Winners and losers from 2026 Nurburgring 24 Hours
The 2026 Nurburgring 24 Hours will long be remembered as the year Max Verstappen made his debut and raised the profile of the race to new heights.
But there were so many stories of success and disaster beyond his race, as we show in our winners and losers from the top class at the Nurburgring 24 Hours.
Winner: Win-drought-ending Mercedes
While others lost their heads in the chaos of the rain showers, the Winward Racing team, which runs two Mercedes AMG cars, including the ‘Team Verstappen’ car, got its tyre calls spot on and built itself a comfortable one-two with the #3 and #80 cars.
Fabian Schiller, one of the quartet in the #80 shared with Maro Engel, Maxime Martin and Luca Stolz, told The Race that the early tyre calls were the “basis for the win” as it allowed them to “do our race from that point onwards and focus on us”.
Winward proceeded to control the race through the night, with a sizeable gap to those behind, as many of its key rivals were already out of the race, or had made the wrong calls.
It still put on a show with Verstappen and Engel almost wiping each other out while racing in the middle of the night.
Back comes Engel, but it almost ends in tears at the fastest part of the track! 🫣
— Intercontinental GT Challenge (@IntercontGTC) May 17, 2026
📺 https://t.co/nRctemYlyf#IGTC | #24hNBR pic.twitter.com/khW3IxxOnv
"Seeing our guys really racing hard is nice because we wanted to deliver a show for the fans, but of course, you ask yourself the question 'are we risking too much? Is it really necessary?'" head of Mercedes-AMG motorsport Christoph Sagemüller told The Race.
On the Engel/Verstappen near-miss, Sagemüller said: "It was a bit nerve-wracking, it was like 'we want to deliver racing action, but not too much!'. When you're in the situation and racing the 'Green Hell' in the dark, with all the traffic, hard to judge the last bits and pieces.
"Was it necessary to take this risk? Maybe not, but I think afterwards it was much more controlled somehow, and we also reminded the drivers to bring the cars safely through the night."
Of course, the oasis didn’t last with the unfortunate driveshaft issue for the #3 Mercedes, eliminating it from victory contention.
But that’s why manufacturers have multiple horses in such a brutal race.
The #80 Mercedes was a worthy winner, with each of the four drivers having their own story.
Engel bounced back from a qualifying crash to repeat his 2016 victory on the Nurburgring - the one driver present across both 2016 and 2026 winning crews.
Schiller called it his “first major endurance triumph on my record” after numerous near-misses.
Martin has finally won overall, having finished runner-up at this race on three separate occasions since his debut in 2012. He praised the job of the #3 crew too: “It was a hard but fair battle with our sister car from the moment the rain came. It’s a shame and I’m truly very sorry for the other car; I know all too well what it feels like to be set back by a technical issue.
“But this time luck was on our side, and once we were in the lead, we simply brought it home safely.”
And Luca Stolz now has a Nurburgring 24 Hours triumph to add to his two outright Bathurst 12 Hours victories.
Loser: Team Verstappen
By pure definition, Team Verstappen is a loser from the Nurburgring 24 Hours just because it was on course for a convincing victory and ended up 21 laps down in 38th place.
But don’t take that as a slant on the supreme job Lucas Auer, Jules Gounon, Dani Juncadella and Max Verstappen did across the event, under more pressure than any other team.
There were so many obstacles lying in wait to trip them up and really those were avoided, as initial inspection of the driveshaft failure that stymied the #3 Mercedes seems to have been put down to one of those things that happens in a 24-hour race.
It’s still good vindication for all of the hard work that Verstappen has put in since beginning this Nurburgring venture. He’s been fully committed since going through all of the extensive licence-earning process.
It’s a triumph of versatility, and everything Verstappen demonstrated through the weekend - the supreme night stints, the catalogue of on-the-edge passes - only adds to his legacy as a motorsport great.
It’s a great success for his hard-working team-mates too. Pitted against the toughest benchmark in the world, Auer, Juncadella and Gounon all gave a good account of themselves.
And so while they’ll be clearly disappointed and unable to get revenge for another 12 months, Team Verstappen made a hugely successful impact on the 2026 Nurburgring 24 Hours.
