It’s the return of the Green Hell’s showpiece event as Lamborghini lock out the front row for the first time, with Max Verstappen making the headlines before we’ve even begun. Can he cement his status as one of the true greats of our sport with a win here and break Mercedes’ longstanding curse that has stood now for a decade? It will certainly be no easy feat, as this year’s edition has attracted a record high of 41 SP9 entries all set to battle it out over the next 24 Hours.

As we enter the final quarter of the race, Max Verstappen leads in his #3 Winward Mercedes ahead of the sister #80 car of Luca Stolz, with the gap sitting at seven seconds. Both of them hold a comfortable margin over the #34 Walkenhorst Aston Martin of Christian Krognes, the gap sitting at six minutes with Max Hesse slowly closing in from fourth, Patric Neiderhauser’s #84 Lamborghini and the #81 BMW M3 Touring completing the top 6.

With one third of the race left to go, and 100 laps in the bank it was the #3 of Verstappen with a 18 second advantage over the #80 with the top 5 completed by the #34 Walkenhorst of Christian Krognes, the #99 of Dan Harper and Ugo De Wilde’s #81 M3 Touring with Christian Engelhart’s #84 Lamborghini closing the gap to 3 and a half minutes as the Schnitzelalm Motorsport #11 became an offical retirement after Phillip Ellis made contact. Even more drama occured in SP9 Guido Dumarey’s #27 Prosport Racing suffered a suspension failure on the Dottinge-Hohe and a horrible crash that destroyed the Aston Martin, causing a code 60 on the entire back straight and the #3 gained nearly 20 seconds onto the existing gap it had built up over Sunday morning.

Meanwhile the #99 had fully closed the gap for the first time in hours with Dan Harper finally getting the #34 Aston in its sights for third overall and the two had a great battle. Seperated by barely a second the fight for the last podium place had been a slow burner to this point but now it came alight, with Harper all over the back of Krognes, and the Norwegian placing his Aston in the perfect place every time to deny the young brit. After the pitstops Harper soon found his way past the Aston, and soon consolidated his position, before the #34 pitted on schedule, but lost out to an undercut from Max Hesse who was now in control of the BMW.

When the #81 and #84 came to pit again the gap was a mere 15 seconds, but driver changes saw the #84 now of Patric Neiderhauser hold off the #81 – now with Neil Verhagen aboard the chassis – and maintain the gap at a constant 10 seconds, comfortable enough to hold fifth without worry and having taken 75 seconds out of the fourth-placed #99 ROWE BMW in the last hour.

Meanwhile, Christian Krognes opened up the gap with the Norwegian squeezing every last tenth out of his Aston at a rate the ROWE BMW behind could not match. The #34 was still nearly six minutes down on the leading Winward pair, with 20 seconds of breathing room to the #99 behind.

image credit: REZAG, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons