Schubert beats Falken by 0.308 seconds after four hours of NLS8

Jens Klingmann brought the number 77 Schubert Motorsport BMW M4 GT3 EVO across the line 0.308 seconds ahead of Morris Schuring’s number 44 Falken Motorsports Porsche 911 GT3 R to win the 65th ADAC Reinoldus-Langstreckenrennen. After four hours and 27 laps of the Nordschleife, that is the margin.

The two cars had been within half a second of each other for most of the afternoon, and they were still within half a second of each other at the flag.

Half a second for three hours, three tenths at the line

This was not a race that came alive in the last ten minutes. The gap between the Schubert BMW and the Falken Porsche sat at around four tenths of a second for long stretches of the afternoon, through driver changes, through two pit stops each, and through several code 60 phases that could have separated them and did not.

Schuring was still there at the last corner. He was 0.308 seconds short.

There was one more moment after the line. Our reporter at the circuit watched Klingmann flashing the winning BMW’s lights in celebration as it came past the pits, and brushing the wall while he did it. No harm done, and it did not change anything, but it was an odd way to finish four hours of making no mistakes at all.

Klingmann took the flag for a crew he shared with Jordan Pepper and Ugo de Wilde. It converts a front-row start into a win, after Pepper had put the car second in qualifying behind a car that was not in the same class, covered in our qualifying report.

Falken set the fastest lap and lost anyway

The quickest lap of the race belongs to the number 44: a 7:55.730 against the 7:55.804 of the winning BMW. Seventy-four thousandths of a second separated the two cars at their best, and three tenths separated them after four hours.

Tim Heinemann and Schuring shared the Falken Porsche. On any other afternoon a lap like that wins the race. Here it was not enough, which tells you how little either team gave away.

Max Kruse Racing put an AT1 Audi on the overall podium

Third overall went to the number 75 Max Kruse Racing Audi R8 LMS GT3 EVO II of Marcel Fugel, Dominik Fugel and Benjamin Leuchter, a minute and two seconds behind the winner and on the same lap as the leaders.

The car does not run in SP9 at all. It is classified in AT1, a separate category, and it beat every GT3 car in the race bar two. It also won its class by a distance. Fifth on the grid became third at the flag, which in a race this attritional is what a clean four hours buys you.

Fabian Schiller and Jay Mo Haertling were fourth in the number 80 Winward Racing Mercedes-AMG, which makes them third in SP9 PRO.

The pole car finished tenth

David Jahn’s 7:53.343 in the morning was the lap of the weekend, and there is a detail worth restating now that the race is over: the number 23 Gamota Racing BMW is an SP9 PRO-AM entry. A PRO-AM car took overall pole from the professional crews.

It lost the lead to the number 77 in the opening phase and never recovered it. Gamota finished tenth overall and fourth in PRO-AM, a lap down. The morning was theirs. The afternoon was not.

Hartog took fifth in class with two drivers

Loek Hartog and Michael Klitgaard Christensen brought the number 54 Dinamic GT Porsche home eighth overall and fifth in SP9 PRO, one lap behind the winner.

They did it as a two-man crew against three-driver line-ups in a four-hour race, which means more time in the car each and fewer chances to hide a mistake. Eighth out of a 136-car entry on that basis is a good afternoon’s work.

The Haupt Mustang never got going

The number 64 Haupt Racing Team Ford Mustang GT3 of Vincent Kolb and Frank Stippler started third and was effectively finished inside half an hour. Race control logged an incident involving the number 64 and the number 5 BLACK FALCON Team EAE Porsche at 12:23, 23 minutes into the race, and placed it under investigation.

The Mustang completed six laps before stopping for good. The Porsche carried on and won SP9 AM. The timing sheet shows Kolb as the driver on the car’s last completed lap.

Result, top ten

Official classification from the series live timing. Class winners: SP9 PRO the number 77, SP9 PRO-AM the number 48, SP9 AM the number 5, AT1 the number 75.

Our angle: this is what four hours of restraint looks like

A 0.308 second margin over 27 laps of the Nordschleife is not a photo finish that happened by accident. It is two teams making no mistakes at all for four hours on a circuit that punished a dozen others out of the race entirely.

Look at the attrition around them. One of the pre-race favourites was gone in the first half hour. Long code 60 phases at Hatzenbach, at Fuchsroehre and through the Aremberg to Adenauer Forst section reshuffled the field repeatedly. Pit lane speeding and minimum stop time penalties took chunks out of other people’s afternoons. Neither the BMW nor the Porsche gave any of that away.

That the deciding factor came down to three tenths, and that the car with the fastest lap is the one that lost, is the honest summary of the day. Nobody was beaten on pace here.

NLS9 starts again on Sunday

The second half of the double-header runs on Sunday, and most of these cars are entered again. The number 54 adds Loris Cabirou Gomez to its crew. Our full NLS9 entry list is here.

RNT-Motorsports is at the Nurburgring all weekend. Follow the coverage on the RNT-Motorsports live blog.