The No. 31 Whelen Cadillac V-Series.R at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta during the Motul Petit Le Mans weekend. Photo: General Motors
Cadillac has found a cheap way to staff a world championship program: borrow from the one it just won. When the 2027 Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA lineup was confirmed on Oct. 15, five of the six drivers were names already on Cadillac’s IMSA GTP roster. The only exception is António Félix da Costa, who also happens to know JOTA’s workshop better than most of the people he’ll be sharing a car with.
Alex Lynn and Sébastien Bourdais leave at the end of the season. Da Costa and Ricky Taylor come in. Jack Aitken, Earl Bamber, Norman Nato and Will Stevens stay. Neither General Motors’ announcement nor the FIA WEC’s says who goes in the No. 12 and who goes in the No. 38. That detail matters more than usual this time, and we’ll get to why.
The IMSA side of the announcement was mostly a story about continuity, which we covered in our breakdown of Frederik Vesti’s promotion to the No. 31. The WEC side is where the actual roster change happened, and it tells you how Cadillac now thinks about running two championships with one driver pool.
Cadillac’s 2027 WEC drivers and their other day jobs
- Jack Aitken: WEC with JOTA, plus a full IMSA season in the No. 31 Cadillac Whelen as reigning GTP champion
- Ricky Taylor: WEC with JOTA, plus a full IMSA season in the No. 10 Cadillac Wayne Taylor Racing entry
- Earl Bamber: WEC with JOTA, plus the IMSA endurance races in the No. 31
- Will Stevens: WEC with JOTA, plus the three longest IMSA endurance races in the No. 10
- Norman Nato: WEC with JOTA, plus the three longest IMSA endurance races in the No. 40
- António Félix da Costa: WEC with JOTA, with no IMSA role announced
Cadillac calls this its “One Team” setup. GM introduced it in 2025 to tie Action Express and Wayne Taylor Racing in IMSA to JOTA in the WEC, and it says engineers and race leads from all three teams have been attending both series’ races. The 2027 roster takes that idea from the engineering office to the driver line.
Lynn and Bourdais leave with their names on Cadillac’s WEC milestones
Going by the record book, this isn’t a clear-out of underperformers. FIA WEC credits Lynn with the 2025 Le Mans pole, four WEC poles in total, and a share of Cadillac’s first WEC win at Interlagos in 2025 with Stevens and Nato. That crew also gave Cadillac its first overall Le Mans podium. Bourdais has been at JOTA since the Cadillac Hypercar program started and has several podiums with the team, including second place at September’s Lone Star Le Mans in the No. 38 with Aitken and Bamber. That was the result we called Cadillac’s best WEC finish of 2026.
The more useful clue is in Lynn’s 2026 season. Neck surgery kept him out for most of the year, and the FIA WEC says he’s due back in Barcelona. Cadillac filled the hole from its IMSA bench, and Ricky Taylor drove for JOTA at COTA. A team that has just spent a season proving it can plug an IMSA driver into a WEC seat at short notice has an obvious reason to make that the default arrangement.
Eric Warren, GM’s vice president of global motorsports competition, put it in terms of chemistry, pointing out that Taylor and da Costa “already have a long-standing relationship with everyone at Cadillac.” Lynn and Bourdais each have two races left with the team.
Da Costa returns to the team that built his sports car résumé
Da Costa raced for JOTA from 2019 to 2023, starting in LMP2 and moving up to Hypercar. His best year there was 2022. That season he, Will Stevens and Roberto González won the WEC LMP2 title in JOTA’s No. 38 Oreca, with a class win at Le Mans along the way, according to the FIA WEC’s season review. He is also the 2019–20 Formula E champion.
His 2026 car was the No. 35 Alpine A424. At COTA, that Alpine crossed the line second, ahead of the No. 38 Cadillac. A late penalty for an unsafe pit-stop release then dropped it to third, and Cadillac inherited second. So Cadillac’s best WEC result of the year came partly from a pit-lane mistake by the car its newest signing was driving. Next year he’ll be on the Cadillac side of the pit wall.
This is where the car assignments come in. Put da Costa and Stevens in the same car and JOTA has reunited two-thirds of its 2022 title crew. Cadillac hasn’t said whether it will. Splitting them would give each car a driver with a long JOTA history, which is also a sound argument.
Ricky Taylor’s first full WEC season comes at 37
Taylor is the bigger bet. He is 37, a two-time IMSA champion with 32 wins and 76 podiums in North American sports car racing, and 2027 will be his first full WEC season. He isn’t giving anything up to do it. He keeps his full-time IMSA seat alongside Filipe Albuquerque in the No. 10, now in their seventh straight season together.
The car won’t be the hard part. The V-Series.R is the same LMDh car in both series. The adjustment is everything around it: a balance of performance run by a different rulemaker, unfamiliar circuits on the world calendar, and team dynamics in a squad where his two teammates in any given car may also be his teammates in IMSA. The COTA cameo gave him one WEC weekend with JOTA. Next year he’ll do nine.
Do the 2027 calendars actually fit?
On paper, yes. We compared the published 2027 IMSA WeatherTech schedule with the nine-round 2027 WEC calendar, and no GTP race falls on the same weekend as a WEC round. The one IMSA weekend that does share dates with a WEC round is Canadian Tire Motorsport Park, which runs alongside São Paulo, and GTP doesn’t race there. VIR doesn’t include GTP either.
Not clashing is a long way from being comfortable, though. Aitken and Taylor are each signed up for 18 race weekends, plus the Roar and the WEC’s Qatar Prologue, and the calendar groups them tightly:
- April: Imola (April 9–11), Long Beach (April 16–17), Silverstone (April 23–25), then Laguna Seca (April 30–May 2). That’s four race weekends in a row, switching between Europe and California every week.
- June: The Detroit street race (June 4–5) runs in the days just before the Le Mans race week (June 9–13).
- September–October: Lone Star Le Mans (Sept. 10–12), Indianapolis (Sept. 17–19) and Fuji (Sept. 24–26) run on three straight weekends, then Petit Le Mans (Oct. 6–9).
It has been done before. GM says Aitken and Bamber raced most of both 2026 seasons, and Aitken won the IMSA title anyway. The difference for 2027 is how the load is shared out. Bamber’s IMSA role shrinks to the endurance races, and Taylor takes on the full double. Cadillac now has exactly two full-time drivers in both series, and they’re its reigning IMSA champion and a two-time IMSA champion. If either one gets injured, the backup plan affects both championships.
What to watch next
- The car pairings. Whether da Costa and Stevens end up in the same car will show whether JOTA is building around its own history or spreading experience evenly across both cars.
- Lynn and Bourdais’s last two races. The final rounds of 2026 start in Barcelona, which Michelin is already calling the hardest race of the year on tires.
- The fourth No. 31 driver at Daytona. Cadillac still hasn’t named the fourth driver for the Rolex 24 (Jan. 28–31). If it’s another WEC regular, the shared driver pool gets even bigger.
- April 2027. That four-weekend stretch is the first real test of whether one driver pool can cover two championships without one of them losing out.
Cadillac won IMSA’s three 2026 titles on consistency more than outright speed. It’s now betting that the same people, kept busier, can carry that consistency into the WEC. That bet works only if the travel doesn’t wear them down first.
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