6 reasons why the Nürburgring 24 is the greatest endurance race

Unlike Le Mans, Daytona and Spa, the N24 is not a purely professional contest. Yes, there are plenty of “privateer” entries in those races, but they’re still contested exclusively by teams who are mostly making a business of racing.

The N24, however, is open to all comers.

The N24 runs as a special event as part of the VLN series, which is basically a “house” series of endurance races at the Nürburgring. The N24 is not part of the VLN points championship, so it’s kind of its own thing, but the VLN is kind of its own thing, too, running outside the purview of any other European series.

And while many major factory-backed teams contest the N24–Manthey Porsche was coming off a Le Mans win just the week before when it took the checker (but not the win–more on that later) at the ’Ring–the VLN and the 24 are made up of numerous classes of cars spanning the gamut of performance capability and expense.

So if you’re watching trackside, you may see a GT3 Aston Martin followed by a Renault Clio, or an E90 BMW 3 Series, or a Porsche Cayman or a Volkswagen GTI.

Imagine if they scheduled the Rolex 24 At Daytona the same weekend as an SCCA club race and just said, “You know what, we can’t fix this. Just let ’em all run.”

There’s simply no other race in the world where you’ll see teams with multiple transporters competing on the same track with some local dudes who towed their F30 there behind a minivan on an open trailer, and we’re completely here for it.

This contrast is certainly obvious on track, but it’s also highly evident on pit lane. More than 130 cars started the 2025 race, and while you’re probably thinking, “The Nürburgring 24-hour course is like 25 kilometers long so that doesn’t seem too crowded,” you’re forgetting that pit lane is most definitely NOT that long, and the pit-side garages were not built for that kind of crowd.

Up to six cars are stuffed into each garage bay, and no, Black Falcon, we don’t care if you don’t have a number of entries divisible by 6, you’re sharing space with that team fielding the nearly stock Cupra.

Pit Party

Speaking of the pits, the crowding is just the beginning of the excitement. Between every other garage bay on pit lane sits a commercial-style fuel pump. And that’s where EVERYONE fuels from. No fancy elevated rigs or dump cans; we don’t care if you’re Manthey or Rowe Racing, you fuel from the pump like you just pulled up to 7-Eleven for a Slurpee and some Corn Nuts before topping off the Tacoma en route to the beach.

As a result, coordination between teams is paramount, since there are clearly not enough pumps to handle 132 cars at the same time. The first couple hours of the race are rife with teams making off-cycle stops to try to alleviate congestion and conflict on pit lane.

And if you’re thinking, “Commercial-style gas pumps aren’t that fast,” you’re also right on the money. Stops are comically long by international endurance racing standards. Stops have minimum times based on the fuel capacity and class of the car in question, but you’re still talking about minimum stop times for top teams in the 2-and-a-half-minute-plus range.

Toward the end of the race, restrictions are relaxed a bit, allowing teams to trade the ability to take on less fuel for a lower minimum time. Essentially, teams can do “splash and go”-style stops as the clock runs out.

It makes for a lot of drama in the pits, as racers aren’t given to sitting around watching the clock run while nothing is happening, so teams frequently try to use every available second to do … something. Anything. Just activity to fill the gap where panic would otherwise reside.

Party, Party

The chaos is certainly not limited to the track, however. The 2025 event saw a record official attendance of 280,000 people, and the truth is there’s probably another 30,000 to 40,000 on top of that who get lost in the shuffle and just wander through the campgrounds in the sprawling primeval forest.

The trackside camping welcomes a fairly endless sea of humanity, as you might expect from a track big enough to contain four entire villages within its boundaries. And while there’s a fair share of tent and RV camping, there are also massive temporary installations built on site by enterprising fans that are probably nicer than half the decks in half the backyards in your town.

Okay, yeah, there are lots of horrifying ones, too, but some of these structures are simply magnificent. During a walk around some of the campgrounds, we saw sprawling temporary decks easily exceeding 600 to 700 square feet–and with running water, hot showers, elevated viewing platforms, full kitchens, multiple refrigerators and big-screen satellite TVs monitoring the action.

Many of the campers have been coming to the race for decades, and camping spaces are governed entirely by social contract. Technically everything is on a first-come, first-served basis, but more than a few campers told us that regular attendees tend to gravitate to their same spots, and taking the spot of a longtimer “wouldn’t be proper.”

The gates open at 6:30 p.m. on the Monday before the race, and camp crews are already in line. Teams of up to a dozen people start construction the moment they hit the ground.

Chaos Reigns

There’s a reason they call the Nürburgring “the Green Hell,” and that’s because the Nordschleife section is essentially a 13-mile autocross through the forest. Most parts of the non-GP track are only 28 feet wide, most of the 100-plus corners are blind, and probably less than 1% of the surface could be considered even close to level.

