Fifty-five minutes at the Nürburgring, 26 GT3 cars, zero cautions — and an incident counter that sat on 15 of 17 for three quarters of the race. P10 on the grid, P6 at the flag. I don’t think I have ever driven this carefully and this hard at the same time.
The qualifying lap I nearly threw away
Qualifying started badly. I picked up a track incident on my first flying lap, then got the lap invalidated at the very last corner before the line — and came out of that corner far slower than I normally would. One lap gone, one lap left.
The second one landed: 1:27.938. When the grid came up and I saw P10 out of 26, I genuinely didn’t believe it. Daniel Krug took pole on a 1:27.436, which means the entire top ten was covered by half a second. That number told me everything about the race that was coming.
Two laps that almost ended it
The opening two laps were carnage. Contact from behind, contact in front, cars going off on both sides of me, and track limits being collected by everyone including me. I picked up the overwhelming majority of my incident points before lap five had even finished. By the time the field finally spread out, I was sitting on 13 of the 17 points that end your race.
Thirty-three laps still to go.
Fifteen of seventeen
It crept to 15x not long after, and there it stayed. That is a very specific way to drive a race car: fast enough to hold a position in a pack that never stopped churning, but with the knowledge that a single four-point hit deletes the entire afternoon. Every move had to be finished cleanly. Every defence had to leave room I’d normally have taken back.
And somehow that produced my best drive in this series so far. The fighting was constant and the margins were tiny — overtakes going both ways, three-wide moments, cars close enough all race that I never got a lap to just breathe. P6 at the flag, 12.753s behind the winner, 2.273s off Tom Muskett in P5 and 3.015s clear of Alex Marconi in P7. My best lap was a 1:27.450 on lap 14, which is 0.371s off the fastest lap anybody set all race. On 15 incident points, I’ll take that.
It cost me 0.35 of Safety Rating and returned 67 iRating. Fair trade, but I’d rather not repeat the method.
Sixty frames that didn’t feel like sixty
Worth a technical note, because it surprised me. At the race start — 26 GT3 cars on screen, full grid effects, triple 4K OLED — the frame rate dropped into the 40s and 60s. On a fixed-refresh panel that would have been a stuttering mess and I’d have felt every frame of it.
On the new LG UltraGear OLED triples with variable refresh, I didn’t notice a thing. No judder, no tearing, no sense of the picture falling apart. I only found out afterwards by looking at the numbers. If you’re weighing up a triple-4K upgrade and worrying about hitting a locked frame rate: sync matters more than the number does.
Up front
Daniel Krug turned pole into a lights-to-flag win in the Ford Mustang GT3, leading 36 of the 38 laps and keeping Raimond Brakenhoff’s BMW M4 GT3 EVO at 1.918s. Carlos Bravo Cano completed the podium in the McLaren 720S.
The drive of the race belonged to Oliver Wallin. No qualifying time at all, started P25 of 26, and finished P4 — 21 places, with a lap led along the way and 16 incident points as the receipt. Michal Stepien2 had the outright pace, setting the fastest lap of the race at 1:27.079, but 17 incident points left him P17 after starting P8. Jordan Strandt fell from P2 to P21. Four drivers disconnected, including Alex Stepanovskiy from P4 on the grid after just ten laps. Three lead changes, zero cautions, and only 17 of 26 cars finished on the lead lap.
The rig — Simucube 3 Ultimate and 55 minutes of real work
D-BOX 4250i Gen3 under the seat, Cubic belt tensioner pulling me into the harness, and the Simucube 3 Ultimate up front — wearing the AMG GT3 replica wheel from Alex-Racing. The AMG GT3 on this combination is the best the simulator has ever felt. The front end talks constantly, the rear steps out in a way you can actually catch, and the kerbs at the Nürburgring come through with weight rather than noise.
That wheel deserves its own paragraph. It is a one-man build by Alex, who spent close to two years developing it and now produces three or four a month: a 4mm CNC-cut carbon fibre front plate, silicone grips moulded directly onto the plate at 60A Shore, two seven-way funky switches plus a rotary encoder, and magnetic aluminium shifters running Omron switches with carbon paddles. Under 990 grams including hub and shifters. Driving an AMG GT3 with an actual AMG GT3 wheel in your hands closes a loop that a generic round rim never quite does, and the shifter action alone makes downshifts into turn one something you look forward to.
The flip side is that it is genuinely physical. Fifty-five minutes of wheel-to-wheel racing on the SC3 is work — forearms, shoulders, neck. Adding the belt tensioner and motion on top means you finish a race properly tired. That is exactly what I wanted from this setup, and it is also why I’m not planning back-to-back 55-minute races any time soon.
