Max Verstappen didn’t just turn up at the Nürburgring 24 Hours and blend in — he arrived with the sort of self-awareness you don’t always associate with a driver whose default setting is “take it personally”.
Daniel Juncadella has revealed Verstappen was originally pencilled in to take the start of last weekend’s race in the #3 Mercedes-AMG GT3 shared with Juncadella, Jules Gounon and Lucas Auer. In the end, it was Juncadella who rolled off the line on Saturday afternoon, with Verstappen climbing in later for his first double stint.
The switch, Juncadella says, came from Verstappen himself, and it wasn’t down to a sponsor request or a last-minute change of plan. It was Verstappen looking at a 24-hour race at the Nürburgring — with traffic, chaos, and a first-lap funnel into Turn 1 — and deciding the team didn’t need his instincts unleashed in hour one.
“There was a conversation with Max after qualifying,” Juncadella told SoyMotor. “At first, Max was supposed to start the race. In fact, he started every practice run.
“And given the history of him racing there, imagine if something happened and he couldn’t get in the car [at all]. But on Friday night, after qualifying, he came up to me and said: ‘You should start instead, because I know myself and it’s a 24-hour race. First lap, fourth place – I’m going to want to fight everyone. You’d better start instead.’”
It’s a telling admission. Verstappen’s reputation — in any paddock — is built on aggression and control in equal measure, but endurance racing asks for a different kind of discipline. The Nürburgring 24 Hours isn’t a place where you win the race in the opening minutes, but it’s certainly a place you can lose it, especially when the track is still congested and everyone’s adrenaline is doing the talking.
Juncadella’s opening stint wasn’t drama-free anyway. He made contact at the first corner with the pole-sitting Lamborghini, a reminder that even with the calmer head at the wheel, the Nürburgring tends to manufacture its own incidents.
From there, Verstappen got his turn — and by all accounts looked exactly like what he is: a four-time Formula 1 world champion with an irritating ability to get up to speed in whatever you put in front of him. The quartet had built a healthy lead with four hours remaining before a driveshaft issue ripped away any realistic shot at victory. The #3 car was eventually classified 38th, a result that doesn’t remotely reflect how their race had been trending until the mechanical failure landed.
The Verstappen story at the Nürburgring has had its bumps already this year, and that context matters in understanding the caution. Juncadella alluded to the “history” of Verstappen racing there — a nod to earlier trouble that left Verstappen with reasons to treat the place with respect, not bravado. Starting the race, with maximum risk and maximum consequence, suddenly looks like the one job you delegate if you’re thinking about the bigger picture.
Gounon, meanwhile, has been openly struck by Verstappen’s approach — not just his pace, but how he processes a discipline that’s not his day job. He told PlanetF1.com that within the team Verstappen earned the nickname “Maxipedia” for his encyclopaedic motorsport knowledge, and described his adaptation as something out of the ordinary.
“For me, it’s amazing that he puts himself out there,” Gounon said. “I think it’s going outside your comfort zone.
“So to come to the craziest race that you can do in endurance, to go out there for your first time, it’s something I have huge respect for.
“In the end, he came in and he was straight [on pace] with us. No wonder why: it’s Max Verstappen… to arrive and be with us is something pretty special.”
There’s an irony here that will resonate with anyone who’s watched Verstappen’s F1 career up close. He’s often cast as the driver who can’t help himself in combat — and sometimes that’s been fair. Yet at the Nürburgring, with a shared car and three team-mates depending on him, he apparently made the call to remove himself from the most combustible part of the event. That’s not a surrender of instinct; it’s a different expression of it.
And in a weekend where the scoreboard ended up being defined by a broken driveshaft, this is the detail that sticks: Verstappen, of all people, talking himself out of the temptation to “fight everyone” on lap one. In endurance racing, that kind of restraint can be as valuable as outright speed — even if, this time, it wasn’t enough to keep the dream result alive.
