Hankook 24HR at COTA 2018
The last race of the season at Circuit of the Americas and it’s a great way to end the year! The Hankook 24 Hour race is a great series to experience. The crazy thing that blows our minds is that this race weekend is free and open to the public! It also has a great variety of cars mixed in together in typical endurance type racing. The 24 hours are broken up between Saturday and Sunday. Even though the race is split, the action never really stops!
The GT cars were lined up first to start the race with the TCE cars being escorted by their own Audi R8. We were up on turn 1 awaiting for the the start of the race and before the race had even started, we were already seeing some action!
When both classes did their formation laps, the TCE cars appear to have been going slower than expected. This cause the GT cars to almost catch up on their first lap while the TCE cars still had a pace car R8 in front of them. Thankfully the officials saw this and caused the race to be red flagged and successfully started the race with no issues.
We really enjoyed seeing multiple TCE cars taking turn 11 with their left rear wheel up in the air and often locked up!
Our ears and eyes were extremely confused when the Burger King sponsored MARC Focus drove by. We were first confused as to why the car was running with the GT cars and then further confused as to how they could make a Ford Focus sound so mean. That’s when we realized that the MARC car is actually a V8 powered Focus! This took our prize for best sounding car of the race.
In the looks department, the Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus SCG 003, took the prize. We couldn’t decide whether it looked better in white or in yellow.
One thing we were surprised to not see were the lights set up at the track similar to how they are for the American LeMans race. Many of the cars were sporting their own additional headlights to guide them through the night.
The mix of both classes on COTA made for some great racing. We are glad the year ended with this amazing series and we look forward to next year’s event.
Be sure to check out the 24H Series site to see the TCE results and the GT results.
