Brutal, brutal heat

Belgium was in the middle of a serious heatwave all weekend, with temperatures across the country pushing past 37 degrees, part of the same heat dome that was setting records across France, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands. Saturday's stint of the race ran in full sun under that heat, and it showed: teams were single-stinting through the opening hours because nobody trusted tyres or drivers to handle a full double stint in that kind of temperature. Sunday cooled off into the low 30s and even brought a brief rain shower at night, which only made the strategy calls harder. Porsche themselves credited the cooler overnight conditions as part of what let the #80 car close the gap. BMW's statement afterward called it a hot event "in every sense of the word" and was genuinely relieved every one of its cars made the finish.

BOP still off-balance

The balance-of-performance hasn't been the strongest this year. Most notably Aston Martin, BMW and even Porsche seem to struggle during practice sessions. On race day, the BOP gave teams a better fighting chance. Less weight and more boost seemed to do the trick for most cars lacking pace. Noticably, the Porsche 911 GT3 R Evo received a weight reduction of 15 kg, whilst Mercedes, McLaren and BMW all got a 10 kg reductionin minium wiehgt. 

Qualifying was already a mess before the race even started

This year's chaos didn't wait for lights out. The GetSpeed Mercedes #17 set the provisional fastest combined time in Thursday qualifying, only to get caught red-handed by TV cameras: mechanics doing illegal work on the right rear brake during Q3, pulling stones and sand out of the car in a session where touching the brakes isn't allowed. Every lap from that session got deleted. A car that should have started on pole instead started somewhere around 60th.

That wasn't the only penalty handed out. The third-placed AF Corse Ferrari and an Attempto Audi both had laps thrown out over data logger and Balance of Performance issues. Two Aston Martins got bounced from Superpole for running boost pressure 15 millibars over the limit. And four cars, including the eventual race winner, had to start from the pit lane after engine changes. By the time the green flag actually flew, half the front-runners weren't starting anywhere near where they'd qualified.

The start nobody wanted

If you watched the opening laps, you already know this wasn't going to be a clean one. The field barely got going before the first Full Course Yellow came out, and the carnage kept stacking up from there. A BMW into the garage with the bonnet off before lap one was even done. An Audi stuck in the gravel at La Source. An Aston Martin nearly wiped out in a first-lap pileup that somehow limped back to the pits to fight another day. By the time the early safety car situation settled down, several cars that should have been factors all weekend were already playing catch-up they'd never fully recover from.

This is becoming a pattern at the big SRO enduros. Spa joins Paul Ricard and Monza this year on the list of races where the opening lap produced more carnage than the next twenty hours combined. At some point that's not bad luck, that's a driving standards problem, and it's worth someone at SRO actually looking at it instead of shrugging it off as "that's endurance racing." The drivers seem to forget that they're racing for 24 hours when the lights go out. Unfortunatly, we've seen similar opening laps at Spa where a pile up happens when the first wave of cars exit Double Gauge. 

La Source caused problems all weekend, and not just from contact

It wasn't just drivers causing chaos in that first corner. The tarmac itself started breaking up under cars going through La Source, with the surface visibly losing chunks as the race wore on. A patch of asphalt was seen being sprayed with water for over an hour, just to keep the temperture down. But the temperatures never let up, so the track itself became one more variable teams had to manage all weekend.

The corner also produced the most talked-about on-track moment of the race. On a lap before a scheduled pit cycle, Ayhancan Güven launched a late dive bomb into La Source on his own factory teammate, Morris Schuring, in the sister Boutsen VDS Porsche. The contact damaged Schuring's front bumper and knocked the #2 car out of the podium fight entirely. Güven picked up a five-second penalty for it the next day. Porsche-on-Porsche, in a fight for position that didn't even matter for the overall win. Not a great look.

