With three and a half hours left at the Nürburgring on Sunday afternoon, Dani Juncadella was two laps into his stint when the driveshaft in the #3 Verstappen Racing Mercedes-AMG GT3 gave up. The car had been leading the race for the better part of 20 hours. Max Verstappen, who had personally hauled it from tenth on the opening stint into first place during a mixed-conditions masterclass that left even his fellow GT drivers fumbling for superlatives, was no longer going to win his first ever Nürburgring 24. “The word heartbroken probably doesn’t even come close to what we feel right now,” he said afterwards. Then he announced he’d be back next year.
The race went, eventually, to the sister #80 Mercedes-AMG of Maro Engel, Maxime Martin, Fabian Schiller and Luca Stolz. Mercedes’ first overall Nürburgring 24 win since 2016. A Lamborghini was second. An Aston Martin was third. None of which is the story.
The story is the 352,000 people who turned up to watch.
That’s a record crowd for the 56-year-old event. Tickets had sold out for the first time in its history before the green flag fell. The Eifel region of Germany, briefly, became the centre of motorsport. None of this was happening for Maro Engel, brilliant as he is. It was happening for a 28-year-old four-time F1 world champion who had decided, in the middle of his own miserable Formula 1 season, that the best way to spend a weekend was to drive a 25.378-kilometre circuit 154 times in a row for fun. Verstappen’s Nürburgring entry was the most-anticipated non-F1 race of the year. The actual race lived up to the billing.
Here are the relevant figures. 161 cars entered, the largest field since 2014. The race opened in light rain, and Verstappen — starting his first stint in the wet on the Nordschleife, having taken over from Juncadella in tenth place — carved his way to the lead with what Naomi Schiff politely called “a degree of commitment GT drivers don’t usually employ.” He survived two near-disasters, including a 270km/h side-by-side with Engel in the #80 that briefly looked likely to end both their afternoons. By the time he handed over to Jules Gounon, the #3 had a 30-second lead and was managing the race rather than racing it.
Then the driveshaft. With four hours left. In a race where 48 of the 161 starters didn’t make the classification anyway. The variance was always going to find someone.
For F1, the awkward part isn’t that Verstappen didn’t win. It’s that Lando Norris spent yesterday telling McLaren’s own YouTube channel that he wants to do Le Mans. “You know, I still feel like I want to go and try other things,” the reigning F1 world champion said. “Do Le Mans, now McLaren are doing Le Mans, so maybe go and do that at some point.” McLaren are indeed doing Le Mans. The MCL-HY hypercar is currently in its 2026 test programme with Mikkel Jensen, Gregoire Saucy, Richard Verschoor and Ben Hanley, with a 2027 WEC debut confirmed. Zak Brown told media last year he had spoken to both Norris and Oscar Piastri about Le Mans drives: “They would like to be at Le Mans in one of [our cars].”
File this alongside the FIA’s V8 announcement two weeks ago, the ongoing fallout from the 2026 rule rewrite, the active Ford-Verstappen Le Mans discussions, Kimi Antonelli’s stated plan to take a Nordschleife A-permit, George Russell’s request to do a Nordschleife lap-record attempt (denied), and Oliver Bearman’s confirmation he was watching. The pattern is not subtle. The drivers who actually have to drive the new F1 cars are, with increasing frequency, choosing to drive other things. The fans, by 352,000 of them at a single race, are watching what the drivers are watching.
What does Verstappen get out of this that he doesn’t get from F1? Several things. He gets to actually overtake. He gets cars that aren’t lifting off the throttle in long straights to harvest battery energy. He gets weather, traffic, night driving, and 154 corners of the most technically demanding circuit ever built. He gets to lose a race because of a driveshaft rather than because of an MGU-K deployment table. And he gets, by the look of his face when he was being interviewed in the early hours of Sunday morning, the kind of grin that has been absent from his F1 weekends since round one in Australia.
Mercedes has now reportedly banned him from doing it again. Take that with whatever salt you like — he’ll likely race something on the Nordschleife next year regardless. Ford continues to court him for Le Mans. The Canadian Grand Prix is in five days, and the F1 schedule between now and December is increasingly looking like the obstacle rather than the destination for at least three of the sport’s top six drivers.
F1 is not in danger of being eclipsed by the WEC. The money is too lopsided, the global audience too large, the commercial machinery too entrenched. But it is now in the unusual position of having its biggest stars publicly enjoying their side projects more than their main one. The Canadian Grand Prix this weekend will draw a good crowd. It will not draw 352,000 people. The 24 Hours of Le Mans on June 13 — the same weekend as the Spanish Grand Prix, just to make the comparison painful — will probably draw more.
A sport whose biggest star is also a fan of his own sport’s biggest competitor is a sport with an interesting problem. Verstappen will be back at the Nürburgring next year. He said so himself. The question is whether F1 will give him a reason to be enthusiastic about Bahrain.
