GT & EnduranceGT World Challenge Europe

Eight crews can still take the Sprint Cup, and Barcelona has thirty-five points left

Thirty-five points are still available at Barcelona on 2 to 4 October, and six crews sit within nineteen of the lead. The GT World Challenge Europe Sprint Cup goes to its finale with the title open to more of the field than at any point this season.

The standings going into the last two races

Pos Drivers Team Points
1 Ricardo Feller and Bastian Buus Lionspeed GP 59
2 Arthur Leclerc and Thomas Neubauer AF Corse 53.5
3 Daniel Juncadella Mercedes-AMG Team Verstappen Racing 53
4 Kelvin van der Linde and Charles Weerts Team WRT 50
5 Maro Engel and Lucas Auer Winward Racing Mercedes-AMG 42.5
6 Ben Green and Thierry Vermeulen Emil Frey Racing 40

The arithmetic that keeps eight crews alive

A Sprint Cup win is worth 16.5 points, and there are two races. Add the single point that goes to both drivers of the car topping each qualifying session and the weekend is worth 35 points to a crew that takes everything.

That number is what makes the finale worth watching. Feller and Buus lead on 59 and cannot control the two crews 5.5 and six points behind them. Van der Linde and Weerts are nine back with a full weekend to play with, and even Green and Vermeulen, nineteen adrift in sixth, are not mathematically out. Nor are Valentino Rossi and Max Hesse, 25.5 back in the number 46 BMW, or Dorian Boccolacci, 33 behind in the Boutsen VDS Porsche, although both would need something close to a perfect weekend. That makes eight crews in contention, the number SRO also gives. The Barcelona entry list has all 44 cars.

The counter to all of that is consistency. Feller and Buus have scored in every round without winning the championship outright at any stage, and a pair of solid finishes at Barcelona would be enough against rivals who need wins.

GT3 cars running several abreast through the banked Hugenholtzbocht at Circuit Zandvoort
The GT World Challenge Europe field bunched together through the banked Hugenholtzbocht at Zandvoort. Photo: Tessa van Duin / RNT-Motorsports

The team title is a different fight

Team WRT leads the teams’ standings on 67 points, eighteen clear of Lionspeed GP on 49, with Mercedes-AMG Team Verstappen Racing and 2 Seas Motorsport on 46.5 and AF Corse on 45. WRT can lose the drivers’ title and still take the team one, which is exactly what its two-car count is built to do.

Emil Frey arrives on the back of a win

Green and Vermeulen took Race 2 at Zandvoort, the result that ended a long wait for Emil Frey Racing and moved the pair into sixth. Nineteen points with thirty-five available is a long way from a title shot, but it is the kind of gap that turns interesting if the crews in front of them collect each other in the first corner.

The GT World Challenge Europe field streams away from the start line at Zandvoort
The start of Race 2 at Zandvoort, with the Emil Frey Ferrari leading and the Garage 59 McLaren alongside. Photo: Troy Hamilton – RNT-Motorsports

The class titles: Silver is settled, Gold and Bronze are not

Matisse Lismont and Ignacio Montenegro (Team WRT) have already wrapped up the Silver Cup. In the Gold Cup, Tommaso Mosca and Matias Zagazeta (AF Corse Ferrari) go to Barcelona 20.5 points clear of Tom Fleming and Louis Prette in the #58 Garage 59 McLaren, according to SRO’s race preview. The Bronze Cup is led by Peter Dempsey and Eddie Cheever in the Ziggo Sport Tempesta Porsche, with Rinat Salikhov and Marvin Dienst in the #87 Winward Mercedes-AMG named by SRO as their most realistic challengers.

The Barcelona timetable

Session Day Local time
Official test Thursday 1 Oct 13:30
Free Practice 1 Friday 2 Oct 09:00
Free Practice 2 Friday 2 Oct 13:55
Qualifying 1 Saturday 3 Oct 09:45
Race 1 Saturday 3 Oct 14:00
Qualifying 2 Sunday 4 Oct 11:10
Race 2 Sunday 4 Oct 16:00

Spain is on the same clock as the Netherlands and Belgium, so those times need no conversion for most of our readers. The Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya runs to 4,655 metres and sixteen corners. SRO’s own preview lists the two qualifying sessions at 09:50 and 11:15, five minutes later than the event timetable, so check the GT World stream on the day.

The title is Feller and Buus’s to lose

Our sense of the run-in is that the championship goes to the crew that does not need anything dramatic. Feller and Buus have a 5.5-point cushion, two rivals separated by half a point behind them who also have to beat each other, and a format in which the reversed weight of a good qualifying pair matters more than one big result. The most likely way they lose it is a first-lap incident, not a rival’s pace.

History is on their side as well. SRO points out that in the previous 12 Sprint Cup title deciders, the crew that started the weekend on top went on to win the title six times, and the crew in second four times.

The more open question is the team title, where WRT’s eighteen-point lead looks safe unless both of its cars have a bad Saturday. That is a smaller story than the drivers’ fight, and it is the one more likely to be settled before Sunday afternoon.

Our full Sprint Cup standings after Zandvoort have the rest of the table, and the 2027 calendar is already out, with Barcelona moving to the Endurance Cup next season.

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Jakob van Putten

Jakob van Putten is the founder and editor-in-chief of RNT-Motorsports. Racing started as a hobby: he has followed motorsport since 1994, and Max Verstappen's rise into Formula 1 made him follow it more closely than ever, from Formula 1 and Formula 2 to the FIA WEC, endurance racing, GT World Challenge and the NLS. He started RNT-Motorsports because he enjoys bringing the news himself, and because he hopes to get more people as enthusiastic about the sport as he is. Today he does that together with an enthusiastic team who share the same passion and keep RNT-Motorsports up to date every race weekend. He holds press accreditation at NLS and GT World Challenge events, granted per event rather than as a standing credential.

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