it’s young prince Ricky who is bringing them great IMSA glory [fig.1].
Ricky is the quiet one. He would make an excellent action-movie assassin. His younger brother, Jordan, is loud, a jorts-wearing counterpoint to Ricky, and was recently featured in Sports Illustrated. Ricky is already a championship-winning driver for the Acura factory prototype team.
Jordan has been a title-winning pillar in Corvette Racing’s factory IMSA GT team. Wayne, their brooding father, can lay claim to passing on the best of his racing genes, while everyone in the family credits Shelley, their dynamic mother, as the source of all the light in the sons. The family business is Wayne Taylor Racing, which campaigns Acuras in IMSA with Ricky as the lead driver.
Wayne ripped through IMSA’s analog Grand Touring Prototype (GTP) category in the Eighties and Nineties. Master of the pole position with his raw speed and bravery, Wayne gave fits to the giant factory teams. He and Shelley immigrated to the United States from South Africa and raised their boys in Florida. They grew up in his fatherly shadow at the 24 Hours of Daytona and the 12-hour party at Sebring, watching and waiting for their turns.
“When my dad was racing in GTP, it was a real golden era, and I think that’s what we’re headed back to with all of these iconic car companies signing on to race each other,” Ricky says. “It’s like a dream list of manufacturers. This is going to be huge.” And “this” is the return of GTP for 2023, with radical new racing machines featuring digital wizardry and 21st-century technology, including hybridization.
“If you’re a tech nerd, then you’re gonna love these GTP cars with all the new systems we’ve got going into them,” says Ricky, 33, who’s been racing most of his life and has 30 wins. “A lot of the prototypes we’ve had recently have been amazing to drive, but they maybe weren’t representative of where technology was going in the automotive world at those times.”
Ricky believes having “more relatable technology” in the cars will be a source of excitement for fans. “We’ll have something in common with the EV or hybrid owner,” he says, “and we’re racing ours to better develop the road cars they’re inspired by.”
With only Acura and Cadillac in IMSA’s current Daytona Prototype International class, the call to shutter DPi in favor of GTP was easy to heed. The move to hybridization promises to invigorate GTP with the required use of 40-hp energy-recovery systems. Manufacturers have embraced the new class with enthusiasm and, more importantly, money.
Along with recommitments from Acura and Cadillac, the commissioning of major programs from BMW and Porsche has attracted even more brands to the fight. Lamborghini arrives in 2024, and McLaren is tipped to join in 2025.
Coupled with 640-hp internal-combustion engines of all displacements, cylinder counts, and aspiration methods, creative styling freedom with GTP cars has given each brand an opportunity to visually distinguish itself. Ricky loves every aspect of the formula change.
“We’re now talking in terms of total energy use,” he says. “It’s the fuel in the tank plus the energy we’re harvesting with the energy-recovery system and how we race for the first time with these two energies combined. It’s not gonna be just ‘Go like hell’ anymore. We’re going to have to think like hell and strategize how much energy to use in a stint, when to use it, what amount, when to conserve. I feel like I’m a rookie again, learning everything for the first time.”
And Ricky has found another way to make the hybrid GTP cars relatable to potential IMSA fans. “I was joking with my engineer about how to explain our energy use to the average person,” he recounts. “So I said, ‘You keep talking about how many kilojoules of energy we use per stint. Isn’t a joule something that can also be converted into a different unit, like calories?’ He said yes. So I said, ‘Okay, then, do the calculations on how many pizzas we burn!’ He came back, looking proud, and said, ‘We burn 155 pizzas per stint, medium pizzas.’ Now I’m hungry.”
Ricky, already considered by many as one of the greatest drivers of his generation, will continue to lead his father’s Indianapolis-based team and bring the family name back to where it rose to prominence. Most princes, after all, ultimately want to be king.
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