The weekend
Two sprint races, Saturday and Sunday, each a self-contained contest. Friday belongs to practice; each race day then opens with its own 20-minute qualifying session, so there are two poles to fight for every weekend. Races run 55 minutes plus a lap from a rolling start, with joker laps available to top the distance back up after safety cars. Pit stops are tyre changes only — no refuelling — and the two days deliberately differ: Saturday demands one mandatory stop in a mid-race window, Sunday demands two, each in its own window, and a cheap stop under safety car or full-course yellow doesn't count.
Points
The top fifteen in each race score 25-20-16-13-11-10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 — the MotoGP-style scale, adopted to keep midfield positions valuable and blunt the appeal of team orders on a packed GT3 grid. The top three in every qualifying session add 3-2-1, so a perfect weekend — both poles, both wins — is worth 56 points.
What decides things
Success ballast keeps winners honest: finish on the podium and your car carries extra weight into the next race; miss the podium and it comes straight back off. That sits on top of Balance of Performance, which trims weight, power and aero across eight different marques so a Mustang, a 911 and a Temerario can genuinely race each other. The other lever is rubber: Pirelli's DTM-exclusive tyre, new for 2026, is built to degrade quickly, allocations are tight, top-ten qualifiers must start on their qualifying tyres, and tyre pre-heating is banned — so managing a worn set while heavier than yesterday is the champion's core skill.
The championship
Four classifications run all season: Drivers, Teams, Manufacturers — where only a marque's two best-placed cars score in each race — and a Rookie of the Year award. Around 21 cars from eight manufacturers contest 2026: Mercedes-AMG, BMW, Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini, McLaren, Ford and Aston Martin. With sixteen short races and points down to fifteenth, there is nowhere to hide a bad afternoon and no single round that can rescue a season.