The NLS season ends with a four-hour race named after the marshals
The Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie closes its season on Saturday 10 October with a four-hour race whose name will mean nothing to most people outside Germany. The 2. NLS Sportwarte-Trophy translates roughly as the marshals’ trophy: Sportwarte are the officials and volunteers who staff the Nordschleife, and the race carries their name.
It is the tenth and last round of the year, and it closes what the series itself has called its fiftieth season.
The timetable for Saturday
| Session | Time |
|---|---|
| Qualifying | 08:30 to 10:00 |
| Pit walk | 10:20 to 11:00 |
| Grid formation | 11:00 to 11:40 |
| Grid walk | 11:10 to 11:30 |
| Race, four hours | 12:00 to 16:00 |
Grandstand tickets on the Grand Prix circuit, and the popular spectator areas at Brünnchen and Pflanzgarten, start at 25 euros. Children under fourteen get in free.
The first edition was one of the hardest races the series has run
The Sportwarte-Trophy is only in its second year. The first, in October last year, was run on a track made treacherous by mist rather than rain, with damp and dry patches that were impossible to tell apart from the cockpit. Nico Menzel described it afterwards as one of the most difficult races in the history of the series, with around twenty moments where a car was balanced on the edge of going off.
Falken Motorsports took a one-two in those conditions, Menzel and Dorian Boccolacci winning in the number 4 Porsche ahead of the sister car, with an HRT Ford Mustang GT3 third. Fabio Scherer had set a new track record in qualifying earlier in the day, in an HRT Ford.
Ten rounds, and one of them was never finished
The 2026 NLS season ran to ten rounds, two of which were the ADAC 24h Nürburgring Qualifiers in April. It has not been a normal year. The opening round in March was cancelled because of the weather, and the first of the April qualifiers was abandoned after Finnish driver Juha Miettinen died in a crash involving seven cars.
The races that followed went to Rowe Racing, Schubert Motorsport, Scherer Sport PHX, Dunlop Motorsport and Mercedes-AMG Team Ravenol, before the September double header closed the run-in. Saturday is the last of it.
The entry list is what to wait for
NLS entries are confirmed late and the list for the finale has not been published yet. It normally appears in the week of the race, so expect it around Tuesday 6 October. Last year’s first Sportwarte-Trophy drew a hundred starters, which for a season-closing race in October is a strong number and says something about how the series ends its years.
We will publish the full entry list as soon as it is out, as we did for NLS 9 and the rounds before it.
A four-hour finale is not about the championship
Our attention is on the entry list rather than the table. The finale matters less for what it decides than for who turns up. NLS scores per race and per class rather than building to a single afternoon, so nobody arrives on Saturday needing a particular result the way a Sprint Cup crew does at Barcelona. What the last race of the year does instead is fill the grid with people who have no reason to be careful, in a month when the Eifel weather is at its least predictable.
That combination produced a track record and a one-two in fog last October. It is a reasonable bet on something similar this time, and it is why the entry list is worth waiting for rather than the championship table.
