ADAC Zurich 24Hours preview

This weekend sees the 45th running of the ADAC Zurich 24 Hours of the Nurburgring with around 170 cars plus scheduled to take the start of the race on Saturday 27th May.

Dubbed the Green Hell for many reasons, the nearly 26km circuit around the Nurburgring Grand Prix track and the infamous Nordschleife is no place for the faint hearted with many a championship winning driver and team coming away battered, bruised and empty handed.

In a change to last years approach, Aston Martin Racing will not have any GT3 representation at the event having previously used it as a warm up for its factory drivers for the next 24 hour on the calendar at Le Mans.

With attention, both financially and in engineering resource being focussed upon the World Endurance Championship as well as the continued development of its new for 2018 GTE car, it appears that AMR will be in attendance purely in a supporting role for their customer teams.


In slight change to the entry that completed the Qualification Race for the event last month, AMR factory drivers Darren Turner and Nicki Thiim will again support Peter Cate in the Aston Martin Vantage GT8 but they shall now be joined by R Motorsports Markus Lungstrass in place of Florian Kamelger.

Lungstrass will be no stranger to the GT8 in an endurance race as he, Turner and Kamelger raced the car this year at the Bathurst 12 Hour. With Cate also having raced the car in VLN races it is actually WEC GTE Champion Thiim who has the least amount of experience of the SP8 class car!!


Joining them on the grid shall be the #70 R Motorsport V8 Vantage GT4 (SP10 class) car of Andreas Baenziger, Florian Kamleger, Peter Leemhuis along with Markus Lungstrass who will be on double duty with his employers and the AML car.


VLN regulars Team Mathol Racing with Avia Racing return to the N24 again with a South American touch to their other familiar VLN driver line up in their #73 V8 Vantage GT4 (SP10) with Wolfgang Weber and Eric Johansson sharing with Marcos A Vazquez and Juan Manual Silva.


Completing the Aston Martin entry for the event shall be the Aston Martin Lagonda of Europe #49 V12 Vantage S with VLN regulars Heinz Jurgen Kroner, Tony Richards, David Thilenius and Wolfgang Schubauer. This car and line up featured in VLN2 and is run by the Aston Martin Test Centre team.

Track action starts this Thursday with the races first Qualifying Practice session in the evening before the second a final Qualifying run the next morning. The top 30 shoot out takes place Friday afternoon before the green flag for the 24hour at 14.00hrs on Saturday.

Finally, and if recent weather forecasts are to be believed then this weekend may just turn out quite nice!

Photo credits - AMR / VLN / Mathol Racing