Memo Gidley Wins Sonoma GT America Race No. 1

TKO Motorsports’ Memo Gidley was able to sweep past Wright Motorsports’ Adam Adelson in turn 1 on the initial start of the race. From there, Gidley was able to hold to win GT America powered by AWS Race No. 1 at Sonoma Raceway Saturday (April 1). It is Gidley’s second straight victory.

“This is unbelievably special,” Gidley said after the race. “TKO Motorsports…put this together and allows me to live my dream.”

Gidley’s margin of victory was .265 seconds over Adelson. Crowdstrike Racing with Riley Motorsports’ George Kurtz was third, followed by CRP Racing’s Jason Dasaklos. RealTime Racing’s Anthony Bartone was fifth.

At first, Gidley pulled away to a decent lead over Adelson. However, as the race continued on, Adelson began to reel the former CART racer in.

Lapped traffic gave Adelson the chance to get the lead back from Gidley in the closing laps. Adelson made a last minute move in turn 11 that was ultimately unsuccessful as Gidley took the win.

In GT4, Rotek Racing’s Robb Holland started from pole in his Porsche Cayman GT4 RS CS and slowly began to pull away from Archangel Motorsports’ Todd Coleman. Coleman had to deal with both Flying Lizard Motorsports’ Jason Bell and Chouest-Povoledo Racing’s Ross Chouest.

After a couple of laps, Bell was able to take second from Coleman, but Holland had stretched the lead up to nearly five seconds by that point. That advantage ended up being enough to split the GT4 field.

Holland ended up just in front of Gidley at the finish. Not only does that mean that Holland took the GT4 lead, but it meant that he finished the race on a lap of his own.

Bell ended up second in class, then Chouest and Coleman. Flying Lizard Motorsports’ Elias Sabo was fifth.

Race No. 2 will start at 11:55 a.m. ET Sunday morning and will be streamed on the GT World YouTube channel. By virtue of the quickest lap of the race, Adelson will start from pole.

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