RSR Intelligence · Issue 021

Issue 021 · 20 October 2026

GetSpeed turns pace into a breakthrough

Mercedes-AMG Team GetSpeed brought speed across its three drivers together with well-timed pit stops to win the GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup finale at Portimão.

It was the team’s first overall victory in the competition. Ralf Aron, Maximilian Götz and Fabian Schiller supplied a result that strengthens the evidence of Mercedes-AMG’s competitive reach beyond Winward Racing.

Winward remains the benchmark for sustained achievement. Russell Ward and Philip Ellis have won three consecutive GT Daytona titles in North American sports car racing. The class pairs professional and amateur drivers. In Europe, Winward’s crew also secured this year’s Endurance Cup drivers’ title with a race to spare.

GetSpeed’s breakthrough adds another winning team to that account. It begins a different test: turning a first victory into repeated success.

The distinction carries across the weekend. Porsche added podium finishes through two separate teams in Portugal and gained championship ground in Barcelona. BMW’s strongest Portimão result came from a crew competing outside the fully professional Pro class.

GetSpeed delivers across all three drivers

Schiller’s post-race assessment helps explain the significance of the win. Speaking to GT REPORT, he described a team that had shown speed during 2025 and 2026 but had struggled to bring everything together in races.

At Portimão, GetSpeed completed the job.

The team kept Götz on track longer than the two leading Porsches before making its first stop. Aron emerged ahead after taking over, and Schiller maintained the advantage through the closing interruptions.

The lap-time comparison supports a contribution from the whole crew. The B Pillar’s report compares the quickest half of each driver’s laps that meet its timing rules. It excludes pit-entry and pit-exit laps, the opening lap and laps outside its time limits.

A GetSpeed driver leads each of the report’s three comparisons covering the opening, middle and closing parts of the race.

Götz’s average was just 0.04 seconds quicker than Thomas Preining’s in the Lionspeed GP Porsche. Aron and Schiller averaged roughly 0.3 to 0.4 seconds quicker than their counterparts in the two leading Porsches later in the race.

Those differences need context. The report estimates considerably more running with a clear track ahead for Aron and Schiller than for several Porsche rivals. That may explain part of their advantage, alongside differences in tyres, traffic and when the laps were completed.

The figures support competitive speed throughout GetSpeed’s crew. They cannot separate every cause of the gap.

That gives the victory more substance than a successful pit-stop sequence alone. GetSpeed brought several parts of its race together, providing a concrete example of AMG success beyond its most consistent championship-winning team.

Porsche strengthens its championship challenge

Lionspeed GP finished second at Portimão, with Boutsen VDS third. Two separate Porsche teams reached the podium, extending the customer-team story examined in Issue 020.

Sunday’s 6 Hours of Barcelona brought a different gain. Yasser Shahin, Riccardo Pera and Richard Lietz won in The Bend Manthey’s No. 92 Porsche in LMGT3, the production-based GT category of the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC).

The LMGT3 teams’ standings put The Bend Manthey second on 74 points, eighteen behind TF Sport’s leading Corvette. Team WRT’s No. 69 BMW is fourth on 66.

Shahin identified previous testing and confidence in mixed wet and dry conditions as advantages. Manthey credits his opening drive with giving the team more freedom to respond as the race developed.

The sister Manthey DK Engineering Porsche finished sixteenth. The team’s account describes contact damage and repair stops that left it unable to recover. Its result reflects a disrupted race, rather than establishing a simple performance gap between Manthey’s entries.

TF Sport also lost opportunities. Congestion in the pits and a ten-second collision penalty contributed to its leading car finishing seventh.

Porsche therefore leaves Barcelona with an earned victory and a stronger title challenge, while Corvette retains the championship advantage. The Portimão podiums demonstrate competitiveness across separate Porsche teams; the WEC standings show that winning the season remains a different task.

From 2027, the LMGT3 teams’ trophy will measure performance across both entries. The FIA has confirmed that points from the two cars entered under the same competitor licence will be combined. This year’s entries continue to score separately.

Barcelona’s contrasting Manthey results illustrate the significance. Under the new format, a winning car and a damaged sister entry would contribute to the same title campaign, making consistency across both cars a more direct measure of team success.

WRT’s Silver crew supplies BMW’s strongest Portimão finish

Amaury Cordeel, Matisse Lismont and Ignacio Montenegro finished fifth overall in WRT’s No. 30 BMW and won the Silver Cup, a class that groups crews by driver rating.

The No. 30 crew supplied BMW’s strongest result at Portimão.

In Barcelona, Dan Harper, Anthony McIntosh and Parker Thompson added third place in WRT’s No. 69 BMW.

Harper’s WEC commitment had prompted Neil Verhagen’s appointment alongside Max Hesse and Valentino Rossi in the No. 46 car at Portimão.

BMW reports that the revised crew suffered an early puncture before retiring with a mechanical problem.

That failure needs its own diagnosis. Neither the finishing position nor Verhagen’s lap times establish that the substitution weakened the programme.

The clearer finding is that WRT delivered a class win at Portimão and a podium in Barcelona, while the No. 46’s race ended with a mechanical failure. Those results do not establish that the calendar clash harmed the team.

A funded opportunity for Härtling

Series organiser SRO Motorsports Group has named Jay Mo Härtling its GT Academy winner, earning a funded drive with a Mercedes-AMG team in the 2027 GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup, with crash damage excluded from the funding.

That adds a practical opportunity for next season to a weekend already rich in evidence about established teams.

GetSpeed has strengthened AMG’s case beyond Winward through an outright win supported by all three drivers. Winward’s repeated championships remain the stronger measure of lasting success. Porsche’s broader podium presence and renewed WEC challenge add weight to its customer-racing record, while BMW’s results show why its crews need to be assessed separately.

This weekend adds further examples of success across different teams. Sustaining those results remains the harder test.

Our Monday briefing 002: Porsche gains ground, GetSpeed breaks through covers the weekend’s first assessment, including Max Verstappen’s recovery from 24th to ninth.

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