Verstappen's Green Hell: Everything you need to know about the Nürburgring 24 Hours

In 54 editions across more than half a century of racing, the Nürburgring 24 Hours has always had room at the gates for whoever wanted to come. That changed this week.

Weekend tickets for the 2026 edition are completely sold out, the first time in the event’s history.

Limited day tickets remain, and those are going fast.

The cause is not hard to identify. Max Verstappen, four-time Formula 1 world champion, is making his debut in one of motor sport’s most demanding and mythologised events.

The Verstappen effect has been building since he began threading a GT3 car around the Nordschleife last year as a genuine enthusiast rather than a publicity stunt.

It has now produced something unprecedented: a sellout crowd for a race that has run since 1970 without ever needing one.

Read on for a guide to the race, the circuit, the format, and to understanding what Verstappen is letting himself in for.

What is the Nürburgring 24 Hours?

The Nürburgring 24 Hours is, by most measures, the most complex motor race in the world.

That is not a claim about prestige — Le Mans carries more history in the prototype classes, Daytona more glamour in the American context — but about sheer logistical and competitive scale.

The 2026 edition, the 54th running, will send 161 cars from 23 different classes onto the circuit simultaneously. They will race continuously for 24 hours. Amateur drivers in road-derived touring cars will share the same tarmac as factory-backed GT3 machinery driven by world-class professionals.

The race is organised by ADAC, Germany’s automobile club. In 2026, it also serves as the second round of the Intercontinental GT Challenge, giving it genuine international championship significance for the premier GT3 class.

The event takes place at the Nürburgring complex in the Eifel region of western Germany, roughly 45 miles south of Cologne.

The circuit used is a combined layout: the modern grand prix circuit, which hosted Formula 1’s German Grand Prix, is joined to the legendary Nordschleife to create a lap of 25.378 kilometres (15.769 miles), one of the longest in competitive motor sport.

Drivers navigate more than 150 corners, encounter elevation changes of over 300 metres, pass through dense forest, and emerge onto open hillside, all in a single lap that takes a fast GT3 nearly eight minutes to complete.

The circuit

The Nordschleife – the old circuit, literally ‘North Loop’ – is the reason this race carries the weight it does.

Opened in 1927 as a public road course through the Eifel hills, it is known universally as the Grüne Hölle: the Green Hell. Jackie Stewart coined the phrase in the late 1960s and it has never stopped being apt.

The circuit rewards accumulated knowledge more than almost any other track in the world. Professionals who have raced there for decades still speak of it with something approaching awe. For a newcomer, it represents a substantial learning curve.

The Nürburgring 24 Hours began in its current form in 1970, initially as a touring car event.

It has grown progressively into the multi-class spectacle it is today, with the GT3 era transforming the top-class competition and attracting major manufacturer involvement from Mercedes, BMW, Porsche, Audi, Ferrari, and others.

The atmosphere around the circuit is unlike almost any other race in the world: tens of thousands of fans camp in the forests, light bonfires along the banking, and watch through the night as headlights cut through the trees in the darkness.

The field: 161 cars, 23 classes

The 2026 entry list is the largest since 2014, a fact that organisers have directly linked to the Verstappen factor.

The field has grown from a low of 97 cars during the pandemic-affected 2020 edition to a figure that required the organisers to accept more entries than their previous self-imposed cap of 150 had permitted. Entries had to be turned away, even at 161 cars.

Understanding the structure of the field is essential to following the race. Unlike a single-class endurance race such as the Rolex 24 at Daytona, or even the multi-class but relatively streamlined Le Mans, the Nürburgring 24 Hours operates across a vast span of performance and driver categories simultaneously.

SP9/GT3: The headline class, featuring contemporary GT3 machinery – the Mercedes-AMG GT3, Porsche 911 GT3 R, BMW M4 GT3, Ferrari 296 GT3, Lamborghini Huracán GT3, and others. This is where the race is won.

In 2026, SP9 has grown to 41 entries, almost double the previous year’s tally, driven largely by Verstappen’s participation, attracting factory and semi-factory teams that might otherwise have sat out. The class runs under the SP9 Pro, SP9, SP-X, and SP-Pro subcategories based on driver classifications.

GT4 and SP10: One rung below, the GT4 category features production-based sports cars with less aerodynamic and mechanical downforce than GT3. Quick but not comparable at the sharp end; important in the overall field mosaic.

Cup cars: Porsche 911 GT3 Cup machinery, BMW M2 CS Racing, and equivalent one-make competition cars. Fast enough to cause problems for slower GT3 runners in traffic, and a significant presence in terms of numbers.

Touring and production cars: From BMW M240i Racing Cup entries through VW Golf GTI Clubsport machinery to modified road cars of various descriptions. These are predominantly gentleman-driver and club-racing entries. They complete the same lap as the factory GT3 cars – slower, obviously, but on the same circuit, in the same session, at the same time.

This co-existence of categories is central to what makes the Nürburgring 24 Hours what it is. A GT3 car lapping at over 120mph in sections of the Nordschleife may encounter a touring car that is 30 or 40 seconds per lap slower. Traffic management, observation, and patience are genuine race skills at this event in a way that simply does not apply elsewhere.

The mandatory safety rules that govern overtaking under yellow flag conditions — speed limited to 120km/h under double waved yellows, with Code 60 zones at 60km/h — are strictly policed. Violations can cost a licence.

