PERFECTION

Driving the incline spanning Barber Motorsports Park’s fourth and fifth turns – the topography between which rises some 30 feet – Ricky Taylor’s No. 10 SunTrust Ford-Dallara each lap assumed a perfect angle for the 20-year-old to peer at the very top of Barber Motorsports Park’s towering, 10-story scoring pylon – giving the driver only one glimpse once each lap of the 2.3-mile, 17-turn race track.

Before Taylor began his cool-down laps he’d not paid any attention to the pylon’s numbers, instead finding and focusing on the groove that would best carry him quickly around a highly technical track that legendary motorcycle rider Scott Russell characterizes as “a long roller coaster ride that runs through a park” and still others just cuss.

Having to negotiate 15 turns and the roughly 90-seconds between each pass of the pylon, Taylor’s stomach had more than enough time to churn during his Dallara’s two cool-down laps, all the while wondering if the “10” – his 10 – atop the pylon might be replaced by one of 15 other Daytona Prototypes trying to gain the best position from which one can start a Barber race – up front.

“I was nervous,” Taylor admitted, “I thought someone would lay down a fast lap in the final few minutes.”

Taylor said his team via radio had straightaway signaled him when he put down the Friday qualifying session’s fastest lap but had grown largely quiet afterward. Ricky Taylor also knew the day’s fastest lap – an unofficial record fast lap at that – had earlier been claimed by Antonio Garcia in the Spirit of Daytona’s No. 90 Cayenne V8-Coyote.

With others taking the session’s checkered flag, Garcia was still using as much of the track as he dared, pushing his Coyote hard on what up to that point was his fastest lap. While rounding the track’s final turns the Spaniard bobbled just enough, limiting the throaty No. 90’s Porsche 8-cylinder to the outside pole for Saturday’s race.

It was over. The pylon wouldn’t change. A Ford-powered Dallara would sit on the Porsche 250’s Daytona Prototype pole and in the process became Ricky Taylor’s first in that class.

“Relieved,” said Wayne Taylor after son Ricky (together, below) collected the pole, “Just relieved.”

  “It’s been a tremendous weight for Ricky to carry, stepping up this year for a full season on the SunTrust team. We all knew he had the ability to drive well and now he’s demonstrated it.”

Little wonder, that weight, especially in light of Ricky Taylor’s Grand-Am biography (written by others) that in part reads: “Taylor begins the 2010 GRAND-AM Rolex Sports Car Series season with his father-owned SunTrust Racing . . .”

Immediately in the Daytona Prototype championship hunt after joining the series in 2004, SunTrust driving-duo Wayne Taylor and Max Angelelli would a year later claim the 2005 Rolex 24 At Daytona (with an assist from third-driver Emmanuel Collard) and drove on to a commanding win of that season’s DP championship (five wins, 12 top-five and ten top-10 finishes among the 28 drivers and 16 race teams fully competing for the 2005 DP championship, that year squaring off against a total of 38 different DP teams).

Fast forward a few years and, in the wake of Wayne Taylor all but totally retiring from driving, Angelelli in the SunTrust car separately paired with (some would say, “chopped through”) two other full-season co-drivers (actually, including part-timers, four in all: Jan Magnussen, Memo Gidley, Michael Valiante, Brian Frisselle.

Barely a day before 2010 season testing began in earnest at Daytona International Speedway’s early January “Roar Before The 24,” Ricky Taylor found himself driving for one of the Grand-Am Rolex Series’ premier teams: SunTrust Racing.

Working for the old man, indeed!

About six years ago, after bringing two fairly disinterested and relatively quickly bored offspring to a Daytona International Speedway test, Wayne Taylor was all but resigned to the possibility that sons Ricky and Jordan wouldn’t become involved in the family business.

About the time Wayne Taylor explained a hands-off policy with regard to forcing his sons’ participation in racing – maintaining “heart” and not outside force fuels the best racers – he ironically lamented, “They’ve showed interest in just about everything but racing.”

Shortly after, as if by spontaneous combustion, Ricky and Jordan’s motorsport passion suddenly, simultaneously and seriously ignited.

Undertaking a carefully crafted but nonetheless fast track that took the pair through Karting and into various Skip Barber racing programs, Ricky and Jordan Taylor pictured at left)  soon startled just about all whom they first encountered on the track, displaying skills clearly beyond their years.

By 2006, Ricky claimed a Skip Barber Eastern Series Championship (three poles, six wins and 12 podium finishes), while Jordan in 2007 scored a Skip Barber Eastern Championship (four poles, four wins and 10 podiums). That same year in a Skip Barber National Championship run, Ricky scored five poles, two wins and five podiums on the way to a second-place overall finish.

(As an aside: it’s rare for a parent to recognize that while he or she may exhibit excellent given professional expertise, patiently and correctly teaching an offspring those same skills is an entirely different undertaking; “modeling,” however, being an entirely different subject and the practice of which Wayne Taylor clearly was capable.)

After tentatively here-and-there testing the Rolex Series’ waters in 2008 (helping the SunTrust team collect a fifth-place finish in that year’s Rolex 24), Ricky Taylor in 2009 contested the season’s 12 DP races in an eclectic variety of rides, mixing Dallara, Crawford and Riley chassis variously powered by Ford and Pontiac engines.

