A Fifth-to-First Drive Through the Styrian Mountains
Albert Costa and Giacomo Altoè reclaimed the joint lead of the 2019 International GT Open championship on Saturday at the Red Bull Ring, fighting from fifth on the grid to win the first race of the Austrian weekend by over fourteen seconds. The result marked their second victory of the season in the #63 Huracán GT3 run by Emil Frey Racing, and it set the tone for a weekend that demonstrated just how deeply Lamborghini’s customer racing operation had embedded itself at the sharp end of European GT competition.
The hard work got done early. Costa exploited chaos at the exit of the first corner, where Martin Kodric’s McLaren, Fabrizio Crestani’s Ferrari, and his own teammate Mikael Grenier all ran wide while battling for position. That single moment vaulted the Lamborghini from fifth to second. Costa held station until the mandatory pit stop window, and the team’s strategy delivered Altoè back onto the circuit with a seven-second cushion over the BMW of Beitske Visser.
Altoè then did what you want any co-driver to do with clean air: he stretched the gap. The final winning margin of 14.039 seconds tells the story of a car that was not simply fast but composed across a full stint. For a team chasing a championship, that kind of controlled dominance is worth more than a last-lap lunge, and it spoke directly to the maturity of the Huracán GT3 as a platform.
Grenier and Siedler Salvage Points Despite a Drive-Through Penalty
The second Emil Frey Racing entry of Mikael Grenier and Norbert Siedler endured a rougher afternoon. A drive-through penalty during the race, essentially a death sentence for a podium result in a 70-minute sprint format, dropped them down the order. They still brought the car home seventh, finishing just 30 seconds behind their victorious teammates.
Seventh place does not look glamorous on paper, but in a championship where consistency compounds, it matters. Costa and Altoè now sat tied on points with the BMW pairing of Kodric and Henrique Chaves, and every point Grenier and Siedler collected added pressure to rival squads lacking the depth to field two competitive entries simultaneously. Running two Huracán GT3s in the same championship and extracting points from both, even on a difficult day, is the kind of operational strength that separates contenders from one-off winners.
Three Blancpain Podiums at Zandvoort Keep the Title Fight Alive
Roughly 900 kilometers north of the Red Bull Ring, a different Lamborghini campaign was playing out on the sand-lined curves of Zandvoort. Andrea Caldarelli and Marco Mapelli, driving for FFF Racing in the Blancpain GT World Challenge Europe, collected a third-place finish in Race 1 and a seventh in Race 2. The Grasser Racing Team Lamborghini scored its own podium in Race 1, bringing the combined haul to three Lamborghini podium finishes across the two Zandvoort races.
Caldarelli and Mapelli’s weekend was not without frustration. Lamborghini describes Race 2 as “somewhat difficult” for the FFF Racing drivers, a diplomatic way of acknowledging that a seventh-place finish in a title fight is not ideal. Still, the mathematics remained favorable: the Italian duo sat just 8.5 points behind the Black Falcon Mercedes of Luca Stolz and Maro Engel in the championship standings. In endurance-style points racing, a gap that small can evaporate in a single strong weekend.
That Grasser Racing Team also placed on the podium independently is worth noting for a broader reason. When multiple customer teams running the same chassis can fight at the front with different setups, strategies, and driver combinations, it signals that the car itself is genuinely competitive. That is a selling point Lamborghini Squadra Corse can take directly to prospective customer teams evaluating which GT3 platform to invest in for the following season, and it reinforced the same message the Red Bull Ring result was sending from Austria.
Why GT Open and Blancpain Results Matter Beyond the Podium
For readers who follow Lamborghini primarily through road car launches and special editions, the brand’s GT racing activity can feel like background noise. It should not. Customer racing programs like GT Open and Blancpain are the proving ground for the Huracán GT3 platform, and the results directly influence which teams choose Lamborghini hardware when they write their next check.
