April 8, 2025
Adelson Acquires One of Porsche’s Most Successful Customer Teams to Forge New Future
By Tony DiZinno
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – “The Wright stuff” is one of the oldest and most frequently uttered puns to describe Wright Motorsports’ presence racing Porsches in sports car racing. It wouldn’t stick if it wasn’t true.
The team’s preparation, commitment to engineering excellence and sustained success across multiple IMSA championships have served it well for its more than two decades of existence.
But the ingredients that make up the “Wright stuff” recipe have changed. On April 2, the team officially announced Adam Adelson had acquired the team from founder John Wright, although plans had been in the works for a year with the sale finalized in December 2024.
Wright will remain as an advisor to guide the team, with team manager Bob Viglione becoming Chief Operating Officer after 14 years with the group. The team will stay based in Batavia, Ohio even though there may be expansion plans, since Adelson is based on the West Coast.
What Adelson doesn’t plan to change is the dedication to winning, which Wright has done regularly throughout IMSA and what Adelson and co-driver Elliott Skeer have started to do in their year-plus in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship Grand Touring Daytona (GTD) class.
“What I love about Wright is the familiar environment, but also their dedication to performing into different levels of motorsport, not just to compete but also to win races and championships,” Adelson said.
“I got talking with John Wright, and it was pretty evident he wanted to take a step back to focus on his family and personal life. I’d just came off an attempt to start a team. Wright Motorsports was really starting to seem like the best path forward to both continue to compete as a racing driver and field championship-winning programs.
“But because of their dedication to engineering excellence, it felt like – and Wright Motorsports has a lot on street car projects and custom race car projects too which folks will see in the not-too-distant future – it felt the perfect launch platform for me to chase my dreams.”
Adelson and Skeer won their first IMSA race as co-drivers at last September’s TireRack.com Battle on the Bricks in Indianapolis, which marked their third podium finish of their first year in GTD.
They’ve started 2025 strongly too; Skeer won the Motul Pole Award for the Rolex 24 At Daytona as the quartet of Skeer, Adelson, Tom Sargent and Ayhancan Guven finished second. Adelson also won the first two IMSA VP Racing SportsCar Challenge races in Daytona in that series’ new Grand Touring Daytona X (GTDX) class for GT3-specification cars.
The success this pair has had has come in large part from formative years together. Adelson’s nascent sports car career began in 2020 when he drove his first cars, and he and Skeer shared cars together in various sports car series over the last several years, including winning a class championship in GT World Challenge America with Wright in 2024.
Adelson has hailed Skeer for learning “countless” things and Skeer praised Adelson for revitalizing his potentially stalled career, despite winning the 2015 IMSA Porsche GT3 Cup USA championship in a Wright-run Porsche.
“From his first day on a race tire, and at relatively the same age and not a 20-year gap, the dynamic was different with Adam and special in terms of his starting from the beginning,” Skeer reflected.
“He was enthusiastic and ready to go. The little things in racing, you’re so excited about. How to qualify. How to start. How to do the first proper quali sim on stickers. How do you develop from the beginning? For me, it went back to rediscovering the rules I’d forgotten, and (his) first win is almost more special to me than any of the others.”
Adelson added, “He’s been my coach and mentor since the first time I went on a race tire. Starting off in the sport with literally zero racing experience, it’s not often that you get to participate in a sport you get to share with a true seasoned professional. That type of access to what a true professional does in their sport, I don’t know where you get that access, in what the top of the top do. And to compare data, methodologies, training methods, and do it alongside your coach and co-driver.
“I’ve learned about the insane levels of dedication and preparation it takes to compete at these levels. No matter how many laps you do on the simulator, no matter how many hours in the gym, random track days, instances of seat time, someone out there is doing more. Elliott helped me get into and develop that mindset.”
Adelson has understood the shift in team dynamic, too, from customer to team owner and ensuring the successful transition for team employees to now be working for someone who joined as a customer.
“I’d had an all-hands meeting with our full-time employees and contractors, everyone who became part of the family,” he explained. “At track, I am a customer and a driver. With John Wright running the program amazingly as he did, there’s not much more that I need to be involved in relatively to what I want to be involved in.
“With the transition from friendships within the team to now having it transfer to an employer-employee, I cannot credit every team member enough with how well they’ve handled the transition. It’s turned into respect in a professional perspective. We all have the same goals. We’re all a family. And that’s how we make it work.”
Through Indianapolis last year, Wright has eight IMSA wins in WeatherTech Championship competition, perhaps its most famous being the 2022 Rolex 24 At Daytona GTD class win. The team has flown the flag for Porsche in the GTD ranks as other teams have come-and-gone. It’s also enjoyed success in IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge, with longtime Wright driver Jan Heylen securing the 2021 Grand Sport (GS) class title in a Porsche GT4 specification car.
Adelson made no secret of his lofty goals for the team going forward, while remaining customer-service focused.
“The main goal is effectively to achieve a level of growth that enables us to field race- and championship-winning capable programs that a Porsche GT race car can race in, in the United States,” he said.
“John Wright and I have had a lot of long discussions to have a mutual understanding of what the future of the team should be and how to grow it progressively and organically to not bite off more than we can chew.
“The very last thing I’d want to happen – and I won’t allow this to happen – is to lose the level of quality and service we provide for our customers. I want every single customer Wright Motorsports has or will have to have the same exact, incredible, extremely professional experience I had with them.
“It’s why I wanted to purchase the team. I want to make sure every customer has the same experience.”
