Taylor qualified the Wayne Taylor Racing Acura in third and the car has appeared to be consistently quick in all track conditions, but he expects teething troubles for all the GTP cars which are new and running spec hybrid systems.
“If you talk about the pace of the car, I'm confident,” he told Motorsport.com, “but outside of that I don't think anybody can really have a lot of confidence in reliability. It's so unproven.
“We'll just react to whatever happens and try and fix problems as they come, which is normal in an endurance race – you are always fixing problems. This year they might be just a little bit more severe and complicated. I think every GTP car is going to have some obstacles, some big obstacles…
“It's amazing how many times you finish the race and look at the car afterwards, you're like, ‘That was almost broken, that wouldn't have lasted 10 more laps.’ Statistically, somebody makes it, but I'd say the odds are much less this year…”
The multiple sensors on the new hybrid cars have required multiple resets through last week’s Roar Before the 24 and this week’s practice for the Rolex 24 Hours, but Taylor says that is preferable to going into ‘limp mode.’
“We’ve got a button that clears error and that button I'm pretty sure we are going to need a new one because it is worn out!” he smiled. “So in practice, we have a lot of scenarios where the car will go into limp mode.
"That's not going to happen in the race. The car is not going to have a limp mode… because it is going to be in limp mode half the race if we have a limp mode. We are going to clear sensors, we are going to be doing all of that throughout the race, I'm sure.”
Regarding whether the car must stop to go through a system reset, Taylor said: “It depends on what the error is. It could be anything, unrelated to hybrid even.
"When it says something is wrong, I need to limp home. But if the car does become live or something, stopping the car is probably the better call. We’ve never had that situation.”
He added that should the MGU fail, the car “can still run [but] it's very complicated because you can't start the car because the MGU is the starter. But I'm pretty sure there are workarounds that you can run."
And in terms of the car’s battery, Taylor said, “We just don't want to discharge it completely. It's easier to keep it conservative. We don't deploy that much, we don't regen that much. It's not complicated keeping it in a pretty easy window.”
His fulltime teammate Filipe Albuquerque added: “I had a sensor failure and that shuts the car down. So then we can shut those sensors down, but it still takes time to do it. But when it comes to the race they will just put what they know works and off it goes.
"Still there is a big part of it that needs to be fingers crossed that it goes for 24 hours.”
