Vesti, Taylor confident in Cadillac's competitiveness at Sebring

Cadillac has won five of the last nine editions of the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring, including the first race of the current GTP era in 2023, and appears best suited to disrupt Porsche’s grip on IMSA’s top class.

Cadillac Whelen’s Frederik Vesti hasn’t yet gone to the top step of the podium at Sebring, but his team has momentum and strength on its side going back to last season, and he’s grown by leaps and bounds since he started showing the potential that once made him a coveted single-seater prospect and applying it to his new adventure in sports cars.

“I don’t really look too much back to what has happened in the past,” Vesti admitted to RACER. “We are all changing. The cars are changing, we’ve got very competitive competitors, and we need to look at what we can do this weekend.

“But the car is strong here. I think the bumpy surface, it probably suits the Cadillac quite well. The race does finish at night, and that’s where we need a fast car – so FP1 and FP2, it is important, but it’s not everything. I think having a strong night practice tonight will be sort of our main priority.”

The red No. 31 Cadillac V-Series.R led 155 laps last year but faded out of contention for victory after nightfall. Vesti impressed alongside co-drivers Jack Aitken and Earl Bamber and now feels much more confident at the controls of his Cadillac a year on, adding: “I feel so much more relaxed and happy in the car.

“I think last year, the first half of the year, I was showing good things – especially Sebring. But I know I wasn’t driving 100 percent. I was still getting used to the car. But I’m feeling so much stronger, and it’s only going to get better. My learning curve, yeah, it’s still happening, and I’m still taking in a lot of information from my teammates.

“I was very happy with my performance in Daytona, getting the car back to the front, and I intend to carry that momentum.”

It shows in Cadillac Whelen’s recent results: Wins in back-to-back endurance cup races at Indianapolis and Road Atlanta for Petit Le Mans, and a close second-place finish at Daytona to start this season.

On the other hand, IMSA veteran Ricky Taylor has reached the pinnacle of success at Sebring: He gave Cadillac its first Sebring overall win back in 2017 when he drove alongside his brother Jordan, and a now-stalwart member of the Cadillac Hypercar program in Alex Lynn.

Taylor’s season in the No. 10 WTR Cadillac started on a sour note thanks to an engine failure at Daytona, but he’s feeling confident that the team is shaking off its 2025 slump and could find its way back to the top step of the podium soon.

“Coming into the second year with the car, getting to go to the same tracks for the second time, makes such a huge difference,” said Taylor. “Even if turn one is like, we’re not quite there yet, it’s a night and day difference in how the car rides the bumps, and our compliance versus last year. We just feel so much better prepared.”

Wayne Taylor Racing put its two cars in the top five in the first Practice at Sebring, a good place for the team to start this weekend. It’s been no secret that the team struggled with the change of manufacturer from Acura to Cadillac – similar to manufacturer changes that Wayne Taylor Racing had done before, but now with a much higher degree of difficulty due to the complexity of the current LMDh cars.

“The systems are one thing, the cars, they really need to be in a precise window,” Taylor concurred. “There’s a lot of performance from being exactly where the car wants to be.

“But also, just the size of the program – in the DPi days, when you change a manufacturer, you may be learning five new names in terms of engineers. Now it’s 40 new people, and getting used to working together, how the communication flows between everybody, and whether you’re dealing with the sim group or the tire group. There’s some many different people, you don’t know how to really navigate a race weekend quite the same. That’s been huge.

“I think the series is so refined and the cars these days that finding ultimate pace is, obviously, really important,” Taylor adds. “But the races are head-to-head, battling with other cars. Finding performance in traffic was really important for the team and for Cadillac – that’s something they’ve been working on really hard.”