Podium at the 2026 24 Hours of Zolder: NGT Racing's No. 92 Porsche 911 GT3 Cup (1st), ART Racing (2nd), and Belgium Racing Team (3rd). Photo: Porsche.
Laurens Vanthoor spends most of his season inside a Porsche 963 hypercar, chasing GTP wins for Penske in IMSA. Last weekend he climbed into a production-based 911 GT3 Cup car for a Belgian club enduro he almost never gets to run, and won it outright in front of a crowd he almost never races for. That’s a nice story on its own. It’s also Porsche’s 22nd victory in 48 runnings of the 24 Hours of Zolder, and the number matters more than the sentiment.
The No. 92 NGT Racing Porsche 911 GT3 Cup crossed the line at Circuit Zolder on August 30 with a lineup built for exactly this kind of race: Vanthoor, the 2024 FIA WEC champion; Bertrand Baguette, a Super GT title winner; Porsche Cup regular Glenn Van Parijs; Briton Jonny Edgar; and Tom Van Rompuy, another full-time WEC driver. Between them they had the pedigree to win almost anywhere. What they actually won was a scrap that stayed within seconds of the No. 2 ART Racing entry and the No. 99 Belgium Racing Team car for more than twenty of the race’s twenty-four hours, before NGT finally pulled out a one-lap cushion. The race ended under red flags after a late incident, freezing that margin in place. “We certainly didn’t steal this victory,” Vanthoor said afterward.
Pole position had gone to a different Porsche entirely: Dylan Pereira’s Ajith-Redant Racing 911 GT3 Cup, fastest on Thursday evening with a queue of sister cars right behind it. None of that mattered much once the race actually started. Zolder’s weekend swung between dry spells and rain, the kind of conditions that punish one scruffy pit stop or the wrong tire call far more than they reward a single quick lap in qualifying. Ajith-Redant didn’t make it to the finish. The cars that did were the ones whose crews made the fewest mistakes across a full day and night of changing grip, not the ones that were fastest in the dry on Thursday.
Six Porsches, One Winner
That’s really the technical story here. Six of the first six finishers at Zolder were Porsche 911 GT3 Cup cars, all competing in the Porsche Endurance Trophy Benelux class that made up the bulk of this particular 24-hour field, a genuinely spec category where the chassis, engine, and tire allocation are identical across the grid. Take outright pace out of the equation and a 24-hour race becomes a test of five-driver rotation, pit strategy, and who avoids contact when the track flips from dry to soaked and back again. NGT Racing has now won this race four times specifically because it manages that side of the operation as well as anyone in Belgian sports car racing, not because it has some car nobody else can buy.
A Factory Driver’s Working Vacation
There’s a broader driver-market point buried in here too. Vanthoor’s day job is a manufacturer program at the very top of the sport, the same tier where Ford’s new WEC Hypercar program is trying to find its footing, and Porsche still lets him spend a free weekend racing a Cup car for a Belgian team in his own country. That’s not charity. Keeping world-class talent visible in grassroots categories is exactly how Porsche keeps its one-make ladder credible to the amateurs who actually pay to fill out the rest of the grid.
That ladder has been getting healthier across the board. The pro-am blend that won at Zolder, a reigning world champion sharing a car with club-level talent, is the same formula that’s filled out grids everywhere from Belgium to the Michelin Le Mans Cup, where car counts have nearly quadrupled over the past decade. Manufacturers back these categories because they produce exactly this kind of story: a factory driver validating the car in public, cheaply, in front of the exact customers Porsche wants buying the next 911 GT3 Cup.
Buried under the overall result was a nice subplot in the GT Sport class, where Dirk Van Rompuy took second in a Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 RS Clubsport, his fortieth start at Zolder. Forty trips around this circuit is its own kind of achievement, class win or not, and it’s a reminder that endurance racing rewards loyalty almost as much as it rewards raw speed.
The Numbers That Actually Decide Titles
The bigger number to watch is the Porsche Endurance Trophy Benelux title, which Paul Meijer, Dylan Derdaele, and Nicolas Saelens have now clinched with a round to spare. They didn’t need to win at Zolder to do it. Third place was enough, because they’d already banked wins in the season’s first three rounds. It’s the same lesson spec-series regulars keep proving across sports car racing this year, from Hyundai’s points gap management at VIR to Honda’s recovery drive at VIR in that same TCR race: championships get decided by who avoids the bad weekend, not who has the best one.
That title fight has one round left to settle the minor placings, back at Zolder on October 17 and 18. Vanthoor, meanwhile, heads back to a Penske Porsche program that still has an IMSA season to finish. Whether he gets another free weekend to come home and do this again next year is the real question, and on this evidence, Porsche should probably let him.
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