Race stats
| Series | iRacing DTM Series – 2026 Season 2, Week 6 |
| Track | Nürburgring Grand-Prix-Strecke – Sprintstrecke |
| Car | Mercedes-AMG GT3 2020 – #25 (GT3 2025 class) |
| Start / Finish | P10 → P6 |
| Qualifying | 1:27.938 (P10 of 26) |
| Best lap | 1:27.450 (lap 14) |
| Gap to winner | +12.753s |
| Laps | 38 (0 cautions) |
| Strength of Field | 2484 (split 2 of 6) |
| Incidents | 15x |
| iRating | 2193 → 2260 (+67) |
| Safety Rating | A 3.52 → A 3.17 |
Full results
| Pos | Driver | Car | Start | Best Lap | Gap | Inc |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| P1 | Daniel Krug | Ford Mustang GT3 | P1 | 1:27.285 | — | 5x |
| P2 | Raimond Brakenhoff | BMW M4 GT3 EVO | P6 | 1:27.333 | +1.918s | 7x |
| P3 | Carlos Bravo Cano | McLaren 720S GT3 EVO | P5 | 1:27.295 | +2.830s | 13x |
| P4 | Oliver Wallin | BMW M4 GT3 EVO | P25 | 1:27.255 | +7.436s | 16x |
| P5 | Tom Muskett | Ferrari 296 GT3 | P3 | 1:27.172 | +10.480s | 8x |
| P6 | Philipp Geppl | Mercedes-AMG GT3 2020 | P10 | 1:27.450 | +12.753s | 15x |
| P7 | Alex Marconi | Ferrari 296 GT3 | P9 | 1:27.313 | +15.768s | 12x |
| P8 | Dustin William Owen Dawes | Lamborghini Huracán GT3 EVO | P14 | 1:27.274 | +16.071s | 3x |
| P9 | Mohamed Zikri | Acura NSX GT3 EVO 22 | P17 | 1:27.461 | +23.415s | 14x |
| P10 | Ellen Olsen | Porsche 911 GT3 R (992) | P22 | 1:27.499 | +27.989s | 16x |
| P11 | Daniel J Ryan | BMW M4 GT3 EVO | P15 | 1:27.663 | +28.143s | 12x |
| P12 | Michael Mantl-Leitner | Lamborghini Huracán GT3 EVO | P21 | 1:27.299 | +56.919s | 17x |
| P13 | Dirk Stegemann | Porsche 911 GT3 R (992) | P20 | 1:27.616 | +59.245s | 17x |
| P14 | Logan L Setzer | McLaren 720S GT3 EVO | P23 | 1:27.890 | +73.537s | 16x |
| P15 | Rodrigo Chamorro | Porsche 911 GT3 R (992) | P7 | 1:27.831 | +75.612s | 11x |
| P16 | Chinmay Yadav2 | Porsche 911 GT3 R (992) | P13 | 1:27.662 | +91.814s | 24x |
| P17 | Michal Stepien2 | BMW M4 GT3 EVO | P8 | 1:27.079 | +95.980s | 17x |
| P18 | Stephen Croft | McLaren 720S GT3 EVO | P19 | 1:27.871 | +1 lap | 18x |
| P19 | Jack Hammonds | Lamborghini Huracán GT3 EVO | P18 | 1:27.610 | +1 lap | 20x |
| P20 | Jouni Lappalainen | McLaren 720S GT3 EVO | P16 | 1:27.403 | +1 lap | 22x |
| P21 | Jordan Strandt | McLaren 720S GT3 EVO | P2 | 1:27.479 | +1 lap | 14x |
| P22 | Jim Hacker | Audi R8 LMS EVO II GT3 | P11 | 1:27.450 | +3 laps | 16x |
| P23 | Matthew P Kloet | Porsche 911 GT3 R (992) | P12 | 1:27.920 | DNF | 9x |
| P24 | Alex Stepanovskiy | Ford Mustang GT3 | P4 | 1:27.384 | DNF | 17x |
| P25 | Marcel De Laet | Ferrari 296 GT3 | P24 | 1:30.020 | DNF | 13x |
| P26 | Daan Vandoren3 | Ferrari 296 GT3 | P26 | — | DNF | 0x |
Livery design by Jeremy Kerr.
Catch the full race & behind-the-wheel shots
Full lap on YouTube, in-helmet snapshots on Instagram.