A difficult 24-hour race at the Nürburgring lies behind Walkenhorst Motorsport, but the team from Melle was still the best-placed Aston Martin team.
The ADAC RAVENOL 24h Nürburgring of the 2024 season is behind Walkenhorst Motorsport. Capricious weather made for difficult conditions and a long interruption due to fog meant that the 2024 edition will go down in the history books as the shortest 24-hour race at the Nürburgring. Walkenhorst Motorsport entered three Aston Martin Vantage GT3s and two BMW M4 GT4s.
“This year’s edition of the 24-hour race at the Nürburgring is not what we had expected. Unfortunately, it didn’t go as we had hoped in sporting terms. However, I would like to thank our team for their great work during the entire race weekend! I’m sorry for the fans that they didn’t get to experience a race over the full distance. The cancellation during the night was absolutely right, as visibility was really poor – unfortunately the weather didn’t improve enough for us to resume the race after the five formation laps on Sunday afternoon,” explained Jörg Breuer, Managing Director of Walkenhorst Motorsport.
With the top car, which was driven by Nicki Thiim, David Pittard, Kuba Giermaziak and Christian Krognes, the racing team was aiming for a top result. However, the car was involved in an incident on the very first lap when a competitor hit it on the damp track and flipped the #34 Aston Martin. Among other things, the Vantage suffered tyre damage, which is why it had to head for the pit lane at slow speed, losing several laps in the process. After the team initially continued the journey, the car had to be parked after just over four hours with consequential damage.
As a result, the best Walkenhorst Motorsport car was the Aston Martin Vantage GT3 of Chandler Hull, Benjamin Mazatis, Patrick Assenheimer and Mike David Ortmann in 19th position overall. The driver quartet was also the best-placed Aston Martin in the race. The drivers finished sixth in the SP9 Pro-Am sub-ranking.
The third Aston Martin of Henry Walkenhorst, Stefan Aust, Christian Bollrath and Anders Buchardt finished the race in seventh place in the SP9 Pro-Am classification.
Walkenhorst Motorsport also entered two BMW M4 GT4s in the SP10 class for homologated GT4 cars. Tobias Wahl, Aris Balanian, Nico Hantke and Jörg Breuer finished the race in seventh place in the strongly contested class in car number #191.
The sister car of Jean-Christophe David, Andreas Ziegler, Florian Wahl and Jörg Breuer suffered gearbox damage after just 90 minutes. The Walkenhorst Motorsport team worked hard to change the gearbox and so the car returned to the track on Sunday for the five introductory laps. However, due to the distance travelled, the BMW could not be classified.
Walkenhorst Motorsport Managing Director Niclas Königbauer concluded: “To be honest, we had expected more from the race. But this is motivation for us to attack for the overall victory again next year. We were still able to learn a lot from this race in order to further develop our overall package.”
Walkenhorst Motorsport will continue next weekend when the ADAC GT Masters returns to Zandvoort.