Road Atlanta is often considered to be the best road course in North America. Its dizzying combination of elevation changes, corners, and an almost 5,000 foot straight make this 2.55 miles of some of the most demanding asphalt you can put your tires on. Knowing this, professional racing teams from across North America travel to the small town of Braselton, Georgia to use Road Atlanta as their official proving grounds.

Round one of the 2016 Global Time Attack season was completed at Road Atlanta on May 6th and 7th. LYFE Motorsport took their WTAC-spec, flood damaged Hurricane Sandy recovery, R35 GT-R to Road Atlanta in an attempt to take the current AWD lap record and recently posted the video to their YouTube channel.

Almost immediately out of the pits on the first day of testing, Cole Powelson (driver/owner of LYFE Motorsport) noticed something didn’t feel right and the GT-R’s drivability and performance became worse with each lap. After spending all of their first day and most of their second test day chasing their tails to not even be able to put down a decent lap time, the LYFE team finally found the culprit to be a torn wastegate diaphragm that no amount of tuning would have been able to band-aid.

After the LYFE team sorted out the cause of their mechanical issues the day before, they took the GT-R out on race day with renewed morale and Powelson was easily able to break the standing AWD lap record on their first session out. With a full day still ahead and some of the best race teams in America competing, they knew holding onto that record was going to be a battle. GST Motorsports brought out their GC8 Impreza with Jeff Westphal behind the wheel and kept Powelson on his toes, with both teams fighting through mechanical issues and continuously bumping each others lap records each session.

The race day came to an abrupt end for the LYFE team when their GT-R suffered a serious mechanical failure, ending their race weekend without beating Westphal’s lap record. With a second place Unlimited AWD finish, Powelson was still happy with what their team was able to accomplish, given their rocky start, and are comfortable in knowing that they lost to the talented team at GST Motorsports who now holds the Road Atlanta AWD lap record at 1:20.793.

We will be watching LYFE Motorsport and GST Motorsports throughout the year and look forward to them continuing their healthy rivalry and taking lap records with them.