Losers: Lamborghinis that had the pace to win
We’ll never know how much pace the Winward Racing Mercedes duo had in hand if they’d have had more of a threat, but it looks like they’d have needed it if the Lamborghinis had avoided the strife that wrecked their races.
When the Red Bull Team Abt Lamborghinis were in clear air in the race, their pace was seriously impressive, as it had been in qualifying when they secured a one-two. The #84 Lamborghini, managing to return to second place, was good evidence of that, as was the fastest lap of the race - a supreme 8m08.758s, only seven tenths off the race lap record.
The sister #130 car had strong pace too, but the damage was done at the start.
The polesitting #84 with Mirko Bortolotti at the wheel was caught out by the fast-starting Marco Mapelli, who jumped straight into the lead in the #130 - a move deemed to be a jump start by the stewards, and he was handed a 32-second time penalty.
It also left Bortolotti vulnerable to the Team Verstappen car (with Dani Juncadella at the wheel). The duo touched and give Bortolotti a puncture that exploded at the final chicane of the grand prix circuit.
Bortolotti pitted immediately, but that means you have to do a full loop of the grand prix circuit before resuming - meaning several minutes were lost and they fell down to 49th place. Even 24 hours later, he was less than impressed…
“My feelings are really hard to describe, and to be honest, I don’t even want to think about it,” Bortolotti said after the race.
“I had a good start, followed the procedure and the rules like you should do it. Unfortunately, the car that started alongside me (his team-mate in the #130) had other plans, so it jumped the start big time, put me in a really bad spot for Turn 1.
“Considering how the race started for us yesterday, I’m super proud of our podium finish.”
So it was a supremely impressive recovery drive from the #84 crew, but one that could have been even stronger.
Winner: The underdog podium finisher
The greatest underdog of the Nurburgring 24 Hours was the fan-favourite Dacia Logan, which made it to the chequered flag, but looking at the top class, that has to go to the podium finishing #34 Walkenhorst Aston Martin.
The Aston Martin hadn’t looked to be among the podium contenders pre-race, but Nicki Thiim, Christian Krognes and Mattia Drudi drove a really canny race, avoiding the dramas that eliminated many of their rivals.
“We had to really push at the end to get the most out of the car,” Krognes told The Race.
“From 6am, we saw that a podium was possible, we knew we were on the back foot with strategy since we weren’t able to do 8-lap stints (the typical stint length for rivals) all the time, so that was a joker for us.
“So we had to push like maniacs. Morning stints are always difficult because you’re starting to really get fatigued and tired, but the car responded well and the pace was there to stay in the podium window.
“Luckily the Aston Martin is quite a comfortable car to drive in general, it has a good aero package so you can sort of settle around and be safe in the quick sections, which in other cars you may have to work a lot [harder] and push.
“So I think that came to our rescue a bit, to be honest.”
It was somewhat unlucky not to finish in second, as only an ill-timed final lap Code 60 meant Drudi had to slow and lost valuable time to the #84 Lamborghini, which had a hefty 86-time penalty to serve for an earlier Code 60 violation - a penalty that would have dropped it behind the Aston Martin without the final lap Code 60.
But third place was still an impressive underdog result as Aston Martin’s first-ever podium in its 20-year history with the event.
Loser: The Audi that’s battled Verstappen
Christopher Haase has been one of the breakout stars of Max Verstappen’s Nurburgring races thus far, but he was denied any chance to resume that battle in the 24 Hours race.
He didn’t make a blinding start, but the #16 Audi wasn’t far from the lead when, with Alexander Sims at the wheel, the Audi ran into the back of the #47 Mercedes.
That caused significant damage to the Audi and while Sims returned the car to the garage, the #16 was retired, and with it any realistic chance of an Audi victory.
The officials admitted a misunderstanding with the marshal’s signalling, as while the Code 60 phase was correctly lifted at the Pflanzgarten section, the next marshal post was still showing the Code 60.
Therefore, neither driver was penalised and the stewards told race control to clarify the cause of the misleading signal and rectify it.
Two-time overall Nurburgring 24 Hours winner Haase and his team-mates deserved better, but the Nordschleife cares little for serving pre-race storylines.
Winner: The Nurburgring 24 Hours
Before the race even started, the Nurburgring 24 Hours was already a winner, with over 300,000 fans set to attend and huge global interest.
