Wayne Taylor Racing will be hoping to take the Prototype win as the TUDOR United SportsCar Championship hits Motown – Detroit.
In the race last year, Jordan Taylor and Max Angelelli took a storming lights to flag victory to cement their charge towards their eventual Grand-Am drivers title.
Now, Jordan’s older brother Ricky will take over Angelelli’s seat making their charge for a second consecutive win at the road course a family affair.
Jordan said: “The speed differential between our two classes this year is going to be larger with GTDs. And this year there are more of them. It’s all going to come down to who can capitalize on the traffic and the opportunistic moves that will have to be made. When we start lapping the GTD cars, that’s when the race will get interesting. We haven’t seen them since Sebring, and on a street track it will be a lot different. At Long Beach, we had just a small advantage in traffic with the GTLM cars, so this weekend we definitely will have to be careful. There are a lot of professional drivers in the GTD class, but also a lot of gentleman drivers with not a lot of experience like we saw at Sebring and Daytona. So we’ll just have to be more cautious. We had a really good car at Long Beach, so we’ll use the improvements we found to our advantage this weekend. I think we’re in good shape.”
Both drivers, racing for father Wayne Taylor, will both have one eye on their commitments at the Le Mans test day the day after the race finishes with both drivers booked on an overnight flight to Paris.
Jordan will race in the GTE class at Le Mans as he takes the third seat in the Corvette C7.R, Ricky will take on a completely different challenge as he jumps to LMP2 machinery and a drive with Larbre Competition.
He said of the drive: “Le Mans is such a big race and it deserves 100 percent of your attention when you have the opportunity to do it. It’ll be difficult for Jordan and I with the races surrounding it to give it 100 percent. I’ve never driven an LMP2 car, but I think it’ll be more of what I’m used to than the GT car I drove at Le Mans last year. We head straight to the airport after Saturday’s race and fly all night to get to Paris. With the jet lag, it will be difficult, but I’m sure there will be a lot of adrenaline flowing once we get there and get strapped into the racecar. I’ll be trying to learn the car as quickly as I can. Luckily, I know the track. It’ll be a mad dash to get there, but fortunately I’ll be able to stay there through race weekend as my team plans on having a lot of bonding-type activity.”
