Wayne Taylor Racing will enter the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship 2020 with a new driver line-up.
That became necessary after Corvette Racing has signed up their driver for the past 7 seasons, Jordan Taylor.
Renger van der Zande will, however, be back in the dark blue and black Konica Minolta Wayne Taylor Racing Cadillac DPi-V.R #10. This will be the third season for Renger in the car, while he gets Ryan Briscoe as his new full season teammate.
Briscoe has been racing for the Ford Chip Ganassi Racing team in GTLM for the past seasons, but with that programme shutting down, it had left the Australian without a seat for 2020. But with Wayne Taylor also being the manager of Briscoe, it probably didn’t take many hours of negotiation to find a deal.
Briscoe will bring another “old” Ford CGR teammate with him, in the shape of Scott Dixon. Dixon will be doing all the endurance rounds on the IMSA schedule, which is Daytona 24 Hours, Sebring 12 Hours, 6 Hours at the Glen, and 10 hours at Road Atlanta.
Graphics: Wayne Taylor Racing
There will be a fourth driver in the car at Daytona. Kamui Kobayashi will return to the team for this one race, as the defending race winner, which he accompliched alongside van der Zande, Taylor and Fernando Alonso. Alonso is busy doing the Dakar Rally, and has chosen not to return to Daytona, since he has got the trophy already, and now hunts for other glory. There is another plus for Kobayashi, since he and the main sponsor shares the same nationality – Japanese.
Konica Minolta Wayne Taylor Racing has an impressive statistic for the 24 hours race at Daytona. The team raced it first time in 2007, and has been on the podium 6 timers for the past seven years including a victory in both 2017 and 2019.
2019 wasn’t that exceptional for the team, other than the Daytona win in January, since the Cadillac cars generally had issues with their pace. At least until the final race of the year, where Whelen Engineering won with their Cadillac, and WTR finishing second, less than a second from the winners, with a very emotional Jordan Taylor behind the wheel, since he already knew that this would be his final race for the team, before going to Corvette.
The first official testing ahead of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship will be run on 3-5 January at the Daytona International Speedway, while the 24 hours race itself will run three weeks later.
