Falken wins a rain-hit NLS9 after twice losing the lead to a PRO-AM Porsche

Falken Motorsports won NLS9 at the Nürburgring on Sunday afternoon after a four-hour race that turned over twice in the rain. The number 44 Porsche 911 GT3 R took the flag 38.813 seconds clear of the Dunlop Motorsport Porsche, having lost the lead to a PRO-AM car on two separate occasions.

The number 48 LOSCH Motorsport by BLACK FALCON Porsche 911 GT3 R EVO finished third. It led the race twice, spent part of the afternoon 27th, and took a drive-through penalty along the way.

The lead changed hands all afternoon

Morris Schuring took the number 44 into the lead from pole and was twelve seconds clear after four laps. By the time the first heavy band of rain had passed through, LOSCH was in front. Falken took it back, lost it again inside the final half hour when it made a fifth pit stop, and got it back on the last two laps.

Tim Heinemann, who had put the car on pole that morning with a 7:51.957, took the flag. The car’s best race lap was a 7:54.745, set early while the circuit was still dry. The pairing was confirmed by the name tags on the two race suits in parc ferme, Schuring under a Dutch flag and Heinemann under a German one.

Nico Menzel brought the number 17 Dunlop Motorsport Porsche home second. Dylan Pereira was third in the LOSCH car. Three Porsches, two of them full professional entries and one PRO-AM, covered by 65 seconds after twenty-five laps of the Nordschleife.

Schubert crashed out of the race it won on Saturday

The number 77 Schubert Motorsport BMW M4 GT3 EVO won NLS8 on Saturday by 0.308 seconds. On Sunday it lasted seven laps. Ugo de Wilde crashed heavily and the car did not move again, classified 101st.

It was not the only early loss. The number 123 Mühlner Motorsport Porsche stopped on lap five.

LOSCH led twice and still finished third

No car had a stranger afternoon than the number 48. It qualified second overall that morning, 0.023 seconds off pole, in SP9 PRO-AM. Half an hour into the race it was 27th after an early stop and a ten-minute lap.

It climbed back to the front during the wettest phase, took a drive-through penalty at 14:22, recovered the lead again with twelve minutes to go when Falken pitted, and then lost more than a minute on a single lap. Its 11:11 while the two Porsches ahead of it were lapping in 9:50 turned a seven-second lead into a 1:09 deficit.

An incident involving the number 17 and the number 48 went under investigation at 15:32, shortly before that lap.

Race control called it a wet race before the start

At 11:26, more than half an hour before the flag, race control declared this a wet race. It was not an overreaction.

Rain came through in bands rather than steadily, and the back of the circuit was consistently wetter than the start and finish straight. There was a spell where teams split cleanly between staying out on slicks and pitting for intermediates, and a long Code 60 zone was in place at Flugplatz from 12:47. Our explainer on Code 60 covers how that system works.

The spread of lap times says the rest. The quickest laps of the race were in the 7:54 range. During the worst of it the leader went round in 10:27, and one car recorded a 17:44.

A five-second penalty for the second-placed car

At 15:56 race control announced that a penalty for the number 17 would be converted into a five-second time penalty applied after the race. The car finished 38.813 seconds behind the winner and 26 seconds clear of third, so it does not change the podium.

The number 44 had a penalty of its own recorded at 14:16, following an incident involving the numbers 17, 44 and 888 that went under investigation at 13:09. No conversion to a time penalty was published for that one, and Falken were declared the winner at the circuit.

The classification below is provisional until the stewards publish their final decisions.

Final classification

Provisional classification from the series timing feed. Driver named is the one who took the flag.

The RNT view: the stop that decided it was not a mistake

Falken’s fifth stop, with roughly fifteen minutes left, handed the lead away and looked for several minutes like it had thrown the race. It did the opposite. The car came back out on the right rubber for a circuit that was flooding again, and the two laps that followed were nearly ninety seconds quicker than the one the leader managed on older tyres.

The counter-argument belongs to LOSCH. A PRO-AM crew led the overall race twice, recovered from 27th and from a drive-through, and finished a minute off a full professional team with a works-level driver line-up. In the dry, that gap would have been three or four times larger.

Which is the honest reading of a day like this. The weather flattened the differences between the cars and put the result in the hands of whoever called the next twenty minutes correctly. Falken called the last twenty minutes right.

Bock Norris made the flag

The number 300 Ollis Garage Racing Dacia Logan finished 89th, seventeen laps completed, with team founder Oliver Kriese at the wheel. It had qualified 104th of 109 that morning and recorded a 17:44 lap during the heaviest rain.

For a first-generation road saloon with a Renault Mégane engine, finishing a four-hour Nordschleife race in these conditions is the result. Its story is in our separate report from Sunday morning.

The qualifying report covers how the grid was set, and the NLS8 race report has Saturday’s photo finish. Follow the rest of the season on the RNT-Motorsports live blog.