Endurance 24 Hours of Nurburgring

Vanthoor rues "black day in my career" after N24h clash with brother

Porsche factory driver Laurens Vanthoor says his "nightmare" early crash out of the Nurburgring 24 Hours following contact with his brother Dries was "a black day in my career".

James Newbold

Edited: May 30, 2022, 10:30 AM

Copy link

Share on Viber

Add as a preferred source

The 2015 Nurburgring winner had taken over the #911 Manthey Porsche from Kevin Estre and was battling for third with his younger brother's Phoenix Audi on lap 23 when they made side-by-side contact in the fast sequence of bends approaching the Hohenrain chicane.

The touch between the Audi's left rear and Porsche's right front caused Laurens to spin and make heavy contact with the barriers.

Dries continued unscathed and went on to secure his second victory in the 50th edition of the German endurance classic together with Kelvin van der Linde, Frederic Vervisch and Robin Frijns.

Writing on social media on Sunday, Laurens explained that the desire to beat his brother meant "emotions took over and my brain stopped working".

#1 Manthey-Racing GmbH Porsche 911 GT3 R: Michael Christensen, Kevin Estre, Frédéric Makowiecki, Laurens Vanthoor

Photo by: Andreas Beil

"What happened yesterday was a nightmare," said the Belgian, who is racing in the DTM this year with SSR Performance. "I know I’m smarter, I know you don’t take that amount of risk in a 24h race.

"It’s painful to be this open in public but the reason behind is that I was racing my brother. My emotions took over and my brain stopped working.

"We’ve been competing against each other since we were kids, never backing off and rather breaking a leg then [sic] loosing to each other.

"Unfortunately this competitiveness took the upper hand yesterday. I regret it badly, it was unprofessional.

"I have absolutely no hard feelings towards Dries. In the contrary, I’m a very proud brother. In the future we will have each others' back instead of fighting each other.

"Today was a black day in my career. I will regret it for a very long time but that’s how life works."

The best-placed Porsche after a disappointing 24 Hours for the Weissach marque was Falken Motorsports' example in ninth.

Porsche 911 GT3 R project manager Sebastian Golz said: "We were plagued by bad luck on Saturday and Sunday. We lost six cars in accidents, most of which were involved in collisions through no fault of their own.

"We very clearly witnessed just how strong our GT3 customer teams and our cars were in the race from the top positions of Manthey and Toksport WRT, which makes it all the more disappointing that we weren’t able to turn our competitiveness into a decent result.”

BMW "could have done significantly better"

Another marque left disappointed on Sunday was BMW, which was expected to fare well on the debut of its new M4 GT3 after the Rowe cars had shone in qualifying.

But only one of its cars made the finish, with the #102 Walkenhorst Motorsport car 26 laps down in 15th place after numerous contenders hit trouble.

Early contact for Nick Yelloly put the #99 Rowe entry out, fellow Briton Dan Harper was delayed by contact in the RMG-run Junior Team car that was later crashed by Max Hesse, and a problem with the front-right suspension during the night caused Sheldon van der Linde to crash the #98 Rowe machine.

The #20 Schubert entry of Jesse Krohn, Alexander Sims, Jens Klingmann and Niklas Krutten was set to finish fourth when it retired in the final hour due to an overheating engine.

#99 Rowe Racing BMW M4 GT3: Connor De Phillippi, Philipp Eng, Augusto Farfus, Nick Yelloly

BMW Motorsport boss Andreas Roos said: “Sadly, that was a very disappointing race for us and we could have done significantly better. Our expectations were high after the good, intensive preparations saw us show good pace and record some top results.

"It is particularly galling that we lost two cars early on due to our own errors. We allowed ourselves to be influenced by the hectic events on the track.

"The very positive aspect is that our new BMW M4 GT3 has shown that it has the potential to win this race, being right up there in qualifying and in the race."

We want your opinion!

What would you like to see on Motorsport.com?

Take our 5 minute survey.

- The Motorsport.com Team

Read and post comments

Share Or Save This Story

Copy link

Share on Viber

Previous article Nürburgring 24h: Phoenix Audi wins battle of attrition

Next article Bathurst 6 Hour looking for supports

Top Comments

There are no comments at the moment. Would you like to write one?

View More & Comment

Latest news

The lowdown on this year’s FIA F3 title protagonists

FIA F3

The lowdown on this year’s FIA F3 title protagonists

Iker Lecuona felt significant differences between Ducati's GP25 and GP26

MotoGP

MGP MotoGP

Qatar GP

53 min

Iker Lecuona felt significant differences between Ducati's GP25 and GP26

The Kimi Antonelli you don't know: Inside the Mercedes garage with F1's new world champion

Formula 1

F1 Formula 1

Mexican GP

1 h

The Kimi Antonelli you don't know: Inside the Mercedes garage with F1's new world champion

F1 driver contracts: How long is each driver tied down for?

Formula 1

F1 Formula 1 2 h

F1 driver contracts: How long is each driver tied down for?

Subscribe and access Motorsport.com with your ad-blocker.

From Formula 1 to MotoGP we report straight from the paddock because we love our sport, just like you. In order to keep delivering our expert journalism, our website uses advertising. Still, we want to give you the opportunity to enjoy an ad-free and tracker-free website and to continue using your adblocker.

You have 2 options:

Become a subscriber.
Disable your adblocker.

Subscribe now Already subscribed? Sign in here

Already disabled your adblocker?
Reload page

Manage Alerts