Wayne Taylor Racing Delivers Acura’s First Daytona 24 Hour Victory

Acura wins the ‘Big One’ as team takes its fourth win in five years on its debut with the brand.

Acura won its first Daytons 24 Hour over the weekend on Wayne Taylor Racing’s first outing for the brand. The team, which won its fourth Daytona 24 Hour in five years, made it a team’s hat trick, when Filipe Albuquerque, Ricky Taylor, Alexander Rossi and Helio Castroneves took its new Konica Minolta Acura ARX-05 to a debut victory in a dramatic final hour.

The Number 10 Acura ARX-05 started fifth and hit the front soon after nightfall Saturday, but was no easy task for the Konica Minolta Acura crew. They ultimately held on to beat Jimmie Johnson, Kamui Kobayashi, Simon Pagenaud and Mike Rockenfeller’s Action Express Racing Cadillac, which passed third placed Oliver Jarvis, Harry Tincknell and Jonathan Bomarito Mazda with four minutes to go.

The Acura Led from Saturday Evening

The major event was however three minutes earlier when Renger van der Zande, Kevin Magnussen and Scott Dixon’s Ganassi Cadillac blew a tyre while challenging for the lead with seven minutes left to race. They adopted an alternative strategy to try hunt down the leading Taylor machine and changed only two tyres in van der Zande’s last stop. He used the saved time and extra heat in his rubber race back to second and challenge leader Albuquerque when the tyre burst.

It was former South African driver’s champion Wayne Taylor’s sixth Daytona 24 win. He twice won as a driver in 1996 and 2005, when he was also the US sportscar champion. Wayne also won the LMP1 class in the ’98 Le Mans 24 Hour. As a team owner, Taylor’s Cadillacs took three Daytona wins in four years, before an IMSA championship reshuffle saw WTR shift across to Acura, now with immediate results.

Acura’s First Daytona Win

While Honda had previously found Daytona success when its engine powered Ed Brown, Johannes van Overbeek, Scott Sharp and Pipo Derani’s Ligier JS P2 to victory in 2016, the weekend’s Daytona success was Acura’s first.

“What a fantastic week,” an ecstatic Wayne Taylor admitted after the race. “It is something really special to find immediate success with Acura immediately after had a long and hugely successful relationship with another manufacturer. “It is really just fantastic to have won Acura’s first Daytona 24 Hour in our very first race together!”

Photos: WTR/Acura

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Michele Lupini

Once a handy engine and chassis tuner, and a combative racer and rally driver, Michele took up the pen to express his passion for cars, racing and motoring over 30 years ago. He published South Africa’s go-to enthusiast motor magazines Cars in Action and Bakkie — some say against all odds — for a quarter century. In that time, Michele had a hand in nurturing many of South Africa's motoring media leaders. Today Michele keeps himself busy with his a range of international motoring media duties alongside his own theauto.page. And a little racing on the side.