Max Verstappen’s woeful luck on the Nordschleife in 2026 continued with a heartbreaking blow while on course to win the Nurburgring 24 Hours on debut. 

Verstappen might be partly using the Nurburgring as a glorious distraction from a version of F1 he’s been hating this year, but make no mistake, he had been tirelessly working for months to achieve one clear goal - to win on his Nurburgring 24 debut. 

“Success would mean winning. That’s very simple, that’s why we are here,” Verstappen said ahead of the event. 

And it looked like he and his team-mates Lucas Auer, Jules Gounon and Dani Juncadella had done absolutely everything they needed to do behind the wheel. 

But it all went horribly wrong just two laps into Juncadella’s late Sunday morning stint, Juncadella having taken over from Verstappen with less than four hours to go. 

What went wrong for Verstappen 

Juncadella received an ABS warning, which he tried to nurse, but vibrations aboard the Winward Racing-run Mercedes intensified, and Juncadella had to bring it back into the pits for an unscheduled pitstop at the end of his third lap.

The car was wheeled back into the garage, where driveshaft damage was diagnosed.

There was no quick fix either, torpedoing any chance of the car finishing in the top 10, let alone sailing along to victory or a podium. 

Juncadella was visibly distraught in the cockpit after the quartet of drivers had looked so well on course for a dream victory. 

He said: “It was simply a dream race, but unfortunately for us, it was 3 hours too long. But that’s just how motorsport is."

The team managed to get the car out for the final couple of laps of the race with Juncadella at the wheel, to ensure it took the finish, albeit 21 laps down in 38th place.  

Analysis will be conducted to determine the exact cause, but it’s likely simply to be the wear and tear of over 20 hours of racing the car on one of the world’s most brutal circuits. 

Verstappen’s Nurburgring bad luck continues 

It continues a woeful run of luck for Verstappen on the Nordschleife in 2026, after he already lost multiple victory chances, despite showing strong pace throughout.

Team Verstappen took a convincing win in NLS2 on the road in March but was disqualified from victory over an operational tyre error, while last month, Verstappen lost victory in NLS5 when the car was struck by a splitter issue. 

That splitter issue came after Verstappen had got the Team Verstappen car he shared with Auer that weekend into a commanding position out front. 

That rotten luck continued with the most painful of all heartbreak at the 24 Hour race that Verstappen and his team had put so much preparation into. 

“Very unfortunate and frustrating ending but these things can happen,” Verstappen said.

“I still really enjoyed the experience together with Jules, Luggi (Auer) and Dani. Thanks to the team and everyone around the track for your support.” 

And that’s the crucial thing. Verstappen still enjoyed his weekend. He got the escapism from F1 he wanted, led his team well and was magnanimous in defeat.

It feels like the definition of a successful failure. 

Verstappen was ‘in a league of his own’ 

This would have been a well-earned first Nurburgring win for Juncadella, Auer and Gounon, too. They all played their part brilliantly, dealing with the added pressure of sharing a car with Max Verstappen, and avoiding major mistakes. 

But it was Verstappen who stood out among the four-driver line-up with a pair of double stints that put the Verstappen entry into such a strong position for victory. Even by his astronomically high Nurburgring standards, this felt like another level. 

It didn’t start that way however, as Verstappen had an initially shaky beginning to his first stint. He briefly went airborne over a bump and went through the grass at Pflanzgarten - narrowly avoiding a major incident that could have extinguished his victory bid then already. 

Verstappen's ALMOST in the Armco!

📺 https://t.co/nRctemYTnN#IGTC | #24hNBR pic.twitter.com/PxJxmRexkn

It led to a surprising admission from Verstappen: “I briefly went off track because of a lapse in concentration - in moments like that you have to pull yourself together, refocus and carry on.”

But Verstappen gathered himself and pulled off the kind of charge we’ve become accustomed to him making on the Nurburgring, with standout moves aplenty on his way from 10th to first early in the race. 

There was an opportunistic dart past Christian Engelhart when he made a small error in his Lamborghini Huracan and a jaw-dropping on the grass overtake on the #47 Mercedes of Jesse Krohn.

Then a beautifully timed dive down the inside of Ayhancan Guven in the striking #911 ‘Grello’ Porsche at Turn 1 of the grand prix circuit to take the net race lead. 

Max attack! Every overtake from P6 to P1#IGTC | #24hNBR pic.twitter.com/PKbrzgkrLH

The Winward Racing team that operates the Verstappen car got its tyre calls spot on during several rain showers, as his team-mates took turns at the wheel. 

They were swapping the lead with the sister #80 Mercedes but when Verstappen returned to the car in the night, he once again made the difference. 

That’s despite Verstappen only having a single lap of experience of driving the Nordschleife in the dark prior to the race. 

But like so many of his Nordschleife firsts, Verstappen immediately looked like a  Nordschleife veteran when he was chasing down actual veteran Maro Engel in the #80 Mercedes. 

Back comes Engel, but it almost ends in tears at the fastest part of the track! 🫣

📺 https://t.co/nRctemYlyf#IGTC | #24hNBR pic.twitter.com/khW3IxxOnv

Verstappen made a decisive move around the outside on the run through Tiergarten to take the lead, surviving subsequent side-by-side contact when Engel tried to take it back. There didn’t appear to be any consequences from that - as the failure would occur several hours later. 

Verstappen bolted clear thereafter, so much so that by the end of that double night stint, he had pulled nearly half a minute clear of the sister Mercedes, having regularly set fastest sector times of the entire race so far, despite it being his first proper real-world night racing stint.

