WTR's Struggles Continue with Rock Bottom (?) Outing At Laguna Seca

What exactly does Wayne Taylor Racing need to do in this day and age to right all of their wrongs? Honestly, who really knows.

(End of article).

No we kid. But seriously - will someone or something please come to the rescue of the WTR/Cadillac 2.0 partnership?

With the conclusion of the Monterey SportsCar Championship round at Laguna Seca, we've seemingly never been further away from seeing WTR and their dual-entry Cadillac's secure their first race victory with the V-Series.R, which would also serve as their first win of any kind racing prototypes since the mid-point of the 2024 season when the No. 10 ARX-06 won on the streets of Detroit - 704 days ago.

Laguna began with split-promise between the No. 40 and the No. 10 as Louis Deletraz managed to put the 40 on pole after capitalizing on the stellar pace the car showed through two rounds of practice beforehand. The No. 10 had a more sluggish Friday/Saturday after Filipe Albuquerque ran the sister car off the track when attempting a pretty aggressive pass going into the corkscrew, damaging the bodywork enough to where it slightly impacted their qualifying session and resulted in a P7 start.

The 1:13.221 lap time for Deletraz marked the first pole secured for WTR since they reunited with Cadillac, and it was the team's first since 2024 at Road America. After going winless in their return to GM last season, the organization was undoubtably hoping to start 2026 off on the right foot coming equipped with a substantial Joker EVO update and one year of testing and R&D with the car under their belts.

That has not happened.

At Laguna, things turned for the worse yet again when both cars succumbed to ill fates, albeit in two different fashions. The No. 10 suffered a popped tire and a broken suspension after the Gradient Racing Mustang clipped them 13 minutes into the race, forcing them behind the wall for repairs and ultimately to an early retirement after just 25 laps. Deletraz and racemate Jordan Taylor couldn't convert their pole position into a race win or even a podium, as they instead were one of the many cars caught out of sequence on a strategy call that was dependent on a late-race caution flag coming to reset the order of things, and that flag never materialized. 

P10 for the No. 40, P11 and a DNF for the No. 10. Yeesh.

If you're a Cadillac fan and are still here, look away - the No. 10 currently rests at the bottom of the GTP Teams' title standings - yes, below even the No. 23 THOR Valkyrie. Albuquerque and Ricky Taylor have just 911 points to their scorecard. The 40 has fared better relatively speaking, sitting P8 in the rankings with 1053 points, above the No. 25 BMW and the aforementioned Valkyrie.

Even when things did turn in their favor at Sebring with an original P3 finish and something to feel good about, the No. 10 failed the post-race tech inspection and saw their result stripped and their points haul wiped out. As the massive struggles continue to plague both cars and the team overall, the answers are hard to come by from the WTR collective.

"We have been struggling with pace all year and we have now found it...Going into the race, we felt we could finally go for the win. Unfortunately, the 10 car had their issues on track and then the 40 got caught out on strategy and went backwards from there. It is unacceptable. I am disappointed for Cadillac and our partners." - Wayne Taylor 

"The contact, wheel to wheel, was just enough to bend my rear triangle, bent the car and caused a rear puncture. So, nothing [went] right this weekend." - Filipe Albuquerque

“A really hard weekend from the start. It's been a hard year. I feel like we've shown pace at times, but this weekend was just hard from the very beginning. So I think...we'll forget it quickly...And Detroit, we have a little unfinished business from last year. We were fast, and we've had good results there. We have two podiums in a row. It’s the home race for Cadillac, and I think that'll be a great way to rebound for the season.” - Ricky Taylor 

"We were very strong pace this weekend, throughout both practices and then taking the pole. The race was extremely disappointing finishing 10th. It's definitely not what we came for. I think we have a lot to look at and work for the next time to be better. We want to be better.” - Louis Deletraz

With the final sprint race of the season coming up at Detroit on May 30 it'll be the next chance for WTR and Co. to find *something* positive in this 2026 season. The struggles are honestly hard to try and figure out, especially considering how well the Cadillac Whelen squad have performed both with last season's chassis and with this season's EVO upgrades. Are resources spread too thin amongst the team between the two cars? Forgive the blasphemous question, but, is the driver talent simply not up to par with the rest of the grid? The Brothers' Taylor, Albuquerque and Deletraz all have amazing resumes and will likely end up in various Sportscar Hall of Fames one day, yet they are no different than any other athlete in pro sports; sometimes the drop in ability is a steady decline, and other times it's a craterering out that happens so suddenly that no one could predict or see it coming (the follow-up question to that would be - are we currently seeing the steady decline, or has the bottoming-out already happened?)

Is the car simply harder to tune than the engineers on the team ever expected? Do they zig on the setup for race day when they should've zagged? As we saw with the No. 40 at Laguna, is it Murphy's Law always coming up at the worst times in these damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't strategy calls that never seem to break their way? At this point everything has to be considered and examined because WTR are not used to being uncompetitive in the highest levels of protoype racing, and there remains just five more races in 2026 (ughh) to find their breakthrough.

(photo via autoracing1.com)