Loading
A Red Bull-backed car will line up on pole position for the Nürburgring 24 Hours — but it is not the one most spectators came to see. While the attention of the motorsport world has been firmly fixed on the Team Verstappen Mercedes-AMG entry, it was Luca Engstler in the #84 Lamborghini Huracán who delivered the definitive lap when it mattered most.
Engstler, driving for Team Abt, posted a time of 8m11.123s in a 12-car top qualifying shootout — Qualifying 3 — held on Friday afternoon at the Nürburgring Nordschleife, claiming pole position ahead of a fiercely contested field.
The road to pole was a structured elimination process. Qualifying 1 and Qualifying 2 trimmed the top class field on Friday morning, with only the leading 12 cars advancing to the afternoon's decisive shootout. Each driver was afforded two timed laps to set their benchmark — and it was Engstler who made the most of the opportunity.
The German driver's effort secured a Lamborghini 1-2 on the starting grid, with the sister #130 entry locking out the front row. Marco Mapelli was the man behind the wheel for that car, ending up just three tenths of a second shy of his teammate's pole time — a remarkably tight gap over more than eight minutes of lap time on the Green Hell.
Audi's Christopher Haase rounded out the top three, giving a strong showing for the four-ringed manufacturer ahead of the race proper.
The Team Verstappen Mercedes-AMG entry qualified fourth for the race start — a solid result, though one that will inevitably be measured against the considerable hype surrounding it. Max Verstappen had placed sixth in Qualifying 2, a result good enough to ensure the car's passage into the Q3 shootout. It was Dani Juncadella who took the wheel for the all-important pole position runs, and the Spaniard ended up just shy of nine tenths slower than Engstler's benchmark.
Contextually, Verstappen's team entered the weekend already facing significant Balance of Performance headwinds, with weight and power restrictions making outright pace a challenge. Fourth on the grid, under those circumstances, represents a meaningful platform for the race.
Thomas Neubauer was fifth in the Kondo Racing Ferrari, with Maximilian Paul completing the top six to give Lamborghini a third representative in the upper reaches of the grid — an impressive display of strength from the Italian marque.
Further down, the defending race-winning #1 BMW of Raffaele Marciello qualified ninth — one place behind the #911 Porsche it beat to victory last year. That Porsche result 12 months ago had been tainted by a 100-second time penalty in the race, and this year the Stuttgart machine lines up ahead of the reigning champion heading into the 24-hour test.
With the grid set and the Green Hell primed, the Nürburgring 24 Hours gets under way at 3pm local time on Saturday (2pm UK). As the qualifying sessions earlier in the week demonstrated, the Nordschleife rarely delivers a straightforward narrative — and with Engstler's Lamborghini leading the charge from the front, the opening hours of the race promise to be anything but predictable.
He’s a software engineer with a deep passion for Formula 1 and motorsport. He co-founded Formula Live Pulse to make live telemetry and race insights accessible, visual, and easy to follow.