There are fast race cars, and there are memorable race cars. AO Racing’s #77 Porsche 911 GT3 R has quietly become both — but it’s the livery, not the lap times, that’s made it one of the most talked-about machines in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship over the last two seasons.
You know the car. Green, scaly, with a grinning T-Rex stretched across the bodywork. That’s Rexy — the team’s full-time mascot, a loveable dinosaur that somehow turned a GT racing Porsche into something fans actually queue to photograph in the paddock. But Rexy has a sister. And when Rexy goes on holiday, Roxy takes over.
Meet Roxy
Roxy is pink. Ferociously, unapologetically pink. A female T-Rex with her own attitude and her own fanbase, she made her first appearance as an occasional substitute livery when Rexy’s design was temporarily committed elsewhere during the 2023 FIA WEC season. The logic the team offered was perfectly on-brand: Rexy’s taking a vacation. So who covers the #77? Enter Roxy — and the IMSA paddock hasn’t quite recovered since.
What AO Racing understood — and what so many teams still don’t — is that a livery isn’t just paint. It’s a personality. It’s the difference between a race result and a story, between a car people clock and a car people actually care about. Roxy’s Road America 2024 appearance was the clearest proof of that yet.
Road America 2024: The Most-Photographed Pit Lane of the Season
For the IMSA SportsCar Weekend at Road America in August 2024, Roxy returned in full force. Julien Andlauer joined full-season driver Laurin Heinrich in the #77 cockpit — a pairing that delivered a fourth-place finish in the GTD PRO class and kept AO Racing at the top of the championship standings going into the back half of the season.
The result was solid. But the spectacle was something else. The pink Porsche drew the kind of attention that teams spend millions in sponsorship trying to manufacture. Fans posted it on every platform that existed. Automotive creators filmed walk-arounds in the paddock. It trended in communities that had never followed IMSA before. Because when you put something genuinely original on a race car, the audience does the marketing for you — and they do it better than any agency would.
Why This Kind of Livery Hits Different
There’s a reason the AO Racing dinosaur universe has caught on in a way that traditional sponsor graphics never quite manage at this level of GT racing. It follows the same logic that made the Gulf Oil stripes, the John Player Special black, and the Martini Racing pinstripes permanent fixtures of motorsport culture — they communicate something beyond a commercial arrangement. They have a character.
For the audience that IMSA increasingly pulls in — people who grew up on Gran Turismo and Forza, who know the 911 GT3 R from circuit modes played late into the night, who found motorsport through Initial D or through YouTube rabbit holes at 2am — a pink dinosaur on a Porsche just makes sense. It’s absurd in exactly the right way. It takes the cars seriously and doesn’t take itself seriously at all, which is precisely the tone that lands with a generation of fans who can spot corporate sincerity from a mile away.
Roxy isn’t trying to sell you anything. She’s just there, flat out, at Road America in August. That’s the entire pitch, and it works.
The Road America Edition
The 2024 Road America appearance is widely considered the definitive Roxy moment — partly because of the upgraded driver lineup, partly because Road America’s long straights and fast corners suit the 911 GT3 R in a way that produces genuinely spectacular racing, and partly because the pink against that backdrop of Wisconsin trees and clear summer sky produced some of the best racing photography of the year.
It’s the kind of event that exists in a specific moment — one race weekend, one livery, one set of circumstances that won’t repeat exactly. Which is part of what makes documenting it matter.
If you want a permanent record of that Road America weekend on your shelf, the Mini GT Roxy #77 Road America 1:64 captures it properly — full diecast metal, authentic Pink Dinosaur livery, GTD PRO specification. It’s the version most collectors consider the one to have. And at 1:64, it fits anywhere a good story deserves to live.