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 Sunday morning beckons the race has barely changed its complexion, as Winward Racing still hold a 1-2 lead over the race, with the #80 of Maro Engel ahead of the sister #3 of Daniel Juncadella. The attrition returned to the ring, as High Class’s #86, Juta Racing’s #8, the #1 of ROWE BMW and the #44 of Falken Motorsport all either retired or hit trouble in the dying hours of Saturday.

Running through the rest of the top 5, third place very much belongs to the #34 of Walkenhorst Motorsport, still slowly reeling in the Mercedes pair ahead while ROWE’s sole surviving BMW of Sheldon Van Der Linde and the #81 M3 Touring still staying strong in the top 5.

Once the pitstops had all been completed, it was the Winward Mercedes duo that resumed their lead battle, with the #80 of Luca Stolz 10 seconds to the good of Daniel Juncadella’s #3, and the both of them just under 2 minutes ahead of Nicki Thiim in the #34 Walkenhorst Aston Martin. But just as the ROWE team were gaining momentum, their hopes of a back-to-back win with the #1 machine was over at 11:20 local time, refuelling issues forcing the team to withdraw the chassis and halve their efforts for victory. The #99 was still in 6th with Max Hesse behind the wheel, 10 seconds off the #44 Falken Porsche.

Shortly after Morris Schurring was close to sending his car into the barriers with a hair-raising spin in one of the fast sections. The Dutchman continued on relatively unharmed before slowing a lap later, forced to nurse his car back to pitlane. Another SP9 runner was out of contention.

Not long after that the #8Audi R8 GT3 Evo II of Juta Racing also peeled into the pits with suspected internal damage on the front right bodywork and went into the garage. While not a major contender for the win up to that point it was no doubt a frustrating dent to the fight for the Lithuanian NLS regulars who lost nearly 5 minutes in the pits before fixing the issue.

The Team Bilstein #26 meanwhile had worked its way back up to sixth, with the Lionspeed GP #24 Porsche also making good headway, with Laurin Heinrich getting the car into seventh overall and the pole-sitting #84 Lamborghini up to eighth just after midnight.

Heading back into the pits Luca Stolz was now back behind the #3 of Daniel Juncadella, the two running metronomically as they had since their fortunately timed pitstop with Stolz being replaced Maro Engel by Max Verstappen, who was in the car for his first night stint, the two leaving pitlane pretty much glued to one another.

The casualties continued in SP9, as Harry King’s #86 High Class Racing Porsche spun and found itself beached in the gravel on the GP-strecke. They’d been flirting with the top 10 since the start, but the skirmish to the gravel trap certainly hindered what had been a respectable run thus far.

Returning into the top 10 was Christopher Mies in the #67 Ford Mustang. The team had led overall on Saturday afternoon but by pitting for wets too early they lost consierable time in making an extra pit stop, and now were back up to 8th with Bastian Buus’s #54 Dinamic GT Porsche and the #17 of Dunlop Racing and Alessio Picariello completing the top 10.

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