Max Verstappen will start his first ADAC Total 24 Hours of Nurburgring fourth on the grid after Verstappen Racing's pole-shootout salvo at the Nordschleife on Saturday morning, with the four-time Formula 1 world champion ending qualifying inside the top five despite a Balance of Performance package that loaded an extra 77 pounds onto the team's Mercedes-AMG GT3.
Verstappen Racing's debut on the Eifel mountain has been the dominant motorsport storyline of the weekend. The team's #24 Mercedes-AMG was sixth in TQ2 and squeezed into the top-six pole shootout under conditions ranging from light rain to total darkness over Friday and Saturday morning, before producing a lap good enough for the second row of the grid. Verstappen's team-mates in the car – Audi DTM veteran Lucas Auer, GT regular Daniel Juncadella and former Pro AM champion Jules Gounon – split the qualifying running between them, but Verstappen himself drove the decisive pole shootout stint.
GTWorld's pole-shootout coverage of "Max Verstappen's Best Laps from Q1 & Q2" has already passed 37,000 views within hours of upload, with the Dutchman's overnight onboard footage from the second qualifying session passing 35,000 in a parallel clip. A separate slow-motion compilation of Verstappen working a wet, dark Nurburgring at qualifying-two pace has cleared 150,000 views – a level of attention more typical of a Formula 1 grand prix qualifying than a customer GT3 endurance event.
The gravity of the debut is visible in the ticket sales. Organisers ADAC confirmed earlier in the week that the 2026 24 Hours of Nurburgring is the first edition of the event to officially sell out, with the lift coming directly from Verstappen's entry. Local media has framed the meeting as the biggest commercial windfall for the Nordschleife since the 2017 record crowd.
Verstappen has been emphatic about the motivation behind the project, telling a Verstappen.com interview in the build-up that "success would mean winning" the race outright – an unusually direct line of expectation from a driver whose team will be a third-party Mercedes-AMG GT3 customer rather than a works entry. Asked elsewhere about the wider purpose of his sportscar workload alongside his F1 commitments, Verstappen said: "I refuse to be only an F1 driver."
The Verstappen Racing entry runs in the SP9 Pro top class, where it shares a quartet of factory-backed Mercedes-AMG, Audi R8 LMS Evo II, BMW M4 GT3 and Porsche 911 GT3 R (992) machinery from Manthey, Rowe, Land Motorsport, Falken and others. Balance of Performance adjustments published earlier this week handed the team's Mercedes a near-35-kilogram weight increase relative to its sister cars, after qualifying-pace data from earlier in the week suggested Verstappen Racing was running ahead of the customer-team baseline.
Despite the penalty, the team converted. Fourth on the grid for a race that runs nearly 600 turns and 24 hours of stints in mixed weather is a long way from a benchmark for any GT3 customer entry, and the Verstappen Racing crew now have the platform to fight at the front through the night. Mercedes-AMG's customer programme has not won the event outright since 2016 and has had a thin three seasons in the headline class.
The race starts at 16:00 local time on Saturday and runs through the night. Verstappen is expected to take in roughly six hours of driving time over the full event window, with the team rotating its four drivers through standard endurance triple-stints. With Aston Martin and Mercedes-AMG locking out the front of the customer GT3 field and Manthey EMA's Porsche on the front row, the early game will be about Verstappen's stint pace under the lights – a stint length and circuit type unlike anything he runs in his Formula 1 day job.
