Mustang Challenge 2026: how Cole Loftsgard and Round 3 Racing closed it out at COTA

Mustang Challenge North America finished its 2026 season at Circuit of the Americas on 5–6 September, running Rounds 11 and 12 on the same weekend the WEC was in town. Twelve rounds, two classes, and a title decided by consistency rather than a last-race shootout.

Here is what the season looks like when you read every result rather than the headlines.

Dark Horse: Loftsgard won it on rate, not on drama

Cole Loftsgard took seven of the twelve DH races and finished the year with an average finishing position of 1.67. That is the whole story: he was on the podium so consistently that the championship was never really a question in the closing rounds.

Devin Anderson was the only other driver to win more than once, and he swept both COTA races to close the gap — too late, but it made the finale worth watching. The two of them accounted for eleven of the twelve DH wins between them.

The gap between second and third is the interesting part. Anderson averaged 2.08; Will Lucas averaged 4.00. In a twelve-round season that is not a small margin, and it is why the top two look like a different championship from the one behind them.

Dark Horse Lites: four different winners, and a penalty that moved the finale

DHL went the other way entirely. Four drivers won races, nobody won more than two, and the class average finishing positions are bunched between 2.9 and 4.8.

The COTA finale is worth a note of its own. Tait crossed the line seventh overall in Race 2 and led DHL on the road; a post-race penalty dropped him to tenth, and the class win went to Brad McCall instead. It is the only DHL win of McCall's season and it arrived in the last race of the year.

That kind of result is exactly where a results index earns its keep. The timing feed published at the flag had Tait winning. The classification published after scrutineering did not. If you only read the first one, the season's last race is recorded wrong.

Round 3 Racing took the entrants' title

On the entrants' side, Round 3 Racing — Loftsgard's team — finished ahead of TechSport Racing, with Wheelhouse Motorsports third.

Entrant championships reward the best car a team fields in each race rather than the sum of everything it enters, and that distinction decides this one rather than merely refining it. Wheelhouse ran the largest entry in the class all year. Add up every car they started and they look like the strongest team in the championship. Score the way the championship actually scores — best car, each race — and Round 3 Racing come out on top by roughly a hundred points.

It is a useful reminder that "most cars on track" and "best team" are different measurements, and only one of them wins titles.

What the season says about the class split

Twelve rounds is enough to say something about the two classes rather than just the drivers in them.

• DH was a two-driver championship. Loftsgard and Anderson took eleven of twelve wins and averaged better than 2.1 between them. Nobody else won more than once.
• DHL was genuinely open. Four winners in twelve rounds, and the top four separated by about one position of average finish across the whole year.
• Attrition was low in both. Most of the regulars started all twelve rounds, which is unusual enough in a one-make series to be worth saying out loud.

For a series in its third season, a title fight that goes to the last weekend in one class and a dominant campaign in the other is a reasonable outcome. The interesting question for 2027 is whether anyone in DH can get close to the rate Loftsgard set.

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Every figure here is computed from the full race record in the RacerDB index — all twelve rounds of both classes, not a standings screenshot. Driver names link to their career pages.