Nürburgring 24 Hours 2024: The Race That Changed Everything
Twenty-four hours. One of the most brutal circuits on earth. A Hyundai Elantra N, a crew that never wavered, and a victory that nobody saw coming — except us.
You can prepare for the Nürburgring 24 Hours. You study the Nordschleife, you learn every compression and crest of the 25-kilometer combined circuit. You build a strategy, prepare the car, and assemble a team you trust with your life.
And then the race starts, and none of that preparation fully captures what the next 24 hours actually feel like.
The 2024 Nürburgring 24 Hours was the hardest thing I have ever done in a race car. Fog in the early hours that reduced visibility to near zero. A safety car period that lasted close to two hours. A near-miss with backmarker traffic on the Nordschleife that I still think about. A brake issue in hour seventeen that our team fixed in the pits in under four minutes.
Through all of it, the Hyundai Elantra N TCR never stopped working. That car is built for exactly this kind of endurance — a platform that's robust, consistent, and responsive regardless of what the Eifel weather decides to throw at you. The Hyundai Motorsport engineers run a race operation of the highest order, and their preparation meant we went into the final hours of the race with a car that felt almost as good as it did at the start.
When we crossed the line to take the class victory, I sat in the car for a moment before getting out. Twenty-four hours. The Nordschleife. Victory.
Winning the Nürburgring 24 Hours is something that very few drivers in any generation of motorsport ever get to say. It changed how I see my own capabilities, how I approach endurance racing, and what I know this program is capable of achieving.
Everything that's come since — the 2025 championship, the dual program for 2026 — has roots in what we proved at the Nürburgring in 2024.