As his sports car powerhouse expands with a star-studded cast that’s bigger than ever, the little things still matter the most to the fastidious Wayne Taylor.
During a dizzying and chaotic offseason, Wayne Taylor Racing With Andretti has more than tripled in staff while adding a second Acura ARX-06 in the premier Grand Touring Prototype category and starting a new Lamborghini outfit in the GT Daytona division.
But when he recently caught an early morning flight from his home in the Orlando, Florida, area to the team’s shop near Indianapolis, Indiana, Taylor was measuring his team’s expansion in millimeters.
In another example of the wily team owner’s fanatical attention to detail, Taylor made a 1,000-mile day trip to ensure the decals were spaced correctly on the three cars that will race this weekend in the Rolex 24 at Daytona.
HOW TO WATCH THE ROLEX 24: TV information, schedules, start times and entry lists
“I think it drives everybody on the team mad, because they’re so good at what they do,” Taylor said with a chuckle as a guest during a recent NASCAR on NBC Podcast episode. “And they say, ‘I don’t think you should probably come up. I think we’ve got it.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, no, no, no. I’m coming up.
“And so, yeah, it was a long day. I left home at 4.30 in the morning and got back home at midnight, but I like to put my fingers on that side of everything so that I know it’s 100%. And the company that we use have been with us for many, many years and have done an outstanding job. But there’s always the thing about is the decal 1 millimeter too low on the right? Is it straight? Is it parallel to the ground? So yeah, attention to detail for me is everything. And I think the team have grown into that.”
Growth is the 2024 buzzword at WTRAndretti, which has built a reputation since 2006 as a lean operation that punches above its weight in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.
During a 2019-21 run of three consecutive Rolex 24 at Daytona victories, the team roughly had an annual staff of 30 at Daytona International Speedway. The team will have nearly as many people just mounting and running tires during this year’s Rolex 24.
A staff of more than 100 is at the World Center of Racing under the employ of WTRAndretti in its quest to bring Acura its fourth consecutive Rolex 24 overall victory while also delivering a GTD class win with its new Lambo.
Estimating his budget has mushroomed from $10 million to $30-40 million annually, Taylor proudly lays out numbers to illustrate his team’s massive footprint at Daytona – eight trucks, 17 motorhomes, 66 monitors across its timing stands and 32 workstations.
“It’s been a whirlwind,” he said. “We have our work cut out for us.”
And it’s all coming together under an intense spotlight from a driver lineup that might be the deepest and most renowned in this year’s Rolex 24 field.
The team’s longtime No. 10 Acura ARX-06 will be anchored by Ricky Taylor and Filipe Albuquerque, who will be joined at Daytona by 2022 Indy 500 winner Marcus Ericsson and 24 Hours of Le Mans winner Brendon Hartley (both of whom also are Formula One veterans).
The new No. 40 will be driven by full-timers Jordan Taylor (who returns to his father’s team after four seasons in the No. 3 Corvette) and Louis Deletraz (an endurance driver for WTRAndretti last year). The Daytona lineup will be rounded out by 2009 Formula One champion Jenson Button and NTT IndyCar Series star Colton Herta.
The collection of luminaries continues a longtime tradition for Taylor’s Daytona squads, which have scored overall wins with two-time F1 champion Fernando Alonso, sports car legend Kamui Kobayashi and NASCAR Hall of Famer Jeff Gordon.
“It’s a testament to what my dad has done as a team owner and building this team,” Jordan Taylor told NBC Sports. “It always seems to attract these big-name guys and champions from other series. I think they see what my dad built over the years, and they know Wayne Taylor Racing will have a shot to win the Rolex. Guys are willing to take a jump and come to this team. It’s not like these guys come in and have a huge say and want to sway the team. They fit in, and the personalities always mesh well.”
But this year, the chemistry will need to click among several dozen team members, too.
When Jordan Taylor left his family’s team in 2019, he knew all the mechanics and their families. He has returned to the same building but a new staff that virtually is unrecognizable.
“It’s pretty insane how everything has exploded,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you 90% of their names. I’ve asked the team to give me a playbook of names and faces so we can help the learning process. Not only am I learning a new car, a new class, but the team size has massively changed. It’s a big change. I think all for the positive. My dad always wanted two cars and with how competitive GTP is now, having one car was tough to battle all those big teams.”
