Verstappen, Gounon, and Juncadella win NLS2 by a minute and get DQ’d for exceeding tire limits

I can’t say watching Jules Gounon, Dani Juncadella, and Max Verstappen race a Mercedes-AMG GT3 in a minor round of the Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie was that fun. I mean, it would be fun to watch these guys lap the Nordschleife with no one else out there, and it was more fun than that to watch them dodge cars going so much slower than they were that it looked like they were placed there intentionally to challenge them, but they didn’t actually race after the first stint of the four-hour race.

This event made Max very happy, of course, because instead of losing like he is in Formula 1, he got to win a race by over a minute with no competition, which is apparently very fun for him.

Unfortunately, the team won’t get to book the result because they used an extra set of tires in qualifying and exceeded their weekend limit, so the win goes to the Rowe Racing BMW of Dan Harper and Jordan Pepper. By blaming qualifying procedures, I guess Mercedes means to convey that they miscounted at that point, so they didn’t know they were short in the race. That, of course, would be publicly indistinguishable from knowing they were short and going, “Who cares? This is a test.”

Max proved his point, though: Everyone else racing in this year’s N24 should be scared of him.