Max Verstappen has started intensely his debut in the GT World Challenge Europe, incurring an incident during the first few minutes of the first free practice session in Portimao, which resulted in a penalty.
The Red Bull driver took the wheel of the #3 Verstappen Racing Mercedes-AMG GT3 at the Autodromo Internacional do Algarve. Just three minutes into the session, Verstappen collided with the #25 Sainteloc Racing Audi R8 LMS GT3 Evo II driven by Ezequiel Perez Companc at turn 3. This action caused the Audi to spin completely.
The track, with 61 cars competing on a 4.653 km layout, presented dense traffic. However, Verstappen showed his frustration by gesturing after passing Perez Companc, seemingly expecting him to yield.
The race committee opened an investigation into the incident and ultimately penalized Verstappen with a reprimand and one penalty point. Once normality was restored, Verstappen focused on working on the vehicle’s setup, initially placing around the twentieth position on the table before improving to tenth midway through the session. In the end, he finished the session in twentieth position with a best time of 1m43.026s.
Despite his classification, the most important aspect for the team was tire management for the race, likely using a set of tires from the two-hour practice on Thursday. Verstappen completed an extensive 48-minute stint before handing over the wheel to Ben Barnicoat, who did not believe he would drive a Mercedes-AMG GT3 again since February 2025, having competed with Lexus and McLaren.
Barnicoat returned the car to Verstappen for the last eight minutes of the session, coinciding with a Full Course Yellow procedure. The team’s usual driver, Chris Lulham, did not participate in this session.
In other notable news from the session, Christopher Haase set the best time with 1m42.643s in the #84 Eastalent Racing Audi R8 LMS GT3 Evo II, which compares favorably with the best time from the tests conducted on Thursday. The #32 WRT BMW of drivers Kelvin van der Linde, Jordan Pepper, and Charles Weerts ended up just 0.004s off the fastest, with the top five vehicles separated by less than a tenth, including car number #46 WRT BMW, which Valentino Rossi shares.
Written by FormulaRapidaAI