The podium fight nobody's talking about: Mercedes vs Ferrari for second

The story everyone's covering is Porsche's win, but the better race all weekend was for second place. The #51 AF Corse Ferrari was the fastest car on track in the early heat, building a real lead before a puncture four and a half hours in cost it a lap and a half. AF Corse clawed it back overnight using smart strategy, timing a pit stop around a Full Course Yellow-to-Safety Car transition to stay on the lead lap, something that's brutally difficult to pull off at Spa. Then Nicklas Nielsen's teammate Tommaso Mosca picked up a second puncture in a wheel-to-wheel fight with Mercedes' Luca Stolz. The car stayed on the lead lap, but by the time temperatures dropped in the closing stages, Ferrari's early pace had evaporated. The #48 Mercedes-AMG of Lucas Auer, Maro Engel and Luca Stolz drove a genuinely mistake-free race and beat the Ferrari to second by a handful of tenths after 24 hours of racing. That's as close as this race gets.

Valentino Rossi has another strong Spa, but will leave dissapointed

Valentino Rossi finished sixth overall in the #46 WRT BMW alongside Dan Harper and Max Hesse, and for a few hours Sunday morning it looked like it might be even better than that. The car briefly led the race after the mandatory technical stops before the BMW M4 GT3 Evo's lack of outright pace on dry tarmac caught up with it again. It's the second time Rossi has finished inside the top six here, and the fact that a guy four years removed from full-time MotoGP can keep doing that at the world's biggest GT race says more about his car craft than people give him credit for. BMW as a manufacturer left Spa disappointed overall, though. None of their cars had the pace to challenge for the outright win, and the brand's own statement afterward admitted as much.

A big one for Sarah Bovy

Not every story from this weekend was good news. Sarah Bovy had a heavy crash in the #700 Comtoyou Aston Martin at Blanchimont overnight, hitting the tire barrier hard after contact with another car. Bovy said on social media afterward that she'd been hit. It came less than half an hour after another car, an Eastalent Audi, had already crashed in roughly the same spot, and together the two incidents triggered one of the longest Full Course Yellow and Safety Car sequences of the entire race, the eighth of the night. Glad she walked away from that one.

The retirement parade

Spa's attrition rate this year was brutal, and the list of cars that didn't see the finish reads like a who's who of pre-race favourites. The GetSpeed Mercedes #17, already wrecked by its qualifying penalty, never recovered: forced to fight through traffic from the back, it made contact with a sister Mercedes and both cars retired with terminal damage. The Verstappen Racing Mercedes #3 was running solidly in the leading group until a stranded car blocked the pit entry mid-race, causing a queue that saw it rear-end the Ferrari #51. It limped on for four more hours before the secondary damage forced retirement. Markus Winkelhock crashed the Eastalent Audi hard at Blanchimont overnight after the car had already lost laps to mechanical issues. Garage 59's McLaren went out in the seventh hour with a right-front problem. And Lamborghini's brand-new Temerario GT3, on its Spa debut, had a weekend to forget: one car retired with engine trouble in hour six, the other finished but three laps down in 19th. Not the introduction Lamborghini was hoping for.

Class winners

Outside the overall fight, BMW at least had something to celebrate: the Rowe Racing M4 GT3 of Ugo de Wilde, Tim Tramnitz and Jens Klingmann won Gold Cup by six laps, finishing 11th overall. Rinaldi Racing took Silver Cup, Kessel Racing took Bronze, and Johor Motorsports Racing's Corvette won Pro-Am, the first Corvette class victory at Spa since the marque's outright win back in 2009.

The numbers behind the chaos

This year's race drew a record 132,000 spectators across the five-day event, the biggest crowd in the race's history. It's also the ninth time Porsche has won the 24 Hours of Spa since the race began in 1924, and the marque's first win here since 2020, in what happens to be the 75th anniversary year of Porsche Motorsport. Fifteen Porsches started the race, and three finished inside the top eight. Whatever else went wrong for everyone else this weekend, it was a genuinely good one for Stuttgart.

The takeaway

Endurance racing rewards patience over speed, and this year's Spa 24 Hours was the clearest possible proof of that. A car starting from the pit lane beat a field full of cars that qualified inside the top five, simply by staying out of trouble while almost everyone else didn't. That's the whole appeal of this race in one result.

Oh, and one bonus image: here's the BMW M3 Touring GT3 on display. What a machine!