ADAC Ravenol 24h Nürburgring. 2026 season

Origin

The first 24-hour race at the Nürburgring ran on 27–28 June 1970, conceived as an affordable, amateur-friendly counterweight to the professional 1000km race on the same circuit.¹ Hans-Joachim Stuck — nineteen years old — and Clemens Schickentanz won it in a Koepchen-tuned BMW 2002 TI, covering 123 laps and roughly 2,808 kilometres to finish two laps clear, with BMWs filling nine of the top ten places.¹ The early editions kept gentleman-racer rules: the 1973 race was even run in two eight-hour stints separated by an overnight pause, and its winner, Niki Lauda, sharing an Alpina BMW with Hans-Peter Joisten, remains the only Formula 1 world champion ever to win the event.² The race skipped 1974, 1975 and 1983, which is why the 2026 running was only the 54th edition.³

Turning points

The amateur decades

For its first four decades the entry was dominated by production-based touring-car classes, and the winners' list reflected it — the race could genuinely be won by near-showroom machinery run by small Eifel teams. The emblematic case is Sabine Schmitz, who in 1996 became the first woman to win the race outright, sharing Johannes Scheid's Group N BMW M3 with Hans Widmann, and repeated the win in 1997.⁴ "The Queen of the Nürburgring" died in 2021, and the circuit renamed its first corner the Sabine-Schmitz-Kurve in her memory; BMW, the marque of that whole era, remains the event's most successful manufacturer with 21 outright victories.⁴¹

The GT3 takeover

The SP9 class for FIA GT3 cars turned the race into a factory battleground, though the older breed resisted — in 2011 the GT2-specification Porsches and BMWs still had the measure of the GT3 fleet. The breakthrough came in 2012, when Phoenix Racing's Audi R8 LMS ultra, driven by Marc Basseng, Christopher Haase, Frank Stippler and Markus Winkelhock, took the first GT3 outright win and Audi's first at the race.⁵ GT3 machinery has monopolised victory since, and the class era has kept producing firsts: Frikadelli Racing's Ferrari 296 GT3 won in 2023 — Ferrari's first overall win, the first by a non-German marque since Chrysler in 2002 — while setting the event's all-time distance record of 162 laps.⁶

Weather epics

The Nordschleife's altitude swings and the Eifel's microclimate make the race a recurring meteorological lottery. In 2016 a freak hailstorm red-flagged the race for hours, and Maro Engel settled it with a last-lap pass on Christian Hohenadel to win by 5.7 seconds — the tightest margin in the event's history — as Mercedes-AMG locked out the top four.⁷ In 2021 fog suspended the race for more than 14 hours and Manthey's Porsche 911 GT3 R won with just 59 laps completed, then the shortest 24h-Rennen ever run — a record that lasted only until fog cut the 2024 edition shorter still.⁸

Today's shape

The modern ADAC RAVENOL 24h Nürburgring is a single annual race each May on the roughly 25-kilometre combination of Nordschleife and Grand Prix circuit, with a field stretching from factory GT3 crews to amateur teams in lightly modified road cars.¹ The 54th edition on 16–17 May 2026 drew 161 cars, 584 drivers and a record 352,000 spectators — swelled by Max Verstappen's debut, which ended with a driveshaft failure while he was in contention for victory with under three and a half hours to run, leaving Lauda's 1973 distinction intact.⁹ The win went to the #80 Winward Racing Mercedes-AMG GT3 of Engel, Luca Stolz, Fabian Schiller and Maxime Martin — who matched his father Jean-Michel's 1992 victory — recovering from 25th on the grid to give Mercedes-AMG its first win since 2016, ahead of the pole-sitting Abt Lamborghini and the Walkenhorst Aston Martin.⁹ The next edition runs from 27 to 30 May 2027.⁹

