Max Verstappen showed incredible car control to avoid what could have been a race-ending crash during a four-hour race at the Nurburgring Nordschleife.
Verstappen is competing in the #3 Winward Racing Mercedes-AMG GT3 car in the second round of the Nurburgring Langstrecken-Serie (NLS2).
He picked up the overall race win alongside co-pilots Daniel Juncadella and Jules Gounon, driving the car to the chequered flag in his second stint.
After putting his team's car on pole by 1.9 seconds, Verstappen took on the first stint on Saturday and managed to maintain his lead at the start.
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He then engaged in a thrilling battle with two-time Nurburgring 24 Hours winner Christopher Haase, which Haase described as 'awesome racing'.
Just like in Formula 1, Verstappen held absolutely nothing back in his first stint as he raced wheel-to-wheel, before stepping out of the car at around the hour mark for Juncadella to take over.
The Dutchman then picked up from where he left off in the final 45 minutes - and narrowly avoided an impact with the outside wall while overtaking a lapped car.
Just like other endurance series, NLS competitors are split up into a number of different car classes.
In basic terms, the cars in the faster class - which Verstappen is competing in - race each other for the overall win, while cars from other classes will race each other to pick up the win in their specific class.
It creates a dynamic within endurance racing that is not present in many other disciplines, with drivers always needing to remain focused to navigate around the various slower cars on the circuit.
That is the context behind why the lapped car in front of Verstappen appeared to be driving so slowly, because it was in a lower class.
It is not something that the Dutchman has had to quickly adapt to, though, as he has competed in endurance racing virtually for a number of years.
In 2024, the night before the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix, Verstappen raced a stint in the iRacing 24 Hours of Nurburgring - before then going to bed, waking up again, and winning the Grand Prix for good measure.
He had a specialist simulator rig delivered to him in Imola so he could compete for BMW Team Redline.
Team Redline's director, Atze Kerkhoff, stated (via The Grand Prix Club): "To make it happen, we needed to build a sim that would fit in his motorhome.
"We did this with Simlab, our partner, and P1XPro and it turns out to be a very, very easy sim to put together.
"We were supposed to ship it in the MP Motorsport Formula 2 trailer but the sim was a tiny bit too big, but they helped us greatly to ship the sim to Imola with a flower guy, who had to be there randomly for some business.
"It was almost plug and play once it was there."
Topics:Ā Max Verstappen, Formula 1, Red Bull Racing, Mercedes
Ryan Smart