Zandvoort drew 26,000 for a GT weekend four weeks after Formula 1 left for good

More than 26,000 people came to Circuit Zandvoort for a GT race weekend last weekend. Four weeks earlier, 325,000 had filled the same dunes to say goodbye to Formula 1 for the last time.

Those two numbers are not in competition. Put side by side they say something about what a circuit is worth once the biggest event on its calendar has gone.

Six races, four series and a record entry

The figure comes from SRO, the promoter of GT World Challenge Europe, which said more than 26,000 spectators attended across the weekend of 18 to 20 September. SRO gave no breakdown by day and published no comparison with earlier Zandvoort rounds, so the number stands on its own.

What those people came for was a full bill. GT World Challenge Europe brought a 45-car field, which SRO called a record for the series. The GT4 European Series added 36 cars. With the GT2 European Series and Porsche Carrera Cup France on the same programme, more than 100 GT cars were in the paddock and six races were run over two days.

Four Dutch drivers were entered in the GT World Challenge field, and two of the teams are based in the Netherlands, Mercedes-AMG Team Verstappen Racing and KPX Motorsport. One of those Dutch drivers, Thierry Vermeulen, won Race 2 on Sunday afternoon.

It is the smallest published crowd of the season, and that is not the whole story

SRO publishes an attendance figure for most of its rounds, which makes a comparison possible. Of the four it has put out this year, Zandvoort is the lowest.

Read as a league table that looks like a disappointment. It is not, for two reasons.

The first is the format. Paul Ricard and the Nürburgring were Endurance Cup rounds, where the cars run for three hours and the Nürburgring meeting decided a championship. Zandvoort and Magny-Cours were Sprint Cup rounds, two one-hour races. Against the only comparable round on the list, Zandvoort finished within a thousand people of Magny-Cours.

The second is that SRO did not publish a Zandvoort figure for 2025, so there is nothing to say whether the crowd grew or shrank. At Magny-Cours it could: that crowd was up by almost six thousand on the previous year. Zandvoort has no such line yet.

The Formula 1 farewell was a different sport

The last Dutch Grand Prix ran from 21 to 23 August 2026 and drew 325,000 over the weekend. Lando Norris won it. The promoter chose not to extend the contract beyond 2026, which closes a run of six Dutch Grands Prix in a row from 2021 to 2026. Zandvoort held the race for decades before that, but the previous one was in 1985.

Setting those two numbers against each other is tempting and mostly meaningless. Formula 1 is the premier class and it sells to the world. People fly in from other continents for a Grand Prix and book a hotel a year in advance. GT World Challenge Europe races only in Europe, and its crowd arrives by car from the countries around the circuit, which for Zandvoort means Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Belgium and France. Those are two different businesses that happen to use the same piece of tarmac.

What the September weekend does show is that the circuit can still fill its banks without the biggest event in motorsport attached to the date. It was the first significant international meeting at Zandvoort since Formula 1 left, and it worked without a Grand Prix audience.

The Grand Prix was privately funded and the site cannot grow

Two things about the Dutch Grand Prix explain why a sold-out race still came to an end. It was funded privately, without backing from the Dutch government, which is unusual among European rounds. And the circuit sits inside a seaside town and a protected dune landscape, so there is very little room to build the venue out.

Reporting on the decision has pointed at the revenue side rather than at any lack of demand, and the organisers themselves have not put figures in public. What is not in dispute is that the race sold out and stopped anyway. A circuit in that position does not need one enormous event. It needs several that fit the space it actually has.

A circuit with a slot to fill

Zandvoort has four weekends a year without a noise limit, the slots that make an event of Grand Prix size possible at all. One of them comes free in 2027.

General director Robert van Overdijk told RacingNews365 that the circuit is in talks with several parties about that slot, and that Formula E is among them for the start of the Gen4 era in 2027. He also said he looks across the Atlantic with interest, naming IndyCar and NASCAR as things he would personally like to see.

His own framing of the problem was the honest one. “What’s important to us as a circuit is that something comes in return,” he said. “It can never be as big as Formula 1.”

Twenty-six thousand is the number that has to grow

The arithmetic facing Zandvoort is not about replacing 325,000 with 325,000. No series available to the circuit can do that. It is about how many weekends of 26,000 the calendar can hold, and whether people who came for one of them come back for the next. Magny-Cours found almost six thousand extra in a single year by treating its round as a festival rather than a race meeting. That is the model worth copying.

That is where a GT weekend has an advantage a Grand Prix does not. Paddock access is open, the grid walk is real, and a spectator who turns up on Saturday morning can stand a few metres from a GT3 car with its bodywork off. The Hugenholtzbocht delivered five separate incidents in two days, which is the kind of weekend that sends people home talking.

Our measure of the weekend

Our measure of it is this. A crowd of 26,000 for a Sprint Cup round, at a circuit four weeks past the biggest day it will ever have, is not a consolation prize. It is evidence that the audience in the dunes is not only there for Formula 1. But it is also the smallest figure SRO has published this season, and pretending otherwise would be doing Zandvoort no favours.

The number we would watch is Magny-Cours. A French circuit with none of Zandvoort’s profile added six thousand people in twelve months. If Zandvoort keeps this date and does the same, the case for the circuit after Formula 1 makes itself. If the figure sits still, 26,000 was the ceiling rather than the floor.

Barcelona closes the season, Zandvoort decides its 2027

The Sprint Cup has one round left, at Barcelona, where Bastian Buus and Ricardo Feller lead the standings after their second place on Sunday. Zandvoort, meanwhile, has a free weekend in 2027 and a decision to make about what goes in it.