Footnotes

1. Red Bull, "Everything you need to know about the Nürburgring 24 Hours," accessed 11 June 2026, https://www.redbull.com/us-en/24h-nurburgring-what-you-need-to-know; BMW Group Classic, "When the (small) fox chased the pack of hounds," accessed 11 June 2026, https://www.bmwgroup-classic.com/en/history/classic-heart/classic-heart-pool/classic-heart/nuerburgring.html. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. ADAC RAVENOL 24h Nürburgring, "Niki Lauda ist tot – 24h-Rennen trauert um Sieger von 1973," accessed 11 June 2026, https://www.24h-rennen.de/en/2019/05/21/niki-lauda-ist-tot-24h-rennen-trauert-um-sieger-von-1973/; GrandPrix247, "Max Verstappen seeks to emulate Niki Lauda as Formula 1 World Champion winner of 24H Nuburgring," accessed 11 June 2026, https://www.grandprix247.com/le-mans-wec/max-verstappen-seeks-to-emulate-niki-lauda-as-formula-1-world-champion-winner-of-24h-nuburgring. ↩

3. "Nürburgring 24 Hours," Wikipedia, accessed 11 June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%BCrburgring_24_Hours. ↩

4. Guinness World Records, "First female to win the Nürburgring 24 hour race," accessed 11 June 2026, https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/652335-first-female-to-win-the-nurburgring-24-hour-race; Hagerty, "German racing legend Sabine Schmitz, the Queen of the Nürburgring, dies at 51," accessed 11 June 2026, https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/german-racing-legend-sabine-schmitz-the-queen-of-the-nurburgring-dies-at-51/. ↩ ↩²

5. Audi MediaCenter, "Facts on the victory of Audi in the Nürburgring 24 Hours," accessed 11 June 2026, https://www.audi-mediacenter.com/en/press-releases/facts-on-the-victory-of-audi-in-the-nuerburgring-24-hours-540; Sportscar365, "Phoenix Racing Wins Nürburgring 24 for Audi," accessed 11 June 2026, https://sportscar365.com/other-series/n24/phoenix-racing-wins-nurburgring-24/. ↩

6. Ferrari, "Ferrari 296 GT3 wins 24 Hours of Nürburgring: historic victory for Prancing Horse," accessed 11 June 2026, https://www.ferrari.com/en-EN/competizioni-gt/articles/ferrari-396-gt3-wins-24-hours-nurburgring; "2023 24 Hours of Nürburgring," Wikipedia, accessed 11 June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_24_Hours_of_N%C3%BCrburgring. ↩

7. "2016 24 Hours of Nürburgring," Wikipedia, accessed 11 June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_24_Hours_of_N%C3%BCrburgring; Motorsport.com, "Nurburgring 24h: Mercedes claims historic 1-2-3-4," accessed 11 June 2026, https://www.motorsport.com/endurance/news/nurburgring-24h-mercedes-claims-historic-1-2-3-4-741824/741824/. ↩

8. "2021 24 Hours of Nürburgring," Wikipedia, accessed 11 June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_24_Hours_of_N%C3%BCrburgring; Motorsport.com, "Nurburgring 24h: Manthey Porsche wins shortest-ever edition," accessed 11 June 2026, https://www.motorsport.com/endurance/news/nurburgring-manthey-porsche-shortest-race/6541001/. ↩

9. ADAC RAVENOL 24h Nürburgring, "Mercedes-AMG claims its first 24h Nürburgring victory in ten years," accessed 11 June 2026, https://www.24h-rennen.de/en/2026/05/17/final-report/; RACER, "RAVENOL team brings Mercedes-AMG its first 24h Nürburgring victory in 10 years," accessed 11 June 2026, https://racer.com/2026/05/17/ravenol-team-brings-mercedes-amg-its-first-24h-n-rburgring-victory-in-10-years; Dailysportscar, "Winward Racing Team Ravenol Mercedes Wins 2026 N24," accessed 11 June 2026, https://www.dailysportscar.com/2026/05/17/winward-racing-team-ravenol-mercedes-wins-2026-nurburgring-24-hours.html. ↩ ↩² ↩³