After a stunning season with titles aplenty, two of Manthey’s key figures reflect on their success so far and look ahead to their plans for 2026.
“It was a special year,” says Nicolas Raeder, Managing Director of Manthey, of 2025. And he’s right: The team had universal success, taking a clean sweep of titles in all three of its main campaigns.
It was a stellar year for the Meuspath team, and marked yet more racing victories in its time as a Porsche customer team. The manufacturer has owned 51% of Manthey since 2013, when Raeder and his brother Martin took control of the historic team, and the partnership has gone from strength to strength ever since.
In 2025, the team first claimed the drivers’ and teams’ crowns in the Asian Le Mans Series on their debut, before going on to win sensational doubles in both the DTM and the World Endurance Championship. The team also finished second in the Nürburgring 24 Hours.
Having returned to the WEC in 2024, the team immediately made an impact, winning the all-new FIA Endurance Trophy for LMGT3 Drivers, as well as the teams’ title. This year, the team fielded two entries in the championship - the #92 1st Phorm car and the #85 Iron Dames entry.
The #92 crew of Ryan Hardwick, Richard Lietz and Riccardo Pera claimed the drivers’ title, taking two wins on their way to glory - including the team’s third 24 Hours of Le Mans class win in four years, and its sixth in total.
Back-to-back titles marked another fantastic campaign for the team, and one which Raeder reflects on fondly - crediting the team’s Racing Director, Patrick Arkenau, with putting together such a strong team.
“To win the championship after the first race where we had no chance in Qatar, I’m very thankful to Patrick that he built up such a great team that can handle all of this,” he says.
“You need the right people to do that. In the end, like in every sport, to be able to win a championship, there is always some sort of luck involved.
“The WEC was a more controlled work over the whole year. We are really proud. Sometimes people ask me if it’s different winning the championship again, and you see how the image is growing and how people are looking at that.
“One thing for us is if you win it one time, or if you are successful in one year, then people say it’s good, but if you do it three times in a row like we have, people say it’s not luck and that you know what you are doing and people are impressed. Then it starts to work - we race to grow our image to help sell our products and for that it’s really important to be successful in racing.”
Arkenau has been with the team since 2014, and started as a performance engineer on the WEC project. He was promoted to race engineer in 2016, before taking over the engineering department and then the whole Racing division in 2022.
He adds: “It’s a superb team effort. I’m very proud of my team, of what they’ve been able to do, to perform in every situation even under immense pressure. They just did an extraordinary job, and I’m very grateful to get the opportunity from Martin and Nicolas to be able to lead such an exceptional operation, but also to my team to be able to do this.
“In the end, they are the ones doing it, they are the ones performing on track everywhere we participate. It’s not only in one series that we have won, or a particular team that is very good, it’s the general operation which is doing all this stuff and performing at a very high level.”
Performing at a very high level is exactly what the whole team did. Though they had a challenging start to the WEC season, the team bounced back to take its first win of the season in Imola with the #92 car.
After a seventh-place finish at Spa, the #92 crew bounced back to take their second consecutive Le Mans victory at the French endurance classic.
Though that was to be their final victory of 2025, consistently strong results in the following rounds - including narrowly missing out on the podium at the season finale in Bahrain - meant they were crowned champions.
“For me, there were two important situations in WEC,” Raeder says. “One was Qatar, we finished with zero points and we had two new customers who come with high expectations.
“After the race, everybody was calm and stayed concentrated, nobody was blaming each other, and we worked continuously and we were back on the next race.
“The second situation was the last race, we only had 10 points advantage to the Ferrari. It’s not bad, but the problem was you have 50% more points in the eight-hour race, so 10 points are not so much.
“We started the race last and second-to-last, and also there everybody was calm, everybody was concentrated, everybody knows what we can do if we do it in our way. In the end, we missed the podium with a bit of bad luck, we drove a controlled race and we brought home the championship relatively controlled.
