Bock Norris, the Dacia that finished the 24 Hours, starts NLS9 from 104th

Car number 300 will start Sunday afternoon’s NLS9 race from 104th place on a grid of 109. It is a Dacia Logan, it carries a badge on the bootlid reading GT 0,3, and in the paddock on Saturday it had more people standing around it than most of the GT3 cars that will start in front of it.

RNT-Motorsports walked through the Ollis Garage Racing awning at the Nürburgring this weekend. The car is the reason the team gets visitors, and the team knows it.

Eleven minutes thirty-seven on a drying Nordschleife

Sunday morning’s qualifying session began in the rain and finished on a drying line. The Logan’s best lap was an 11:36.987, set by Henze, which put it 104th overall and left it near the back of the SP3T field.

For context, the pole time was a 7:51.957. The Dacia is therefore giving away something close to three minutes and forty-five seconds a lap to the fastest GT3 car on the circuit, and that gap is the entire point of the exercise rather than an embarrassment to be hidden.

SP3T is the class for turbocharged touring cars up to two litres. Our guide to the NLS class system explains where it sits in a field that runs from GT3 machinery down to production-based saloons.

Bock Norris began as a Chuck Norris joke

The car has a name. It is called Bock Norris, and according to the team’s own account the name came from a family habit of telling Chuck Norris jokes. The team has also described the car as stubborn, which is the sort of thing you only say about a machine you have spent several winters rebuilding.

Ollis Garage Racing is a privateer team from Münster. It is not a factory operation with a hospitality unit, and the bodywork carries the names of supporters who put money into the project alongside the commercial sponsors.

A Megane RS turbo in a first-generation Logan

The shell is a first-generation Dacia Logan, the cheap saloon Renault built in Romania from 2004. Almost nothing under the skin is standard.

The engine is a turbocharged Renault Megane RS unit producing around 280 horsepower. It drives through a six-speed sequential gearbox with a paddle shift, added in 2025. The front suspension and brakes come from the Megane as well. There is no ABS. Traction control is a bespoke system the team put together itself.

The numbers that follow from that are worth stating plainly. At the Nürburgring 24 Hours in May the Logan was timed at 178 km/h down the Döttinger Höhe, on a straight where the GT3 cars are travelling nearly a hundred kilometres an hour quicker.

Ninety-two laps, one missing wheel, one finish

The current car exists because the previous one was wrecked. A collision with an Aston Martin in 2025 wrote it off, and the team rebuilt on a spare shell. By its own account the work was finished on the Wednesday evening before the 24-hour race.

The race itself was a catalogue of problems. The engine misfired above 4,500 rpm, which meant swapping a cam sensor at pit stops. There were penalties, including one for an infringement under Code 60, the Nordschleife’s full-course slow zone system.

Then, with around three hours to run, the Logan hit the barrier hard enough to tear off the left-front wheel. The crew rebuilt the front suspension and sent it back out.

It finished. Ninety-two laps, a best lap of 10:22.613, 107th overall and sixth in class, and it was promoted thirteen places in the final classification when thirteen cars ahead of it failed to take the flag. Four drivers shared it in May: Oliver Kriese, Christian Geilfus, Robert Neumann and Alexander Becker.

Dacia vs Goliath is painted on the bootlid

The livery is not subtle and is not meant to be. The car is blue and green, with a pair of green comic-book fists across the rear, the words DACIA VS. GOLIATH above them, and a GT 0,3 badge where a GT3 car would carry its class designation.

The mirrors are green. The number board is yellow. On the rear side window the driver names sit under German flags, one of them simply reading Maverick.

It works because the joke is told at the team’s own expense. Nobody at Ollis Garage claims the Logan is quick. The entire proposition is that a car of this kind can complete a Nordschleife race distance at all, and that is a harder claim to make good on than it sounds.

Our sense of it: the Nordschleife needs its slow cars

There is a version of endurance racing at the Nürburgring that is only about the GT3 fight at the front, and the NLS has never been that. A hundred and nine cars started qualifying this morning across more than twenty classes, and the reason the series still fills its grid is that a small team with a road-car shell and a sense of humour can enter and be taken seriously.

The Logan is the extreme case, and it is also the argument. A car that is three and three quarter minutes off the pace is not a problem to be regulated away. It is the proof that the door is still open.

The counter-argument deserves a hearing too. Speed differentials on the Nordschleife are a genuine safety question, the 2025 crash that destroyed the previous Logan happened because a much faster car arrived, and there are people in the paddock who think the slowest classes make the racing more dangerous than it needs to be. That debate is real and it is not settled by how much the grandstands enjoy a Dacia.

Three things to watch in NLS9

Watch whether the Logan finishes. On this circuit, for this car, that is the result. It has done the hard version already.

Watch the Code 60 boards. Sunday’s qualifying produced several investigations for drivers failing to manage a Code 60 properly, and a four-hour race with a hundred-plus cars will produce more.

Watch the front, because the grid is absurd. Pole was decided by 0.023 seconds and the top four, covering a Porsche, a Porsche, a Porsche and a Ford, are inside half a second. Our NLS8 race report covered how close the same fight was on Saturday, and the double-header preview set out what is at stake across the weekend.

Follow the race as it happens on the RNT-Motorsports live blog.