One source indicates that Lamborghini claimed the International GT Open championship title four times in six years between 2016 and 2021, with wins in 2016, 2017, 2019, and 2021. The 2019 season covered here was part of that dominant stretch, and the Costa/Altoè pairing’s mid-season charge to the top of the standings was a critical chapter in that run. Lamborghini’s broader GT Open history now includes more than 30 victories in the series, a milestone reportedly reached at the Red Bull Ring in 2024.
This sustained competitiveness is what keeps the Huracán GT3 relevant in a market crowded with alternatives from McLaren, Ferrari, BMW, Mercedes-AMG, and Porsche. A customer team deciding between platforms looks at reliability records, factory support infrastructure, parts availability, and, crucially, whether the car can win. The mid-season results at Red Bull Ring and Zandvoort gave Lamborghini strong evidence on that last point.
For enthusiasts who own or aspire to own a road-going Huracán, the GT3 program validates the engineering underneath. The naturally aspirated V10 architecture, the chassis rigidity, the aerodynamic philosophy: all of it gets stress-tested in competition, and the lessons feed back into the road car development cycle. When Lamborghini eventually transitioned to the Huracán GT3 EVO and then the EVO2, each iteration carried improvements born from exactly these kinds of race weekends.
The number 63 Lamborghini Huracán GT3 race car speeds around the track during a competitive event.
The Huracán GT3’s Legacy and What Comes Next
The July 2019 weekend sits in the middle of what became one of the most successful eras for any single GT3 chassis in modern customer racing. The Huracán GT3 platform, in its various evolutionary stages, gave Lamborghini a credible weapon against manufacturers with far longer motorsport pedigrees, and weekends like this one built the case race by race.
Car and Driver reports that the Temerario GT3, revealed at the 2025 Goodwood Festival of Speed, will eventually replace the Huracán GT3 EVO2 as Lamborghini’s factory-backed GT3 effort. That car represents a fundamental shift: a twin-turbocharged V8 replacing the naturally aspirated V10 that defined the Huracán’s racing character. For teams and drivers who built their programs around the Huracán’s powerband and throttle response, the transition will require adapting to entirely different engine characteristics, turbo lag management, and weight distribution.
That transition also highlights why results like the 2019 Red Bull Ring victory carry lasting significance. They are part of the body of evidence that Lamborghini can compete, win, and sustain championship campaigns in GT racing. When the Temerario GT3 arrives on grids, it will carry the credibility that the Huracán spent years building, one race weekend at a time.
For prospective Lamborghini buyers who value the connection between road and race, the practical takeaway is straightforward: Lamborghini’s motorsport commitment is not a marketing exercise bolted onto the brand. It is a continuous engineering feedback loop, and results like the 2019 GT Open and Blancpain campaigns are the data points that prove it. Whether you are watching from the grandstands or configuring a Temerario on the Lamborghini website, the same engineering culture produced both cars.
What the Source Confirms and What Remains Open
Lamborghini’s official account of this weekend confirms the following: Costa and Altoè won the first GT Open race at Red Bull Ring from fifth on the grid by 14.039 seconds. Grenier and Siedler finished seventh after a drive-through penalty. Caldarelli and Mapelli finished third and seventh in the two Blancpain races at Zandvoort, with three total Lamborghini podiums across the Zandvoort weekend. The championship gaps, tied on points in GT Open and 8.5 points behind in Blancpain, are stated directly.
The source does not address car setup changes, tire strategy decisions, or the specific circumstances behind Grenier and Siedler’s drive-through penalty. The Blancpain Race 2 difficulties for FFF Racing are acknowledged but not explained. The official material does not provide lap times, qualifying positions for the Blancpain races, or any commentary on Balance of Performance adjustments that may have influenced competitiveness across the GT3 field.
For those tracking the 2019 championship outcomes, the source confirms the standings as of mid-July but does not project the remaining calendar. The season’s conclusion would ultimately validate the trajectory these results suggested, but at the time of this report, the title fights in both series remained genuinely open.