How qualifying works

The Nürburgring 24 Hours has a qualifying system that would be genuinely unrecognisable to any Formula 1 driver at first contact.

There are six separate qualifying sessions across the four-day event, each serving a specific purpose within an intricate structure that governs a 161-car grid spanning 23 classes.

The fundamental distinction is between the top-class teams — those in SP9, SP-Pro, SP-X, and AT1 — and the remaining 112 cars in the lower categories.

For those lower categories, the standard qualifying sessions (Q1, Q2, and Q3) carry genuine weight. Grid positions 50 through 161 are distributed across those three rounds, with each team’s fastest time determining their Saturday starting spot. They cannot, regardless of how fast they go, advance into the Top Qualifying sessions. The two tiers of the field operate in entirely separate qualifying worlds.

For the premier-class teams, including Verstappen’s SP9 entry, Q1 and Q3 are essentially optional practice runs – times are recorded and classified, but they carry no direct consequences for the grid.

Q2, however, is non-negotiable for everyone. This is the mandatory night session, running from 8pm on Thursday until 11:30pm, in darkness. Every single driver on the entry list must complete at least one timed lap during Q2 to remain eligible for the race. Miss it, and you are out. No exceptions. The requirement forces every driver — whether a factory GT3 professional or a club racer in a touring car — to demonstrate basic competence on the Nordschleife at night before being permitted to start 24 hours later.

The fight for genuine grid positions in the top class is decided across the Top Qualifying sessions on Friday morning and early afternoon. The structure deliberately mirrors Formula 1’s elimination format.

TQ1 begins at 8:15 on Friday morning. A 30-minute window is available, which realistically allows for two flying laps on a circuit that takes eight minutes to complete. The 20 fastest cars advance to TQ2. The remaining 24 cars have their fate sealed at positions 26 through 49 on the grid.

TQ2 introduces an additional complexity for SP9 Pro teams: driver rotation requirements apply. Each co-driver must be available to set a time, not just the fastest qualifier. The 12 fastest cars advance to TQ3.

TQ3 is where pole position is awarded. Five teams enter TQ3 automatically by virtue of their performances in the pre-event NLS qualifier races, bypassing TQ1 and TQ2 entirely. The remaining 12 TQ2 survivors join them. Verstappen’s team is not among the five automatic qualifiers.

Verstappen’s team, Mercedes-AMG Team Verstappen Racing, must navigate the full TQ gauntlet from TQ1 onwards. This is a consequence of its difficult pre-event campaign: a disqualification during the NLS2 race due to a tyre-set regulation infringement, and technical problems during the April qualifier weekend, have left the team without the exemption points that would have offered a faster route to TQ3.

The format: how the 24-hour race works

The race starts on Saturday afternoon at 3pm local time (2pm BST) and runs continuously until the same time on Sunday.

The rules allow a minimum of two and a maximum of four drivers per car. While “Pro” line-ups typically use three or four to stay fresh, a two-driver entry is technically legal under the sporting regulations, though extremely rare due to the physical toll of the Nordschleife.

Drivers swap during pitstops, which also serve for refuelling and tyre changes.

Strategy across a 24-hour race is enormously complex: fuel loads, tyre degradation curves, driver fatigue management, and the ever-present variable of Eifel weather must all be factored across every stint decision.

The Nürburgring’s position in the Eifel hills means the weather can be dramatically different at different points on the circuit at the same moment. Rain at the Karussell — the famous banked corner deep in the Nordschleife — while the grand prix section is dry is fairly routine.

Teams carry wet, intermediate, and dry tyre options and must react in real time to rapidly changing grip levels across a 25-kilometre circuit.

Getting the tyre call right — or wrong — at three in the morning can determine the result of a race that started the previous afternoon.

Darkness transforms the race. From around 9.30pm until approximately 5.30am, the entire circuit is lit almost exclusively by car headlights. The Nordschleife’s narrow sections, compression crests, and blind corners, challenging enough in daylight, become a genuinely different proposition in the dark.

Night laps require complete confidence in the circuit’s layout, intimate knowledge of braking points that cannot be seen until the last moment, and total trust in the car’s behaviour over surfaces that cannot be read visually in the way daylight allows.

Safety car periods are common, but the circuit’s length means a full safety car neutralisation takes time; the organisation uses a complex zone-based system for localised incidents, with Code 60 and double-yellow sectors deployed to slow cars in specific sections while the rest of the circuit remains green.

This creates tactical complexity that doesn’t exist in most other forms of racing: a team can gain or lose a lap depending on whether a safety car period catches them just before or just after a scheduled pitstop.

The race never runs simply and cleanly; the Nürburgring 24 Hours has a tradition of producing results that look nothing like the leaderboard at midnight.

Schedule and how to watch (all times BST)

Thursday 14 May

12.15pm – Q1 (2 hours, optional for SP9/Pro/X/AT1)

7pm – Q2 (3.5 hours, mandatory night session for all drivers)

Friday 15 May

7.50pm – Top qualifying sessions (1.5 hours, Top Q1 & Q2)

9.35pm – Qualifying 3 (1.15 hours, no Top Q cars)

12.35pm – Top Qualifying 3 (1 hour, decides pole position)

Saturday 16 May

2pm – Race start

The full weekend schedule can be found here.

The race can be watched live on Motor Sport on this same page.