The Black Falcon team of Bernd Schneider, Sean Edward/Jeroen Bleekemolen/Nicki Thiim have won the 2013 Nurburgring 24 Hours with a incredibly tight margin of two minutes 39 seconds. It was the first ever win at the event for Mercedes after many races at the VLN improved the handling on the infamous circuit.
Heavy rain forced race control during the night to interrupt the race for more than nine hours. Numerous accidents caused a treacherous mix of oil, mud and rain water on the track.
Coming in second place was the BMW Z4 GT3 Driven by Maxime Martin (BE) who brought the number 25 BMW Sports Trophy Team car home. As well as Martin, Yelmer Buurman (NL), Andrea Piccini (IT) and Richard Göransson (SE) were also in action over the course of the eventful race.
After 88 laps of the 25.378-kilometre circuit, the runner-up car was 2:39.781 minutes behind the winning Mercedes SLS.
Because of this, BMW Sports Trophy Team Marc VDS narrowly missed out on securing a 20th overall victory for BMW at the endurance classic.
Porsche had a tough outinq with the best-placed Porsche – a 911 GT3 RSR fielded by the Eifel based Team Manthey Racing with drivers Timo Bernhard (Germany), Romain Dumas (France), Marc Lieb (Germany) and Lucas Luhr (Switzerland) – won the SP7 class and scored seventh overall.
The 911 GT3 R of Manthey Racing with pilots Jörg Bergmeister (Germany), Marco Holzer (Germany), Richard Lietz (Austria) and Nick Tandy (Great Britain) took the flag in eleventh place.
Rain, fog, red-flag, restart – the 41st running of the Nürburgring resulted in a 15 hour race which was incident packed along with many retirements in total the final top 10 standings are as follows:
1. Edwards/Bleekemolen/Schneider/Thiim (Mercedes), 88 laps
2. Buurman/Göransson/Martin/Piccini (BMW) + 2m 39.7s
3. Bastian/Graf/Jäger/Seyffarth (Mercedes) – 1 lap
4. Arnold/Jäger/Roloff/Seyffarth (Mercedes) – 1 lap
5. Fässler/Rockenfeller/Stippler/Winkelhock (Audi R8 LMS ultra) – 1 lap
6. Adorf/Hürtgen/Klingmann/Tomczyk (BMW) – 1 lap
7. Bernhard/Dumas/Lieb/Luhr (Porsche) – 1 lap
8. Ammermüller/Stippler/Stuck/Stuck (Audi R8 LMS ultra) – 2 laps
9. Biela/Jöns/Ludwig/Rusinov (Audi R8 LMS ultra) – 2 laps
10. Lamy/Mücke/Simonsen/Turner (Aston Martin) – 2 laps
Source: Porsche Audi Mercedes