WTRAndretti has retained a core of longtime employees, and Jordan Taylor said that “culture and camaraderie inside the team is what makes it special.
“Everyone likes to have a good time away from the track and between sessions,” he said. “Guys who fit in well, have a good sense of humor, personalities and no egos. I think that culture is moving forward to our two-car program now. Our traditions in the past are continuing to do fun things with the team like temporary tattoos and unique scented candles in our prerace meetings. We have some games prepared to unite both sides of the team so it’s one big family.”
After partnering with Andretti Global last year, Taylor’s team now has the depth of a multicar IndyCar program, too, that has created avenues to recruit talent from Europe. WTRAndretti also fields cars in the Lamborghini Super Trofeo single-make series, which provides a pipeline from the lower sports car division.
Travis Houge, the vice president and general manager of WTRAndretti, has interviewed “hundreds of people from different aspects of motorsports,” making hires ranging from fresh out of school to seasoned engineers and mechanics with 20 years of experience.
The primary criteria for being hired? Fitting into the team’s well-curated culture.
“Since we started, it’s we’ve wanted to do a lot with a little,” said Houge, who joined the team in 2006. “To compete at the top level of everything that we do, but do it in a way where we’re still a small, tight-knit, close family team. And finding the people to do that is a challenge because Wayne has always put it into all of our heads that everything has to look right and perform right. We can’t win every race, but we need to be there to win every race. And when we can’t win races, we need to look the part as well when we’re representing as many people as we have. And we’ve been lucky enough over the years to have partnerships with some of the top manufacturers and some of the top corporations in the US. And that all comes down to the values that Wayne’s instilled in us since we started in 2006.
“It’s all attention to detail. And that attention to detail is what keeps us in the races, but it keeps us looking better than everybody else while we’re doing it.”
Houge said those appearances were reflected by about a dozen team members who recently spent six consecutive weeks building a new timing stand.
“It does the things that we need it to do, but it looks how we need it to look,” Hogue said. “So when we show up to Daytona, everybody knows that’s the core value of Wayne Taylor Racing. That’s something that they put their heart and soul in, and everybody that we bring on board, our biggest thing is take some ownership into the company. If everybody feels like they’re part of this, we’re going to succeed.”
The team also has been known for having an efficient and quick-witted engineering staff that can avoid the bureaucracy of bigger teams.
Ricky Taylor, who is entering his fourth consecutive season with his father’s team after a three-year stint at Team Penske, said WTRAndretti is focused on maintaining its nimble values while scaling up.
“We got really dialed into the agility of a small team and how to win big events with just one car,” Taylor told NBC Sports. “We always looked at multicar teams with envy and sometimes criticism of how we would do it if we had two. The team has just exploded in the offseason. Learning names, meeting people every day has become difficult, but the amount of positivity coming from it has been amazing.
“It doesn’t feel like a family team anymore. It’s not that close-knit, warm, fuzzy feeling anymore. It’s definitely a large, large program where there has to be a lot of systems in place to make sure everything runs smoothly. But it’s proven to be beneficial already with testing already. The amount we’ve been able to learn from having a second car add to the program has been amazing. On track is where we really see the benefit when we work different strategies.
“The team does have a reputation for punching above their weight historically up against big dogs like Penske, Ganassi and the big manufacturers. Now we’re joining them as a big dog. What made us strong was our agility and ability to pivot and adapt to changes, and that’s so critical in sports car racing. Expanding to such a big program has been key, but the team wants to keep that small team mentality of how we communicate and keep that ability to change on a dime.”
It starts with just establishing and maintaining lines of communication. Wayne Taylor and Houge recently took an hour just to walk through the shop and greet every new employee.
“Probably the hardest part at the moment is trying to remember who’s who,” Wayne Taylor said. “We have difficulty remembering the names of the mechanics. It’s just that it’s grown so fast, and you look at one guy and go, ‘I can’t remember who you are; which car do you work on?’ ”
Here are some highlights from the NASCAR on NBC Podcast conversation with Taylor and Houge (which is available to hear via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts):
Q: Wayne, what’s it been like as the leader, as the man whose name is on the title? You joked about having to learn all these different names, but is it more difficult to lead when you don’t know as many people? It’s always been such a tight-knit team and family atmosphere for your group. How do you maintain that leadership while having all this extra staff?
