Some weekends you can feel the sport change. On the first weekend of August, at Road Atlanta — the circuit this championship calls home — college racing crowned the first race winners in its history.
The Collegiate Racing Series — founded by Jack Hobbs, Senter Smith and Todd Buras, with a scope of more than 1,600 schools worldwide and 78-plus in the United States — threw its first green flag. And then it crowned its first winners:
- Round 1 — Jacob Mink, University of Tennessee. Rocky Top Racing took pole and converted it into the first college race win in history. Witnesses called the round "perfection."
- Round 2 — Giancarlo Goeckel, Fordham. A second school, a second winner, a rivalry born on day one.
- The format held. Clean, no-touch, nose-to-tail racing — executed flawlessly by student drivers in their first-ever competitive rounds.
This one is personal. Championship founder Peter Saddington has wanted colleges to race wheel-to-wheel for more than twenty-five years — since his own student days, when there was no such thing as racing for your school. He spent the week before the race entering a Florida State effort of his own ("I just want the garnet and gold to be on top"), and stood in the paddock as the flag dropped on a sport's newest chapter.
His words from the weekend, via his newsletter: "My heart is bursting. We did it… College racing is here."
Every great sport is built on top of a college level. Football has Saturdays before it has Sundays. Basketball has March before it has June. Golf, baseball, hockey — the summit of each sits on a ladder that starts on campus. Motorsport never had one. As of this weekend, it does.
Now think about what happens next: those drivers graduate. A generation that raced for its school will want somewhere to keep racing the real thing — and a sport with a ladder needs a summit worthy of it. That is the world The GT Global Championship is being built for: GT3 and GT4, the greatest circuits on earth, racing where the racing is real — opening at Road Atlanta, the very tarmac where this weekend's history was made.
— The GT Global Championship
The Summit Of The New Ladder.
A world championship for the cars we love — GT3 and GT4, on the greatest circuits on earth, open to the people who own them. Year zero is the only year you can join from the ground floor.