The Nürburgring 24 Hours never needs help selling itself — 24 hours on the Nordschleife will always provide its own mayhem — but the 2026 entry list has a slightly different flavour. Yes, the usual GT3 superpowers are back in SP9, and yes, the big names are exactly where you’d expect them. What changes the temperature this year is how densely packed the front class looks, and how little margin there is for any manufacturer to have an “off” weekend without it turning into a very long night.
Start with the obvious headline: Max Verstappen is on the grid, slotted into a Mercedes-AMG GT3 under the Mercedes-AMG Team Verstappen Racing banner alongside Lucas Auer, Jules Gounon and Daniel Juncadella. It’s the sort of line-up that doesn’t exist to “take part”. The subtext, though, is bigger than one star name doing something cool on a weekend off: Mercedes-AMG’s customer ecosystem arrives with real heft, and Verstappen’s presence only amplifies the spotlight on how AMG manages depth versus outright focus when the race inevitably starts to fracture.
That theme — depth — runs through the whole SP9 picture. BMW doesn’t just turn up with a single bullet. ROWE Racing fields multiple M4 GT3 EVO entries with line-ups that read like a greatest-hits album of GT endurance racing. One car brings Augusto Farfus, Raffaele Marciello, Jordan Pepper and Kelvin van der Linde; another packs in Dan Harper, Max Hesse, Sheldon van der Linde and Dries Vanthoor. There’s no “B team” energy there. It’s a manufacturer strategy that effectively says: we’re not betting on one path through the Nordschleife’s traffic and weather roulette — we’re buying more chances to be the car that’s still clean when everyone else has scars.
Porsche, as ever at this place, looks like Porsche. Manthey Racing leads the effort with Kevin Estre, Ayhancan Güven and Thomas Preining — a Nordschleife-ready core that doesn’t need hype to feel dangerous. But the wider Porsche footprint matters nearly as much: Falken Motorsports and Dinamic GT both arrive with experienced, properly sharp GT3 squads capable of sniffing out an opening when the “main” fight gets messy. And it will get messy. It always does.
Audi’s top-line presence comes through Scherer Sport PHX, with Christopher Haase, Alexander Sims and Ben Green in the R8 LMS GT3 evo II. The R8 package remains a known quantity around here, which counts for a lot when the race becomes an exercise in surviving the circuit’s rhythms rather than chasing a theoretical lap time. If you’re looking for a team that can keep its head while others are playing whack-a-mole with penalties, punctures and bodywork, PHX’s style fits the assignment.
Then there’s Ford’s evolving story. HRT Ford Racing brings multiple Mustang GT3s, spreading key names across its entries — Dennis Olsen, Christopher Mies, Frederic Vervisch and Arjun Maini appear in the mix, with a separate Mustang GT3 EVO featuring Frank Stippler alongside Maini, Fabio Scherer and David Schumacher. The interesting part isn’t simply that the Mustang is back for another major endurance hit; it’s that HRT’s programme is starting to feel less like an experiment and more like a structured attempt to build repetition at the highest-pressure venues. The Nürburgring doesn’t flatter newcomers, but it does reward teams that learn quickly and arrive with a plan that accounts for the unique kind of time loss this race dishes out.
And the SP9 grid doesn’t stop there. Aston Martin is represented by Walkenhorst Motorsport, Lamborghini has Konrad Motorsport and Red Bull Team ABT in Huracáns, Ferrari comes via REALIZE KONDO RACING’s 296 GT3, and McLaren is on the list with Doerr Motorsport’s 720S GT3 featuring a quartet that includes Timo Glock and Timo Scheider. It’s the classic Nürburgring dynamic: a “favourites” group that’s too big to be called favourites once the first fog bank rolls in or the first Code 60 turns the strategy sheets into confetti.
The broader entry list is, as ever, part of the race’s charm and part of its cruelty. SP10’s GT4 field is healthy, with everything from BMW M4 GT4 EVOs to Toyota GR Supras and Porsche Caymans, plus PROsport’s Mercedes-AMG GT4s. The mixed-class traffic is not a footnote here — it’s the race. Over 24 hours, the winner is rarely the car that simply had the cleanest pace; it’s the car that spent the least time being delayed by somebody else’s incident or by a closing-speed misjudgement at exactly the wrong section of track.
There are also the entries that give the Nürburgring its wonderfully unvarnished personality: Subaru TECNICA INTERNATIONAL’s WRX; Hyundai Motorsport N’s Elantra Ns; TOYOTA GAZOO ROOKIE Racing’s GR Yaris with “Morizo” listed among the drivers; and a scattering of Cup cars and assorted specials that will be fighting their own wars while inadvertently deciding the outcome of the big one by where they happen to be on the road at 3am.
Qualifying begins on Thursday, with the key grid-setting sessions on Friday ahead of the race on Sunday. But everyone in this paddock knows the truth: by Sunday morning, the grid order will already feel like ancient history. The question in 2026 isn’t whether the Nordschleife will bite — it’s which of the heavyweight programmes has built enough redundancy into its approach to absorb the bite and keep moving. In a year where the SP9 entry list looks this stacked, the race may not be won by brilliance. It might be won by the team that makes the fewest unforced errors when the Nürburgring starts doing Nürburgring things.