Taylor: “Well, the one thing that I did learn over the years is that you have to delegate. And Travis being my VP is really 100% up to speed. And we probably work closer now than we’ve ever done. Where both of us every day is making decisions and deciding which way to go. And then we’ve also got our technical director, Brian Pillar, who looks after that part of the organization. So I think it’s just basically come down to delegating. And Travis and Brian have certainly done a great job in putting all this together. But there are times when I think to myself, where I’m such a hands-on freak that I have to sometimes let go. And when I went up to the shop this last week, and as Travis was saying what the shop’s like, I just looked in the shop and thought, ‘Oh, my God, it’s probably best I just go home’ because I didn’t know where I was going to fit in and who to tell what to do because everybody was working flat out.
“But really and truly you’re correct, it can be very easy to lose control of something like this both from the standpoint of maybe having a wrong person put into one spot instead of moving them into a different spot. And then there’s the hardest part is controlling and looking after the budget because you’re now suddenly gone from $10 million to $30-40 million. And it just gets bigger and bigger and so fast and especially building up for one of the hardest races in the world, the Daytona 24 hour. But our track record and the guys on the program know the events so well.
“And I must say also, obviously, with our relationship with Andretti, we’ve been able to lean on them when it comes to people and machinery and stuff like that, which we didn’t have access to over the last couple of years. So the partnership is working really well.”
Q: Did you have any concerns about how do you maintain that tight-knit, detail-oriented culture with a lot more people?
Taylor: “Well, I think probably the most important part is if you look back at my career, both as a driver and now as an owner, I’ve always been in a position where I’ve realized that without corporate sponsorships, you don’t go very far these days. Although now with the new LMDh program, the manufacturers have taken over control of the teams in terms of they’re spending probably the most money and the most technical resources, but we still need to bring out our core partners that we’ve had for 10 years to be part of this because you can never have enough money in this sport. Because somebody will always do something better and then you’ll want to be at that point.
“And from my standpoint, I always want to be recognized as the best-presented team at the track, the best presented when we have to go and sit in a boardroom and sell sponsorship or sell (business to business) relationships. And then thirdly, in any form of motorsport, you can’t say what we can say, and that is we can’t guarantee a win, but we can guarantee that we’ll be racing for a win. And you can’t really do that in any other forms of racing. And that can be come down to the fact that our numbers are not as big as everybody else (editor’s note: there are 10 cars in the GTP category), but it is a core part of our business. And the guys probably want to kill me because the first thing I do when I hit the track is make sure that the countertops are clean and the carpets are clean and that the whole presentation, it looks like these guys are on top of everything. And I guess I’ve always used Roger Penske’s organization as somebody for us to aspire to be. And I think our guys have really stepped up and, if you come this weekend to Daytona, I think you’ll see a pretty good organization and well managed and well run.”
Q: Travis, what’s it like to work for Wayne and have that level of making sure the decals are spaced by the right number of millimeters?
Houge: “I don’t think we have enough time to discuss what it’s like working for Wayne. (laughs) No, I think speaking for myself over the last 20 years that we’ve been together, picking up on the importance of some of that stuff as coming up through the ranks in motorsports and some of my background, it’s been very good to understand why we do that. And I think Wayne’s attention to detail when he comes up and looks at the cars, it’s two things. It’s his involvement in that and understanding to the partners and the rest of the team that he does see and does care about everything going on. But it’s also his ability to talk to the guys that are actually doing the work and let them know that it is appreciated that the extra time and effort they’re putting into it and just that visibility of things. And it helps me to instill that in the rest of the team when they know that they’re seeing the vision from both Wayne and myself and everybody else. When you look at something, if it doesn’t look right, let’s fix it now. If Wayne sees it, and he’s going to say something about it, then we need to address it before that. And I think that’s one of the biggest things that I’ve learned and adapted from Wayne is that attention to detail and looking at looking at things from a 50,000-foot view instead of what’s in front of you to get the job done.”
Q: You said you’ve talked to hundreds of prospective employees, and the narrative in racing now is it’s so hard to find good people. How do you thread that needle of making sure you find those good people who meet the team culture when it seems like there’s a dearth in the talent pool? Does Andretti Global help you bridge that gap?