Rivals noticed too. Podium finisher in the #34 Aston Martin, Nicki Thiim said Verstappen was “in a league of his own”. 

While his team-mates had stabilised the gap and yo-yoed between first and second, Verstappen was impressively able to break clear, to a devastating extent that none of his team-mates were able to. 

And that’s zero slant on them, as Verstappen’s performance proved something else…

…The level in GT racing is incredibly high 

This is already a well-established fact for those who follow big GT events like the Nurburgring 24 Hours, but having Verstappen there has proved how high the standard is is, to a much larger audience. 

“It's just something very special for GT racing to have the world's best racing driver come join and wanting to race with us,” Fabian Schiller, one quarter of the #80 winning Mercedes crew alongside Engel, Maxime Martin and Luca Stolz, told The Race.

“It shows that we are operating on a very high level in GT racing, and it’s just got to grow the sport more and more, and hopefully he comes racing with us a few more times in the next few years.” 

It’s made household names of some of GT’s top stars, as well as giving them all a new benchmark to compare themselves to and learn things from. 

There were plenty of drivers who were still able to stand out in a race with Verstappen, that’s no mean feat. 

Kevin Estre’s opening charge in the #911 Porsche led to his chasing down of the Team Verstappen car until his ill-fated meeting with oil that sent him into the barrier. Engel was able to go toe-to-toe with Verstappen in multiple stints, and Mirko Bortolotti (and team-mates Luca Engstler and Patric Niederhauser) showed electric pace in the #84 Lamborghini, which recovered from the back of the pack to finish second. 

And that’s barely scratching the surface of a top class that showed its worth alongside the world’s best. 

The intra-Mercedes fight was ‘frozen’ 

There was an interesting team order curiosity that never fully played out because of the #3’s downfall.

During that night stint when Verstappen had forced his way past Engel in the sister #80 Mercedes, Engel’s team-mate Schiller suggested that battle had been “frozen”, in the context of ensuring Mercedes got its first Nurburgring 24 Hours victory in a decade. 

Schiller told The Race after the event: “The big goal is bringing the win to Mercedes AMG, and obviously, early in the race, we don't want to get too crazy with fighting and so on. 

“So at some point, we decided to calm ourselves a little bit down. and see what the weather does and what the night brings us.

“You always race your sister car a little bit different than other cars.”

Would that have changed in the final laps of the race if the #3 car had stayed in the race and they were running one-two?

“That's always difficult to judge. It's very easy to get stuck in one yellow and the gap opens up and you don't have a chance anymore, so it's very hard to predict anything,” he said.

“But for sure, if we were in a position to, we would have loved to have a fight for the win rather than crossing the line with three minutes in front of people.” 

Ultimately, we’ll never know how that would have played out. In the end Mercedes AMG and Winward Racing played it well.

They gave enough of a show for the fans with the intra-team fights, called it off at the right moment and then had the fortunate position of it not being tested in the final hours. 

Team Verstappen will return 

Everything Verstappen has done on the Nurburgring so far has all been leading to this one 24-hour race - but he isn’t going to stop there. 

He’s spoken previously of his ambition to race at Le Mans, but in terms of future Nurburgring appearances, ahead of the weekend, Verstappen declared this is “something I want to do every single year, with one car or multiple cars”. 

Ironically, he was asked just moments before his team’s disaster whether he’d personally be back next year, saying: “I'll definitely try it. It always depends a bit on my schedule.”

You’d have to imagine Verstappen might now fancy a bit of revenge too, given the unfinished business this creates. His public replies to his team-mate’s Instagram posts of their disappointments were all along the theme of “we will be back”. 

But regardless of whether the F1 schedule allows Verstappen’s return (should he be racing in F1 in 2027), he’s clear he wants to create a lasting legacy for other drivers on the ladder. 

So Verstappen’s GT project isn’t just a nice distraction from an F1 he’s fallen out of love with, he’s keen to create opportunities for sim racers to go into real-world racing.

That’s been clear from the start as Verstappen made his GT3 debut last October in a Ferrari he shared with his sim racing team-mate Chris Lulham. 

Verstappen said: “I wanted to create opportunities for a sim racer to go to the real world. That already worked with Chris (Lulham) so far.”

Verstappen’s team has supported Lulham in forging a successful career in GT racing, Lulham having previously had to abandon his real-world racing ambitions for financial reasons. 

Lulham wasn’t part of Verstappen’s Nurburgring 24 Hours team, but he was racing in a Mercedes with Prosport instead, running a solid race before his own team’s late dramas, splitter damage, cost him a top 10 finish. 

Also making his Nurburgring 24 Hours debut was Thierry Vermeulen in the #45 Kondo Racing Ferrari; he’s the son of Verstappen’s manager, Raymond, so Team Verstappen was well represented beyond the #3 entry, even if Vermeulen suffered an early end when he speared into the barriers while trying to negotiate past a Porsche Cayman GT4 car. 

💥 A big hit for Kondo's Ferrari!

📺 https://t.co/nRctemYlyf#IGTC | #24hNBR pic.twitter.com/GWjd1gHGjF

So it was a painful result for Team Verstappen and all of his extended racing family. But he once again demonstrated his supreme versatility, surpassing his already sky-high Nurburgring benchmark even in defeat, and ensuring if he does return, there’s zero doubt he has everything he needs to win a race he’s helped shine a well-deserved spotlight on.