Wayne Taylor experienced firsthand this week how tight the racing community is when rival Grand Am teams rallied to help him after a transporter fire destroyed all of SunTrust Racing's equipment.
The truck was en route from Saturday's race in Monterey, Calif., back to its Indianapolis race shop when it caught fire on I-40 near Amarillo. The cause of Monday's blaze currently is unknown, but it destroyed everything the team owned.
“Literally every single thing was burned to the ground, and I mean every single thing that runs my operation,” Taylor told The Associated Press on Thursday. “The cars, the tires, the wheels, all the tools, the laptops with all our data — everything that you need to make a race team is gone.”
Taylor said the loss already has exceeded $2 million and left his team with just two cars, a pair of out-of-use Pontiac Rileys that Max Angelelli and Michael Valiante drove to a fifth-place finish in the season-opening Daytona 24 Hours. The cars currently are for sale.
Unsure if the team would make it to the next event, June 6-7 at Watkins Glen, the racing community stepped up to help Taylor rebuild the operation.
“People have offered cars, parts, transporters, whatever we need,” Taylor said, rattling off a list of nearly two dozen names of people who have offered support. “Timmy Keene at Chip Ganassi Racing has just been utterly phenomenal with his help.”
Taylor will now go to Watkins Glen using borrowed equipment from Ganassi.
“They are loaning to us every single thing they have,” Taylor said. “All the setup equipment, pit boxes, a truck, trailer, radio, air guns, everything. It's just amazing that we're all competitive and we all want to beat each other and sometimes we don't even speak. But when there's a crisis, we all rally around.”
-- The Associated Press
NASCAR drivers pull off double-duty (or triple-duty) weekends all the time at different tracks or in different series. But you don't hear about IndyCar drivers doing it very often. This weekend, Marco Andretti will split his time between the IndyCar event at Nashville Superspeedway and the American Le Mans race at Lime Rock Park in Connecticut. Andretti will qualify his Andretti Green IndyCar entry Friday afternoon at Nashville, then fly east. Saturday afternoon he'll drive the first stint in the Andretti Green XM Acura LMP2 car, then fly back to Nashville in time for IndyCar driver introductions, scheduled to start around 6:30 p.m. Read more here.
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