Houge: “So you’re 100 percent right on. There’s a shortage of people in our industry. And we started to recognize that back in 2015-16 when we started the Lamborghini Super Trofeo program with the goal of bringing in younger mechanics, younger engineers and people that we could not only teach the sport but teach the Wayne Taylor Racing Andretti way. So that has been a huge help to us. Probably 70 percent of the people that we had in in our Super Trofeo program have moved into GTD or into GTP, so that side of our business has worked really well.
“Working with the Andretti side, we’ve had a longer reach. Our arm has been a little bit longer. We reached into some of the NASCAR world and have a couple of guys from NASCAR. It allowed us to actually hire some people before we needed them. So there’s people that we started hiring over 18 months ago that helped work at the Andretti shop to get some stuff going and with the intent of moving over to Wayne Taylor Racing. But as you interview hundreds of people and you understand the shortfall that we do have in the industry, it opens your eyes of how do we make motorsports back to where it was 15 years ago where people wanted to come in the sport? And how do we make motorsports something that’s exciting? And one of the things that I probably say to everybody I interview is, If you look at corporate America or you look at any other job that you may have, one of the things that I believe everybody likes to have with work is gratification and seeing results to their work. And that’s one thing that motorsports does well is the start of the race never changes and the end of the race never changes. So if you’re running a 24-hour race or a 100-minute race, you get to see the results of your work. And it’s at a certain point every time. You can’t get any closer to instant gratification than that. So part of when we’re interviewing people, that falls back into that culture of do the job, do the job well, and you’ll see those results. You don’t have to wait for 25 years to see what you did in your career. You can see it at the end of an event.”
Q: You now have eight drivers in GTP with big-name star personalities such as Jensen Button, Marcus Ericsson and Colton Herta. How do you bring them in and manage it to make it all work seamlessly?
Taylor: “Oh, that’s very simple. You deal with every one of them exactly the same. And the good thing is when you’re deciding who you’re going to put on the team, you’ve got to look at firstly his speed and what experience does he have. And is he a guy that’s going to bring something to the party? And the one thing that we really look at carefully is we do not want anybody to come onto this team who want to prove to us that they’re the quickest. Because, as I said to them in the beginning, listen, you were hired because of what you do and how fast you are. So there’s nothing more that you need to prove to us.
#40: Wayne Taylor Racing with Andretti, Acura ARX-06, GTP: , Colton Herta, Jenson Button, #10: Wayne Taylor Racing with Andretti, Acura ARX-06, GTP: Marcus Ericsson
Colton Herta, Jenson Button and Marcus Ericsson will be driving for WTRAndretti in the Rolex 24 at Daytona (IMSA/Richard Dole/LAT Images).
“When it comes down to Jenson Button and Marcus and Colton and (Louis) Deletraz, these guys are just really, really fantastic, and I can say anything to them, and you can see they are really listening intently, not saying, ‘Who’s this old guy trying to tell us how to drive?’ And that’s what’s been the beauty of all of this. And I can also leave them together in the engineering room, and they just automatically work on looking at each other’s data. You won’t find any of our drivers walking around the pits all the time like we do with other teams. We have them sitting in the truck and working on how they can make each other better. And that’s really what wins these races, at the end of the day, barring any sort of mechanical failure. It’s basically in the hands of the drivers, and they know that. So, we’ve been fortunate with all the drivers we’ve had in the past, and I think this year we probably have one of the strongest lineups.”
Houge: “It goes back to the culture that we have within Wayne Taylor Racing Andretti is everybody is the same. It doesn’t matter where the driver comes from or the history. Our goal and our same outlook are the same. We’re there to win races. We’re there to represent our sponsors and our partners. So everybody has to be treated the same. The biggest difference to manage is the people aspect, because when you do bring drivers in, you tend to have a lot more attention. You tend to have a lot more people that want to come around the garage. So working with the crew and the mechanics to let them understand that we have to open that door up a bit because that’s who we are, and we want to make sure we engage with everybody. But it creates a little bit more of an interesting dynamic when you have lines of people all the way out the paddock to come talk to one of the drivers from F1 or back when we had Jeff Gordon.
“But from the management aspect of it, I know Brian (Pillar) is very good with engineering, and he treats every driver the same, takes every piece of information from all of them. But he’s probably got the most difficult job of taking information from four drivers per car and setting the tone and saying, ‘OK, we can’t make a perfect car for each driver. We’ve got to make a perfect car for four drivers.’ We’ve got to take the big-name driver out of the equation and put it together to make the best car.”