Mid-Season McGrew Dominance Locks up Street GT Title
Luke McGrew has been around GRIDLIFE for a while in a wide variety of machinery, Subarus, Vipers, MX-5 Miatas, then Corvettes. It’s been the Corvette experiment that has proven fruitful for the Hurricane, West Virginia driver, topped with the 2025 Street GT championship in his black #717 C6 Corvette.
McGrew, who stepped back from wheel-to-wheel racing for the majority of 2025, began his season in Street GT at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta with a new-to-him Corvette purchased in the offseason. Luke was up against Ryan Mathews, Nick Hendrix (also in Corvettes) and Mark Kilgore in a BMW M4. With Mathews scoring a win and record at Carolina Motorsports Park, McGrew came in at a deficit to the After Dark Speed #211, but that deficit didn’t last long. At Road Atlanta, McGrew scored the win and the track record, defeating Mathews by 0.4 seconds.
A month later at GRIDLIFE Midwest Festival, McGrew followed up that success with a win in the Podium Sprint at GingerMan Raceway over Mathews and Hendrix. There, his margin of victory was under a tenth of a second, narrowly defeating his fellow Corvette competitor. Luke’s run didn’t end there - he earned a third victory at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, this time over Hendrix by 0.5 seconds, with Mathews, Kilgore, and Austin Hertel rounding out the top 5. With McGrew firmly hanging on to the lead, he quadrupled down with his fourth victory of the season at Road America, this time by four seconds over Hendrix and Kilgore. With 102 points scored on the season, the path for anyone else to dethrone him was possible, but unlikely.
Opportunity for Ryan Mathews to launch a resurgence was stymied at Lime Rock Park by Nicholas Hendrix, evening out the duel for second place in class. A win for Mathews at Autobahn Country Club closed the gap to McGrew, but he needed wins and records at Laguna Seca and at Pitt Race to steal the title from the West Virginian.
Neither Mathews nor Hendrix made the trek out to Laguna Seca, though Mark Kilgore did, scoring 25 points and closing the gap to Hendrix for third. When the front runners returned to the east coast for the season finale at Pittsburgh International Race Complex, McGrew had mathematically locked up the championship. This turned out to be fortunate, as McGrew fell ill to suspected food poisoning, powering through the weekend just long enough to score a new track record on Friday. While he qualified for the Podium Sprint, he headed home to recover, allowing Ryan Mathews to win the event. McGrew’s mid-season four event run was enough to secure him the title - five events, four wins, two records - 102 points and a championship for the #717 Corvette.
