I had a chance to drive the WRL 8 hours of COTA with a new team this past weekend in their 981 GT4 Clubsport. This was my second time doing a race in WRL and I can say I had a blast. The racing action was great all weekend with everyone on track racing clean with me anytime I was in the car. If you want to go wheel to wheel racing with a great organization while getting a lot of seat time for a relatively low cost WRL is a great spot. During the race on Saturday we did have a few little hiccups (penalties and extra pitstops) that cost us some spots during our pitstops. We finished 29th out of 92 cars overall and 23rd in the GTO class. Overall a great weekend as we showed speed and the team learned a lot on how the series is ran. Can't wait to do it again.

 

Congrats, looked like fun. What tires/ sizes did you use? does WRL mandate 200TW tires?

 

To be honest I don't remember the tire size we ran for the Clubsport. We did run the Cooper RS3 in a 265/35/18 Front and I believe it is a 295/40/18 in the rear but I could be wrong on the rear size.

They do mandate a TW rating and I do believe it is 200.

 

WRL and AER require DOT approved with tread wear (UTQG) rating of 180 or higher.

 

That's some amazing driving almost keeping up with Austin Dillon and their weird car! I was further back in the GTO field and agree with everything you said. WRL is super clean fun at a reasonable-ish cost, especially if you're okay racing older BMWs

 

We raced the oldest car in the field this weekend in GTO: an LS swapped 944. Talk about bringing a (butter) knife to a (machine) gun fight!

We have a lot of AER experience (20k laps between us), but this was our first time at WRL. We didn't expect to be able to run with the front runners, but we're pleasantly surprised to finish 14th on Saturday, up from 43rd. Not too shabby for four amateurs driving 33 year old car with no ABS ...

The GTO field was pretty amazing. Lots of very beautiful hardware!

I was a bit disappointed by the number of GT4 drivers who could only pull off a pass by diving for the hairpin apex and leaving it up to the passing car to avoid contact - but I was impressed by the relative parity between cars in such a large field.

 

Lots of that going on, and I may have done it a few times myself. It got super sketchy later in the day with marbles on corner exit.

GTO usually isn't this big, at the smaller tracks like Hallett it'd be only 5/6 cars. The parity and quality of drivers makes WRL for me much more fun than AER. Hope you come back!

 

So that's what it looked like up front.

Great weekend, I was in a GP2 E36 BMW and had a blast on track with you all Saturday, but couldn't make Sunday happen. Was that the Supra driver that got the boot for multiple contact events? I remember your blue GT4 out there, it looked so good on track driving away in the distance.

 

What a fun race. I was in the 701 GP1 cayman that won both days in GP1. Lots of fun racing out there. We also run the Cooper Tires. Cooper is one of our season long sponsors. For 200tw endurance racing the tires are amazing bc they have great wear and for us the grip is consistent all race long! Awesome to know several rennlisters were there too!

GTO has been big most races and GP1 is growing too. We run between 8-20 cars depending on the race in GP1. All the big races had 20-49 GTO cars. The pointy end of the WRL field in any class is very very fast with lots of “pro” drivers showing up!

 

From the race control log (in the app) there were two driver ejections Saturday. One was the W2W Clubsport for the weekend (nasty crash), and the other was a GP1 BMW that hit a EV and is banned from the series. Sunday was very clean. Gotta really really pay attention with so many GTO cars.

 

How the heck do you hit an EV on track????

 

Ask JPM!

 

Oh I didn't know it was one of the W2W drivers that got the boot. The car that hit the EV was the other grey E36 in GP2.

Think he was more focused on what was going on behind him than in front, despite the waving double yellows, and flashing lights. I feel bad for the guy. Glad nobody got hurt. See around the 3:07 mark:

 

Oh, that sucks! Agree completely. This guy was at saturation before he left the Esses... His head is looking everywhere around him, except down the road... Feel bad for him, but that's inexcusable.

 

I can't get the video to load. What does it show?