There’s no rest time for drivers during a lap on the Nordschleife section. Even the straightaways require input to control the car over the bumps and undulations, precluding them from doing normal long-straight stuff like tightening their belts or relaxing their hands.

So attrition is definitely a factor in the race. Co-spatial events–especially between cars of different classes–are actually rarer than you might think at first, but 132 cars on the same track will eventually cause some excitement.

And while you might think that having GT3 cars sharing the track with 25-year-old BMWs is dangerous because of the considerable speed delta, the reality is that the GT3, GT4 and TCR cars tend to clear the slower traffic so quickly that they just don’t spend much time in the same spot at the same time.

Still, there are cross-class dramatics. This year, the leading Manthey Grello Porsche 911 GT3 R, which had been in a nearly race-long battle with the Rowe Racing BMW M4 GT3, clobbered a GT4 Aston Martin while making an ill-advised pass late in the race. The Aston was a write-off, ending up tumbling down the track and turning into so much British scrap, but the Porsche continued with no appreciable damage that couldn’t be taped up at the next scheduled stop.

But the stewards didn’t take kindly to the high-risk move, slapping Manthey with a 100-second penalty. This meant the team spent the closing few hours of the race trying to outdrive that deficit over the BMW. Spoiler alert: They couldn’t, and Rowe ended up taking the overall win after both cars were in sight of each other for much of the race.

So the race always has a bit of a body count–the increasingly crowded makeshift boneyard outside the garages attests to that–but what do you expect from a narrow ribbon of asphalt through the forest?

It Means a Lot to a Lot of People for a Lot of Reasons

Hyundai has dominated the TCR class for a few years, but its hopes to get Robert Wickens into the event in 2024 didn’t pan out. Wickens ran into trouble during the mandatory qualifying races, meaning he couldn’t get his permit signed off to compete in the 24.

Wickens and his amazing Bosch-engineered hand controls were back for ’25, though, and Wickens personally saw the checker at the N24 from the seat of the No. 831 Hyundai Elantra N TCR.

Although the North American team composed of Canadian Wickens and Americans Mason Filippi, Bryson Morris and Michael Lewis ran a nearly heads-up race with the European TCR squad, a late-night shunt led to an off-schedule stop to replace a punctured tire, which possibly led to a couple additional punctures during the night, sending them backward in the standings.

The team recovered and stayed clean, though, and even though they made at least four stops more than the Euro team, they ended up with the silver, just a couple laps down, and Wickens got to see the checker after his huge disappointment last year. The entire Hyundai squad was on the fence–literally–celebrating him at the finish.

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“Two weeks ago, I was at a ChampCar race. Now I’m about to drive in the Nürburgring 24.” That was Jacksonville racer Gino Manley, just after slapping a GRM sticker on the back of the BMW M240iR he’d drive during the race.

Manley, the used car director at a Florida dealership who started his racing career doing track days in his Mazda2 not that many years ago, is a fixture at enduros, SCCA events and Jzilla track days in the Southeast. A couple years ago, he decided to take on the Nürburgring, and this year he got qualified for the 24.

How’d he make those multiple VLN ’Ring qualifiers? “I’d work most of Thursday, fly Thursday evening, get here Friday since it’s overnight, do the race Saturday and fly home Sunday. Since the return flight goes west, you’re back the same day and I could be back at work Monday morning.

“And the actual rental fees are pretty reasonable compared to what you’d pay for a seat in a top car in a 24-hour ChampCar or WRL race back home,” he continues. “And yeah, it’s all kind of racer math, I know, but you do the racer math when you’re talking about racing at the Nürburgring.”

The U.K.-based Breakell Racing team he was hooked up with stayed mostly clean but not entirely out of trouble. Manley had already had quite an experience when he got in the car for his first dark laps. “I’ve driven plenty of race cars at night,” he says, “but never at the Nürburgring.

“Then we had some issues during night practice, and I wasn’t able to get in the car after dark on Thursday. So I just asked the team if I could do a stint around twilight so I could kind of learn the track as it was getting dark, so that was the plan.”

But not all plans work out. When their BMW did BMW stuff (electrical issues), Manley ultimately wasn’t able to get into the car after his first stint until it was entirely dark, after 1 a.m. “Most nerve-racking thing I’ve done in a while, but I finished the stint clean,” Manley said of his after-dark adventure.

The final time we saw Gino in Germany was in the Breakell garage. Unfortunately, he was strapped in the car while the team taped up the damaged front end after a very late-race incident. Fortunately, the damage was just cosmetic–nothing that couldn’t be fixed with some neatly color-coordinated racer tape.

Manley took the checker less than 60 minutes later. “It was just such an honor to be able to take the checker at the N24 for Breakell Racing,” he said. “I really think more American racers should give some thought to this race. Yeah, there are some complications in getting permitted to run this, but I’m certainly living proof that this is an attainable goal for a lot of club racers who might have thought it was out of reach.”