A brand new race car signals a new beginning for the No 10 SunTrust Pontiac Dallara team of Wayne Taylor Racing (WTR) as it kicks off the second half of the 2008 Grand-Am Rolex Sports Car Series season with Thursday night’s Brumos Porsche 250 at Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway.
The first seven stops on the 14-race campaign have been eventful, to say the least, for SunTrust Racing and WTR. They kicked things off on this very track with a star-studded two-car effort at the season-opening Rolex 24 At Daytona. Regular co-driver Max Angelelli and team-owner Wayne Taylor introduced new full-time co-driver Michael Valiante to the SunTrust Racing family and Taylor’s 18-year-old son Ricky to the world of big-time racing, and the SunTrust quartet drove its way through various mechanical and electrical predicaments for a top-five finish.
Alongside the No. 10 SunTrust team for the Rolex 24 was the No. 9 Toshiba Pontiac Riley of Penske-Taylor Racing, featuring none other than Helio Castroneves, Kurt Busch and Ryan Briscoe behind the wheel. Under the tutelage of Roger Penske and Wayne Taylor, that high-profile driving trio brought home a podium finish despite overheating and other issues of their own.
In the days, weeks and months since, SunTrust Racing has endured a roller coaster of emotional highs and lows that it’s doing everything in its power to smooth out considerably over the latter half of the 2008 Rolex Series season. Among the highs was the stellar debut of the all-new Dallara chassis, which sported a striking, new tangerine-based SunTrust paint scheme and which Valiante qualified on the front row at Homestead (Fla.) Miami Speedway. Even though the new-from-the-ground-up race car arrived on the scene with virtually no meaningful on-track testing, it showed its tremendous potential by leading laps at three of its first four events and starting from the pole in only its third race at Virginia International Speedway (VIR) near Alton. It seemed the only thing that could slow or stop the new car’s rapid emergence was an eerie series of on-track incidents, none of which were Angelelli’s or Valiante’s doing, at Homestead, Mexico City and VIR. source: theautochannel.com
