File photo: a GT3 grid racing wheel-to-wheel. Ollie Millroy's Shanghai crash involved a Ferrari 296 GT3 competing in the China GT Championship.
Max Verstappen’s GT3 side project has a scheduling problem, and for once it has nothing to do with him.
On 31 July, GT World Challenge Europe announced it was flipping its season finale at Portimão from a Sunday afternoon race to a Saturday evening one. That is an unusually late change for a series that plans its calendar years in advance. The reason: the FIA World Endurance Championship had, just three days earlier, confirmed a brand-new round at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya on the same weekend, 16-18 October, after scrapping its planned trips to Qatar and Bahrain. WEC’s own statement cited “ongoing regional developments” affecting freight and travel arrangements as the reason those two rounds couldn’t go ahead. Barcelona and Monza were parachuted in as replacements, with Barcelona’s inaugural WEC race landing squarely on top of GT3’s Endurance Cup finale.
That’s a headache for any team or driver contracted to both series. It is a particularly awkward one for M-AMG Team Verstappen Racing, the GT3 outfit that races under Max Verstappen’s own name, campaigning a Mercedes-AMG GT3 EVO in both the Sprint and Endurance Cups. The Endurance Cup line-up for car #3 is Jules Gounon, Daniel Juncadella and Chris Lulham, all contracted for the full season. Two of those three names also have a day job in Hypercar: Gounon drives for Alpine Endurance Team, Juncadella for Genesis Magma Racing, and both of those programs race at Barcelona the day after Portimão’s GT3 finale. Unless somebody has an unusually convenient flight plan, Gounon and Juncadella cannot be in Portugal on Saturday evening and Spain on Sunday at noon.
That leaves Lulham, presumably the team’s Bronze-rated entry given the Mercedes currently sits fourth in GT World Challenge’s Endurance Cup Bronze classification, as the only guaranteed body for a car that needs three drivers to start an endurance race. Mercedes-AMG’s own motorsport department has acknowledged the bind without resolving it, saying only that it is “currently assessing various scenarios” for Portimão. The same conflict applies to Maxime Martin, who splits his season between GT World Challenge and WEC’s GT class for Mercedes, a reminder that Mercedes-AMG does not build a factory Hypercar. Its top GT drivers get spread across whatever series will have them, in a way Ferrari’s, BMW’s and Porsche’s factory-backed rosters generally do not.
This is where the paddock chatter about Verstappen himself climbing back into the car gets interesting, and where it is worth being precise about what is and is not confirmed. Nothing from the team, from Mercedes-AMG, or from GT World Challenge has confirmed a Verstappen appearance at Portimão, and nothing on the team’s own channels mentions it either. The same rumor mill has floated reigning IndyCar champion Alex Palou as a possible third name in the car, which is equally unconfirmed. What is true is that the seat is genuinely, mathematically at risk of running short, and that Verstappen has no scheduling conflict that weekend, since Portimão falls in the gap between the Singapore and United States Grands Prix.
If Verstappen does drive, he would presumably go in as the Pro-rated third alongside Lulham, and that detail matters more than it sounds. The Bronze category exists specifically to reward teams for running a genuine Am-rated driver, a structure that underpins Pro-Am grids across GT3 endurance racing, from Spa to the Nürburgring to the now-swollen Michelin Le Mans Cup grid. Swap the wrong body into the car and a team does not just change the results, it can change which classification the car is even eligible to score points in. That is a far less glamorous problem than a four-time F1 champion driving a GT3 car, but it is the one Verstappen Racing actually has to solve first.
None of that is as fun as the version currently circulating out of the Nürburgring paddock, which is presumably why that is the version getting repeated. The more interesting story is the one that put Verstappen’s team in this position in the first place: a security situation on the other side of the world rewrote the back half of WEC’s season, WEC’s fix collided with a calendar GT3 had locked in months earlier, and now a handful of teams, including one owned by a four-time world champion, are working out logistics that have nothing to do with lap times. A confirmed line-up is unlikely to surface before GT World Challenge’s Sprint Cup rounds at Zandvoort and Barcelona in September, once Mercedes-AMG’s scenarios narrow down to one.
About the Author
