COTA Unveils the World's Largest Cowboy Hat, With a Bar Under It, Before the US Grand Prix

The largest object at Circuit of the Americas this week is not a car, a grandstand or the circuit’s 251-foot observation tower. It is a hat. On Monday, COTA and Austin westernwear brand Tecovas unveiled a cowboy hat 47 feet long and 17 feet tall at the track, certified on site by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest, one week before the United States Grand Prix turns the circuit into the centre of the Formula 1 season.

What exactly did COTA unveil on Monday?

A building wearing a hat’s shape. The structure is a to-scale recreation of Tecovas’s Cattleman cowboy hat, built from fiberglass and foam around a steel frame, with the fiberglass textured to replicate the original hat and its paint colour matched to the Cattleman’s natural shade, according to the announcement carried by PR Newswire. The details are scaled up with everything else: a hat band, a steel horseshoe charm, and the outline of the COTA circuit worked into the hat like a cattle brand. Guinness World Records officials certified it at the track during the unveiling.

How big is the world’s largest cowboy hat?

The structure measures 43 feet wide, 47 feet long and 17 feet tall, and those figures exclude the piers it stands on, the announcement says. It took four years to arrive: FOX 7 Austin reports the Austin-based brand worked with the circuit for four years to bring the hat to life, which makes it one of the longer-running projects in the venue’s history, longer than most of the driver contracts that will be raced under it on Sunday. Fans planning the trip can find the practical side in the guide to F1 Austin tickets; the hat is the part of the weekend no ticket tier charges extra for.

Why is there a bar under it?

Shade is a genuine problem at COTA in October, and the hat is built to solve it theatrically. There is a fully operational bar under the brim, FOX 7 Austin reports, open to all ticket holders from Thursday through Sunday of Grand Prix weekend, according to Austin outlet Tribeza. COTA chairman Bobby Epstein called the hat a beautiful piece of art with a practical purpose, a place for fans to gather, enjoy some shade and experience a little Texas hospitality. Tecovas chief executive David Lafitte framed the partnership as a fit between racing and the West, two cultures built on skill, resilience and wide-open possibility. The hat is, in other words, a hospitality structure that happens to hold a world record, rather than a record attempt that happens to pour drinks.

What is Haturday, and when does the racing start?

Haturday is the celebration the two partners built around the hat, and its second annual edition falls on Saturday, October 24, FOX 7 Austin reports. The wider weekend runs from Thursday, October 22, with practice sessions, a pit lane walk and qualifying, through Friday qualifying and a Maroon 5 performance and Saturday racing with Post Malone, to the Grand Prix itself on Sunday, October 25 at about 3 p.m. Central, followed by Alesso. The hat’s first full weekend therefore coincides with the biggest crowd of COTA’s year, and with a championship that could be settled on the track beside it: Kimi Antonelli can become Formula 1’s youngest champion in Austin if the arithmetic of his 102-point lead completes on Sunday.

Will the hat still be there next year?

Yes. Officials say the hat will be a fixture of the track, FOX 7 Austin reports, and Tribeza likewise reports it remains at COTA beyond race weekend. That permanence separates it from the usual Grand Prix week dressing, the banners and hospitality builds that vanish by Monday. It also gives the venue a landmark with a job outside race weeks: a gathering point and a photograph that explains the place in one frame, in a city that already watches Liam Lawson headline a live gig in Austin with his childhood band during race week and a Red Bull engineering handover, where Tom Hart takes over as Max Verstappen’s race engineer for the American rounds, compete for the weekend’s strangest sub-plot.

What happens next at COTA?

Four days of build-up, then the test that matters for a structure like this: whether 100,000 people treat it as a meeting point or walk past it. The record itself is settled, since Guinness certification happened at the unveiling rather than after it. What the hat does for the venue across the MotoGP, NASCAR and endurance weekends that share the circuit will decide whether it becomes part of how fans describe COTA, the way the tower already is. For this week, the assignment is simpler. The fastest cars in the world are racing in Texas, and the shade at the track now comes with a certificate.