Many observers felt August’s Montreal 200 at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve was Ricky Taylor’s breakthrough race, wherein he was running third close to race end when he clearly yielded to Alex Gurney and his No. 99 GAINSCO/Bob Stallings Racing Pontiac-Riley. Deep into a championship fight at the end of which Gurney and co-driver Jon Fogarty would prevail, had he maintained position it would’ve been Ricky Taylor’s first Rolex Series podium.

“They (GAINSCO) were in a fight for the title,” Ricky Taylor later said, “We weren’t and there wasn’t a lot to be gained in us fighting for the position, potentially taking out two or more cars in the process.”

After the Montreal race ended and turning to a journalist, Wayne Taylor squeezed his forefinger to thumb and said, “This close; this close!”

On Friday, in just his third race weekend as a season-long member of the SunTrust Racing team, Ricky Taylor scored a pole on what is arguably among the more trying, if not technical tracks in North America.

Lapping the track in record fashion with a 1:19.624 lap at an average speed of 103.988 mph, Ricky Taylor ironically bested Michael Valiante’s 2008 BMP track-record 1:20.521/102.83, set while driving (what else?) the No. 10 SunTrust Pontiac-Dallara.

“It’s actually the first pole I’ve won in years,” Ricky Taylor said while taking the congratulations of and some gentle ribbing from Memo Gidley, who co-drives Doran Racing’s No. 77 MacDonald’s/South Africa Airways Dallara-Ford with Dionne Von Moltke.

When Friday’s Daytona Prototype qualifying dust settled, Ricky Taylor returned to the SunTrust hauler’s front, sat next to co-driver Angelelli and with him poured over his session’s data entrails, seeking how he might’ve squeezed out yet another tenth, hundredth or thousandth-of-a-second, primarily because his top lap “wasn’t a perfect lap, by far,” he said.

Meanwhile on the track, driving the Racers Edge Motorsports’ No. 30 3-Dimensional.com/IDEMITSU Mazda RX-8 in  GT qualifying, “little” brother Jordan Taylor claimed the GT race’s outside pole - missing that classes’ inside pole by fewer than two-hundredths of one second.

“Now that would’ve been perfect, having them on pole,” Taylor later said, winking and then, with forefinger pressed to thumb, said, “This close; this close!”

Heck, one remembers when Wayne Taylor was “this close” to giving up on seeing either one of those Taylor youngins jumping into a race car.

Later,

DC

Post Script:

Starting from the pole for the first time in his 23-race Rolex Series career was an eye-opener for Ricky Taylor, who nevertheless put pet to metal and let ‘er roll when the racer took the green flag Saturday in the Porsche 250 at Birmingham’s Barber Motorsports Park.

“I’ve never been racing with those guys before up at the front and, now, I can see why they’re racing up there every weekend,” the second-youngest pole-winner in Rolex Series history said after climbing from his No. 10 SunTrust Ford-Riley.

At the field’s front unabatedly for 15 laps (and setting the race’s second-fastest lap in the process; 1:20.591, bested only by his co-driver’s later 1:20.483), the brain trust atop the SunTrust war wagon on Lap 16 called race-leader Taylor – that would be Ricky Taylor, not “Wayne” Taylor – into the pits in a strategic call prompted by Lap 13’s full-course yellow flag. Scooting back onto the track, a seventh-place Taylor rejoined the fray behind cars which for whatever reason chose to remain on the track or undertake only short stops, forgoing either tires or gas.

Between adept passing and seeing others fall from the pace with eventual pit stops, Taylor worked his way up to second place behind Memo Rojas’ No. 01 TELMEX BMW-Riley on Lap-47, where he stayed until both he and Rojas were running on all but gas fumes – Taylor having run nearly half of the race’s 108 total laps but more than half of the SunTrust’s 80 laps.

SunTrust Racing fell short of the race’s mark when Massimiliano “MaxAxe” Angelelli, who assumed driver duties in the car upon Taylor’s exit, tried a fast-closing, inside-line pass on the No. 8 Corsa Car Care BMW-Riley of eventual third-place finisher Ryan Dalziel (Mike Forest, co-driver) at the 2.3-mile track’s 180-degree Turn 5. Dalziel and Angelelli’s respective cars contacted, Angelelli getting the worst of it; suspension damage owing to the car’s 26^th-place (15^th-in-class) race finish.

“I knew it would come but I didn’t know where it’d come,” Ricky’s mother, Shelley, said of her eldest son’s first DP pole, which she didn’t witness.

Shelley was there for the race, though, catching a flight as soon as she heard the news. Unfortunately, like many Shelley will have to wait until at least the next race for Ricky’s first win.

In the meantime, Wayne Taylor’s got another problem on his hands: what to do with trusted friend, near-brother and longtime racing partner Max Angelelli after youngest-son Jordan Taylor collected a hard-earned GT-class second place, driving with Todd Lamb in the No. 30 3-Dimensional.com/IDEMITSU Mazda RX-8.

Of course, that potentially leads to everyone else someday having a problem with the Taylor and Taylor driving team.