Wayne Taylor Racing with Andretti Autosport is making headway on its upcoming expansion to fielding two Acura ARX-06 GTP cars on behalf of the Japanese auto manufacturer.
WTR w/AA’s current No. 10 Acura entry will be joined by a new ARX-06 for 2024, and according to Andretti COO Rob Edwards, the internal staffing and external recruitment efforts required to build out the second-car team is making significant progress,
“We actually we all sat down at Long Beach, the guys at Wayne Taylor Racing, ourselves, and Honda Performance Development, to put together an organizational plan and we’ve been hiring since then when the right people have come along,” Edwards told RACER. “We’re looking at a mix of new people and internal staff for the second car project.
“I think it’ll end up being a combination of some people that are in sports car already, maybe some people that are currently on either on our IndyCar program or the Indy NXT next program — people within the family. And the goal is to have at least a majority of the team in place by September.”
With all of the heightened technology and complexity within a hybrid GTP car, the recruitment process for a new effort is extensive.
“It’s not a hard number, but as a guideline, we’re looking to assemble probably 15 to 17 people for the car,” Edwards said. “We’re going to be very closely engaged with HPD on some of the engineering sides, so that number may drift depending upon how we decide to share responsibilities on some of the engineering topics. The really fun and cool thing is the cars are sophisticated, but that does also mean that you can’t run one with just a handful of people.”
Following Andretti’s investment into WTR at the beginning of the season, the single-car effort with the No. 10 Acura has been run by WTR without significant operational changes. But with the onboarding of a sister entry to facilitate, Edwards says the project represents the first major collaborative item for the two sides to develop from scratch.
“It’s been fun,” he said. “The main people like [WTR GM] Travis Hogue and myself, and then [WTR technical director] Brian Pillar and our technical director Eric Bretzman, we’ve all found a lot of commonalities in our outlook in assembling this new car program when we when we look at people and we interview people.
“Eric and I are also adopting the approach that they’ve been super-successful in sports cars, and we don’t want to come in and change that culture. We just want to be additive to it. So early in the interview process, all four of us interviewed two or three people just to benchmark views, if you will, so that if not all four of us could talk to someone, or the or the pace of hiring had to ramp up, that we’d all calibrate what we were looking for. And that was a really good experience.
“It’s the early stages of this process overall, but it’s been enjoyable to engage with Brian and Travis and for Eric and I to talk to some different folks who usually than we normally talk to, and try and take the best from both teams to build what needs to be built.”
