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Phoenix Audi wins Nurburgring 24 Hours

Audi celebrated another 24-hour race win just one week after its Le Mans success, as the Phoenix team came out on top in the 42nd Nurburgring 24 Hours

Germans Christopher Haase, Christian Mamerow, Rene Rast and Markus Winkelhock racked up a total of 159 laps of the 15.769-mile long circuit, a combination of the Nordschleife and the grand prix track, to establish a new distance record of 2507.296 miles.

It was Audi's second outright win in the Nurburgring 24 Hours after 2012, while Ernst Moser's locally-based Phoenix team scored its fourth win after earlier success with Porsche in 2000, Opel in '03 and Audi two years ago.

Only three minutes down, last year's race-winning Black Falcon Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG GT3 came second with Dutchman Jeroen Bleekemolen, Swede Andreas Simonsen and Germans Christian Menzel and Lance David Arnold.

A 35-second time penalty for a too short pitstop was the only issue for the Mercedes quartet.

Another Mercedes, the Rowe Racing entry with Michael Zehe, Christian Hohenadel, Nico Bastian and ex-DTM and V8 Supercars racer Maro Engel, finished third, two laps down.

Peter Dumbreck was the best-placed British driver in the Falken Porsche he drove to fourth place, sharing with Wolf Henzler, Martin Ragginger and Alexandre Imperatori.

The Aston Martin works team came fifth with Stefan Mucke, Darren Turner and Pedro Lamy while the Schubert Z4 was the only works-backed BMW to make it to the finish with Jens Klingmann, Dominik Baumann, Claudia Hurtgen and DTM racer Martin Tomczyk in sixth place.

In qualifying, Kevin Estre had put the fastest of the two Dorr McLarens on pole with a new record lap time of 8m10.921s, but the two McLarens did not make it to the finish.

Neither did the two Marc VDS BMWs, the second cars of Schubert BMW and Black Falcon and many other entries in a race with a high attrition rate.

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