GR Cup COTA Trip

They say “everything is bigger in Texas”.  The competition in the GR Cup at Circuit of the Americas certainly was.  The GR Performance Parts crew had the privilege to join Ethan Goulart and root him on during his race weekend at COTA.

Day 1:

            Saturday kicked off with GR Cup qualifying at 8:55am. The 15-minute qualifying session saw Ethan snagging a solid top 10 with a P8 lap time.  Conditions were decent with temps in the mid-80s and saw GR Cup qualifying laps around 2:26. Respectable times for a GR86 to lap a 3.4-mile circuit.

After congratulating Ethan & team for a successful qualifying session we were lucky to have some time to meet up with some of you, our customers at a local Buc-ee’s.  The time involved checking out each other’s cars and a talking mods and future plans.  Thanks to several locals in attendance, we had a spirited back road drive to COTA to catch Race 1.  The Texas back roads made for the perfect group cruise to arrive at COTA. 

The 45-Minute GR Cup race had plenty of action.  The start saw an early retirement of car #2 due to a fluid leak and another car up on 2 wheels due to a messy start with some contact. Ethan Goulart charged from P8 to finish in P6 with well executed passes and defenses. Up front Jaxon Bell and Lucas Weisenberg had an exciting battle all the way to the end.  The GR Cup series produces some of the best door to door racing and spectating.  At conclusion of the race the Tech Sport Team and Ethan went to work searching for more pace both in car set up and via race 1 data review.

Day 2:

Day 2 qualifying saw the benefit of the prior evening efforts and Ethan secured an even better P4 in qualifying.  A great place to hunt for a podium finish from.  Ahead of him saw the familiar cars of Bell and Weisenberg, next to him his former teammate Spike Kohlbecker. Race 2 had several safety cars and exciting moments.  Rutledge Wood former Top Gear host and motorsports commentator in the #18 car displayed some good car control.  Ethan secured P3 with 4 minutes to go after an incident between two of cars in front of him.  Those last 4 minutes felt like 40 as Ethan mounted defense after defense against Dean in car #16 battling for P3.  Ethan held P3 to the line but was later issued a surprising 3 second penalty for track limits. Even more surprising was no announced mention of the issued penalty that dropped Ethan from P3 to P7. Despite the unfortunate obscure penalty, it was an impressive drive by Ethan who has demonstrated to be a podium contender.  It’s not a question of if a podium is in Ethan Goulart’s future but when.  We for one will be rooting for that and Ethan during GR Cup’s coming race weekend at Sebring (May 16-18).

We also had the opportunity to check out the new TCA class GR Corolla.  Several have been built with more on the way.  It should be an exciting place for the GR Corolla to run with more and more teams adopting the GRC for racing.

Final Thoughts

            I’ll sum the weekend up as the perfect mix of ingredients resulting in a 5-star experience, but missing the cherry on top of a podium finish.  Despite missing out on seeing Ethan claim his first Podium finish in GR Cup the fans and series saw his skills and drive to be there. We feel fortunate to have been present to support Ethan and meet many of our Texas customers.  We bid you all a fond farewell, until next time Lone Star State.