Max Verstappen didn’t just turn up at the Nürburgring 24 Hours this year — he dragged a chunk of the wider motorsport conversation with him.
A free weekend in the 2026 Formula 1 calendar gave the four-time world champion the chance to scratch an itch that’s been obvious for years: he wants to race, full stop, and he doesn’t particularly care whether that racing comes with DRS zones and tyre blankets attached. So he went to the Nordschleife and entered the 24 Hours in a Red Bull-backed Mercedes-AMG GT3 run by Winward Racing, under his own Verstappen Racing banner.
The immediate impact was impossible to miss. Officially, 352,000 tickets were sold across the event weekend — up from 280,000 in 2025. And anyone who’s spent time at the ‘Ring knows official numbers never tell the whole story, because the circuit’s unique sprawl of public roads, campsites and spectator pockets means there are always far more people in the forest than the ticket scanners will ever count.
Call it the “Max effect” if you want, but the point is broader than one celebrity cameo: Germany just hosted a GT3 event with crowd figures that many grands prix would envy, in a country that currently can’t get Formula 1 to commit to either of its historic venues.
That contrast is what has motorsport people in Germany talking — again — about whether F1 could ever realistically return. Not on nostalgia, not on “it would be nice”, but on the uncomfortable question: if this many people will travel, camp and pack themselves against the barriers for a 24-hour GT race, how did Germany end up without a grand prix in the first place?
Former F1 driver Timo Glock, now a familiar presence on Sky Sport Deutschland’s coverage, was blunt in his assessment at the start of the weekend. The Nürburgring, he said, has been building momentum year on year anyway — but Verstappen’s involvement poured fuel on a fire that was already burning.
“We have 350,000 people showing up… it’s fully packed,” Glock said, pointing to the event’s particular cocktail: multi-class racing, a track that feels like it’s from another era, and spectator access that modern F1 simply can’t replicate.
It’s easy to scoff at the romanticism, but anyone who’s walked the Nordschleife during race week understands what he meant. You’re not watching from a grandstand you paid a premium for; you’re on a campsite metres from the tarmac, with cars flying past through the trees and the whole place feeling only loosely controlled. Glock compared it to Bathurst in terms of atmosphere and proximity — and that’s not a throwaway reference.
Still, even he framed Verstappen as the difference-maker. Not because the Nürburgring 24 needs saving — it doesn’t — but because Verstappen’s presence forces attention in a way the event rarely gets outside endurance racing circles.
“To see Max coming to that place and giving the respect to all the others here, we need to be thankful to him 100 times that he put so much spotlight onto the Nürburgring, and onto German motorsport,” Glock said, adding a line that will sting some decision-makers: German motorsport is “unfortunately dying… officially”.
That’s the heart of it. Germany is hardly short of pedigree. It has major manufacturers, current F1 drivers, and a recent history filled with world champions. Yet it has also slipped into a position where neither Hockenheim nor the Nürburgring GP circuit is hosting a grand prix, largely because there isn’t the political will — at national or regional level — to underwrite the kind of fee F1 can now command. In an era of well-funded new venues, romance doesn’t pay the invoice.
The last time F1 raced in Germany was 2020’s Eifel Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, staged under pandemic restrictions and limited ticketing. It wasn’t a proper measure of demand — if anything, it became a neat visual metaphor for the sport’s fading footprint in the country: grand prix cars in Germany, but no crowd to match them.
And then 2026 happens, Verstappen arrives for a GT3 endurance race, and suddenly the Nürburgring is heaving again.
Verstappen’s teammate Jules Gounon also leaned into the idea that his involvement has legitimised GT racing for fans who might previously have dismissed it as second-tier. That matters, because perception shapes participation, sponsorship, and ultimately the health of a category.
“We can only thank Max for putting the spotlight on our category,” Gounon said. He pointed to Verstappen’s wider GT programme as a pivot point — not just a one-off — and argued it’s helped convert fans by exposing them to what the racing actually looks like up close: tight, scrappy, aggressive and often resolved by skill in traffic rather than the clean-room purity of an F1 lap.
There’s an irony here that won’t be lost on the paddock. F1 has never been bigger globally, yet one of its traditional heartlands can’t make the sums work to host a race. Meanwhile, a 24-hour GT event at the Nürburgring can pull numbers that make the sport’s commercial arguments look a little less tidy.
None of this magically solves the hard part — the funding gap is real, and the calendar is ruthless — but Verstappen’s weekend in the Eifel has at least reset the tone. It’s harder now to claim Germany simply “isn’t interested” when 352,000 tickets say otherwise.
The more interesting question is what happens next. Because if Verstappen keeps turning up to races like this — not as a novelty, but as part of a genuine parallel career — he may end up doing something F1 itself hasn’t managed in years: making Germany feel like a motorsport nation again, in public, not just in memory.
