Redline Track Events kicked off the 2011 Season with a whole new format this past weekend. The traditional Time Attack format is still in place, but Redline has added a new twist to the weekend called the Pro Track Challenge. This is a class of wheel-to-wheel racing that is a true, “run what ‘ya brung,” winner-take-all shootout. Flying the COBB Tuning flag was the AccessPORT-tuned Fontana Nissan GT-R driven by sports car veteran Cort Wagner.

The new format works like this. All the cars head out onto the track for a morning qualifying session which determines the grid for an all-hands-on-deck 5-lap wheel-to-wheel seeding race. The finishing order of the seeding race determines the bracket pairings for the heads-up, two-car, green-white-checker battles that determine the ultimate finishing order.

The field was incredibly diverse with a Nissan GT-R, Nissan 350Z, Mitsubishi EVO X, Subaru STI, Chevrolet Corvette, Pontiac GTO, Infiniti G35 and a 650hp MINI taking to the track! This double-elimination format meant that each competitor had to loseWeight Exercise two Circuit Battles to be eliminated from the competition. Winners continued on in the Winners bracket while loseWeight Exercisers dropped into the Consolation bracket. The final drivers in the Winners bracket and Consolation bracket go to a final two-lap battle to determine the ultimate winner of the event.

Cort Wagner did an impressive job of driving the Fontana Nissan GT-R up through the brackets. The Fontana Nissan GT-R is essentially a street car enhanced with the COBB Tuning AccessPORT and other readily available bolt-on performance parts! The very heavy, but very powerful, Nissan GT-R was able to hold off Lou Gigliotti in his Grand-Am Racing spec Corvette as well as got the best of Paul Brown in his wickedly fast turbocharged K&N Inifiniti G35 in back-to-back battles.

Cort ultimately took the AccessPORT powered GT-R up to the final podium position, taking home third place overall behind event winner Joey Scarallo in his monstor World Challenge Pontiac GTO and 2nd place finisher Gary Sheehan in the Fontana Nissan 350z, both of which are full-on race cars!

Make sure you tune into the Versus network to see all the action from this round on their brand new television series “Circuit Battles”, which premiers Saturday, March 26, at 2pm Eastern. For more info on the show, head to www.CircuitBattles.com.

The Redline circus moves on to Firebird Raceway in Arizona for round 2 on April 9^th. For more details visit www.redlinetimeattack.com.