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 | Daniel Juncadella | Mercedes-AMG Team Verstappen Racing | 53 |
| 3 | Arthur Leclerc and Thomas Neubauer | AF Corse | 53 |
| 4 | Kelvin van der Linde and Charles Weerts | Team WRT | 49.5 |
| 5 | Maro Engel and Lucas Auer | Mercedes-AMG | 42 |
| 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 six points behind them. Van der Linde and Weerts are 9.5 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, 26.5 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.
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 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.
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 six-point cushion, two rivals tied 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.
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.
