Cadillac confident it can deny Porsche Penske another Florida sweep at Sebring

Porsche Penske Motorsport may have won each of the last three IMSA Endurance Cup races in the Sunshine State, dating back to last year’s Rolex 24 Hours, but achieving a clean sweep of the so-called 'Florida 36 Hours' two years in a row will be an extremely tough task.

Its rival brands in IMSA GTP are revved up ahead of Saturday’s Sebring 12 Hours - which is expected to serve up, as ever, large dollops of excitement and drama - and keen to disrupt the form book. Acura, BMW, and Aston Martin can, and will, all make a convincing case that they are in with a shot at a podium or better. Will it be Cadillac, though, that breaks the PPM deadlock?

A glance at the BoP table for this weekend’s 12 Hours suggests that V-Series.Rs in the field could be well poised. While there have been tweaks to the BoP for each of the cars in GTP, the 963s have, perhaps unsurprisingly, been dealt the toughest hand in the weight and power columns following the triumph at Daytona.

Overlooking PPM would, of course, be unwise; we’ve been here before, and often, what the team loses in BoP, it gains back on the strategic and operational fronts. Nevertheless, key members from the Cadillac concern head into the meeting confident that the brand's first win at the event since 2023 may be on the cards.

Action Express Racing driver Jack Aitken is one of them. He was last seen by IMSA’s travelling press pack in the deadline room at Daytona after the 24 Hours, visibly dejected following his near miss in the duel with Felipe Nasr in the closing laps. Rather than trundle into Sebring week with his head down, the Briton - along with his teammates Fred Vesti and Earl Bamber - intends to take the disappointment of finishing second at Daytona and use it as extra motivation to push forward and finish Saturday with a trip to victory lane.

“The Porsches were clearly very strong," he reflects to RACER. "We put ourselves in a position to snatch a win, but it was always going to be tough in that race. It was pretty painful in the moment, but at the end of the day, we can take positives. We ran so well in the final quarter, and it meant we enjoyed a good start to the year. I can’t be too unhappy now.

“Now we’re heading to Sebring, and we did a short test for a day to help us prepare for the track with the new tire from Michelin and the changes to the car. As maths fans will know, when you have two variables in an equation, it gets quite tough and throws up more questions than if just one thing changed! But we feel good."

Aitken has fond memories of Sebring. It was the site of his first win as a Cadillac factory driver back in 2023. He knows what it takes to beat the bumps and the competition, and, crucially, will avoid underestimating the task at hand this week.

“At the time, I knew that winning at Sebring was an important result for me early in my career with Cadillac. It helped me feel at home with Action Express and GM. And looking back now, it feels like an even more important result because it’s so difficult to win a race in IMSA. You don’t often get opportunities like we did in 2023, and we’ve been on the receiving end of plenty of bad luck since then. I’ve only managed two more wins in the past three seasons, so I've learned how difficult it is."

Part of his optimism also stems from the steps forward Cadillac has taken with its 2026 updates. The V-Series.R has undergone significant changes to its aero package and brakes for this season, and after testing and the longest race of the season, he’s confident the updates have achieved their intended objectives.

“The updates are doing what we expected," he explains. "Sebring isn’t an aero-affected track as much as some of the others on the schedule; it’s more about being mechanically sorted. But it’s all working well, and we can focus on the bigger change, which is the tire, as early in the race you need to do double stints, and if it’s hot, it can be tough. It’s a balancing act: you want to be effective at double-stinting, but you need a car that’s strongest in cool conditions for single-stinting at night.

“All in all, though, we feel we’ve got a good handle on the car; there’s no nasty surprises, and Sebring is a track that has been kind to the Cadillac in the past.”

Keely Bosn, the head of Cadillac’s sportscar racing division, feels the same way.

“It’s making a huge difference,” she says when asked by RACER to assess the V-Series.R’s Joker updates. “The whole year in 2025 was spent preparing for it. It was a full-force effort to get it done, so big kudos to our team for working through it. We worked with Dallara all the time to stay on schedule with everything. All of the hard work came to fruition at Daytona.

“A lot of the work was done in-house, but we relied on our teams for feedback. We have an aero team in Charlotte, and they work very closely with Dallara, too.

“Ultimately, we’re always looking for how we can improve. The change to the brakes was made as a GM decision. We’re always looking for performance gains, but we’re looking to strengthen our relationship with Brembo, and we see that the car is more consistent.”

The biggest question mark from a Cadillac perspective this week hangs over Wayne Taylor Racing. It hasn’t yet hit its stride with the Cadillac LMDh since its return to competing with the GM brand last year, and it's still searching for its first win with the V-Series R after a tough 2025 campaign for its two challengers, which lacked consistency and produced just four podium finishes across the season.

Wayne Taylor Racing is still searching for its first win with the V-Series R after a tough 2025 campaign. Photo credit: Brandon Badraoui/Getty Images

“I think Wayne’s team spent last year really learning the car and platform, and setups,” Bosn notes. “Now they’re working really closely with AXR to make sure they’re on par. That’s our biggest goal for the year in IMSA, we want all three cars to have similar lap times and close the gap.”

Within the WTR camp, they’re seeing green shoots. Louis Deletraz, who famously steered the team to victory at Sebring back in 2024 in its No. 40 Acura ARX-06 with a late-race pass (ironically, on a Cadillac run by Ganassi), is upbeat and feels the team is well prepared.

“I think 2024’s race was one of the best in my career so far, and hopefully we can do it again,” he says. “And being back with Jordan [Taylor] and Colton [Herta] in the No. 40 brings good memories and good vibes. I think we’ve been pretty good so far, and the Cadillac was pretty strong at Sebring when we tested for two days. We’ve had some time to prep well, and I’m excited because I think we have a good shot at it.

“For sure, with the switch of manufacturer last year from Acura to Cadillac, there were a lot of new people and new things to learn, and a new car for everyone. That took some time to get together, and we were pretty behind every other team that knew the cars already,” he admits.

“In such a competitive field, it’s hard to catch up. You could already see starting this year at Daytona, with the people, it’s just so much easier to work together. You know where to focus and where to find performance from. Straight from that, we are more competitive.

“In Daytona, unfortunately, on the 40 side, we had an issue during the night, so we lost pace at the end of the race, so we couldn’t fight for it. But I’m very confident this year will be a lot better, and speaking with the engineers and the people at Cadillac, you just feel at ease, it comes from that.

“Obviously, all the manufacturers keep improving, and we cannot just rest on what we know. We’ll push the limit on everything, and I think we’re learning about this new package which Cadillac brought, and we’re all positive and bringing consistency, and again, when we go to a track like Sebring, with all the bumps, it should be positive for us.”