Verstappen has brought so many new eyeballs to endurance racing, the Nordschleife and some hard-working professional GT drivers who have been overlooked for far too long.
It remains to be seen how much of that audience will stick around, but the organisers can be encouraged by the fact that Verstappen’s already declared he wants his team to return every year, which is a big boost.
It is something of a shame that so many of the potential rivals to Team Verstappen were eliminated in a frenetic opening few hours, but it was still an action-packed race that’s a great advert for both endurance racing and the unique flavour of the Nordschleife.
Loser: The sole Ferrari
The #45 Kondo Racing car was once again the sole Ferrari representative in the Nurburgring 24 Hours but unfortunately, just like 2025, despite leading laps, it ended up retiring following an accident.
💥 A big hit for Kondo's Ferrari!
— Intercontinental GT Challenge (@IntercontGTC) May 16, 2026
📺 https://t.co/nRctemYlyf#IGTC | #24hNBR pic.twitter.com/GWjd1gHGjF
Nurburgring 24 Hours debutant Thierry Vermeulen - son of Max Verstappen’s manager Raymond - touched the grass while overtaking a Porsche Cayman GT4 at Hatzenbach, went into the barriers and suffered severe front-end damage.
Kondo Racing has a hugely proven track record in Super Formula and Super GT in Japan and some exciting drivers, but its return to the Nurburgring 24 Hours in 2025 after six years away has remained promising but fruitless.
Loser: The defending winner
No crew has won consecutive Nurburgring 24 Hours in over a decade and a half, and the 2025 victor, the #1 BMW, didn’t really ever come close to doing so this year.
The BMW was hit with an arguably harsh balance of performance adjustment pre-race, with 10kg added to its minimum weight, despite its lead car only qualifying ninth.
"We realised relatively quickly that, unfortunately, we don't have the speed this year to be able to fight at the very front," head of BMW Motorsport M Andreas Roos said after the race.
In the race, the #1 car suffered a recurring refuelling issue that cost it lots of time through its pitstops, an issue that eventually became terminal, denying it the chance to at least walk away with a respectable top 10 finish.
The sister #99 car did a solid job to recover from an opening lap spin to finish fourth, but it didn’t have the pace to catch the podium-finishing Aston Martin.
Instead, the most impressive BMW is the one that started out as an April Fool’s joke…
Winner: BMW’s 'April Fool's joke'
What started out as an April Fool’s joke garnered so much popularity that it became a reality…one with a seriously impressive pace.
The distinctive BMW M3 Touring estate car was a great underdog story of the Nurburgring 24 Hours, running solidly in the top six for the majority of the race, even being the top BMW for a good portion of the race - and with a fastest lap that beat all the standard BMW M4 GT3s.
Ultimately, it finished a highly respectable fifth, thanks to Jens Klingmann, Ugo de Wilde, Connor de Phillippi and Neil Verhagen.
While the one-of-a-kind car has already been purchased by a private owner, it won’t be its last public appearance, with demonstrational outings expected at the likes of the Le Mans 24 Hours and the Goodwood Festival of Speed.
Loser: The redemption-seeking Porsche
The #911 Porsche was the unfortunate runner-up in last year’s race, robbed of victory by a 100-second time penalty for contact, and keen for revenge in 2026.
And it looked well on course to be in the mix for redemption early in the race, with Kevin Estre’s stellar opening stint moving it from eighth on the grid into the lead fight.
But everything went wrong while Estre was running second just before the four-hour mark when his car slid on oil and his Porsche went backwards into the barriers. It clearly was a problem area as Arjun Maini crashed the #64 HRT Ford Mustang (which really could be its own entry) in the same place.
Grello's wait for win #8 goes on!
— Intercontinental GT Challenge (@IntercontGTC) May 16, 2026
📺 https://t.co/nRctemYlyf#IGTC | #24hNBR pic.twitter.com/98AN4tiHvF
He tried to continue but had to park the 911 ‘Grello’ for good, a disappointing end for the car that finished runner-up in the last two Nurburgring 24 Hours.
“Unfortunately, there were no flags and no one in front of me who could have warned me,” Estre explained.
“I’m very sorry for the whole team. They did a great job all week, as always, so the situation is simply hard to accept. Unfortunately, motorsport is sometimes like that, and especially at the Nurburgring, a lot can always happen.”