“It was, for me, impressive how everybody delivered in this situation, even if you are last and second-last.”
Key to that crew was endurance veteran and Porsche driver for almost 20 years, Richard Lietz. This year’s Le Mans victory marked his sixth in the GT classes at Le Mans – all with Porsche.
Described by Arkenau as a “rock” and a “key player” in the driver line-up, Manthey’s management credits him with leading the driver group to its title, steering them in the right direction even through difficult times.
He added: “He will calm the drivers down. For sure, it is one thing if management or the engineers are doing it, but if you hear this from a driver who knows how it feels in the car, he knows it from a practical point of view and he can translate it in their language and in their feelings.
“This helps so much, it’s just really helping a lot and this is really where he’s a leader of the group and definitely making sure we are going in the right direction.”
Though the Iron Dames side of the garage had a tougher season, their best result of fourth-place in São Paulo was still a brilliant effort for a crew afflicted by bad luck.
Arkenau emphasis that the team had “a very steep learning curve, we saw a lot of improvement,” but added: “We can be very proud of the learning curve we had together and what we could achieve together and also where we developed into during the year.
“This was definitely nice to see, despite the fact we couldn’t really earn the result which would have been possible due to various minor circumstances - bad luck, bad timing, individual very minor mistakes which prevented us from going there.”
Closer to home, in the DTM, the team also had an astonishing season.
Since switching from Class 1 Touring Cars to run a modified version of Group GT3 grand touring cars, the championship features closer racing than ever before.
Taking seven wins of the campaign’s 16 races, Manthey proved its worth as one of the series’ top contenders. But even with that level of success, in such a competitive championship, the title came right down to the final lap.
A phenomenal pass from Ayhancan Güven during the last race at Hockenheim sealed him his maiden drivers’ title, and added another teams’ trophy to Manthey’s collection.
Raeder says: “It was one of the most impressive races for me, and one of the hardest races especially, so I’m happy I didn’t die from a heart attack. I’m sure now I have no heart problems.
“The WEC races, you have six, eight, 10, 24 hours, you can work a long race, work a strategy, compare some performance things. If you are, BoP-wise, not the fastest, you can drive a proper race with our skills.
“DTM is so close, you have the qualifying and if you are two-tenths or three-tenths down then you are lost, it’s more or less impossible to come back. The BoP situation is difficult. BoP changed a lot over the weekends, but also there at the end, many drivers could reach the championship and for sure there was a lot of luck, but for sure you have to do it.
“You have to take the luck, and this we did, especially Ayhancan in the last race, but in the races before. So there was lots of ups and downs, and without mistakes everybody could be in the other situation. So this was special.”
Arkenau adds: “It was nothing we could really believe - we did everything to be in the position, we tried our very best in Hockenheim in the final race to be able to achieve it, but it’s nothing we really had on our agenda because we’ve never been the favourites coming to Hockenheim.
“But in the end, with very solid races, a bit of luck with the rainy race on Saturday and very good performance of all our three drivers and the team giving them such a fantastic car, it just happened and we just made it possible.
“Then Ayhancan executed, you could see in the last lap he really wanted to be champion, he had everything which he needed to become champion, under enormous pressure he didn’t do a mistake and when he was actually beaten, he pulled the impossible move out of the hat and was able to fight back.
“This is what a real champion needs and this is why he is a deserved champion of the 2025 DTM season and we’re very proud of it.”
Looking ahead to 2026, Manthey will embark on another new adventure: Heading Stateside to make its debut in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.
In the GTD PRO class, the Grello Porsche (#911) will be competing with Klaus Bachler, Ricardo Feller and Thomas Preining at the wheel.
Ryan Hardwick, Riccardo Pera and Morris Schuring will pilot the 1st Phorm #912 car, which will be entered in the GTD class, with Lietz joining the trio for the season opener in Daytona.
The team pointed to commercial factors as a motivation to join the championship, emphasising that the US expansion is a ripe opportunity to boost the brand’s profile.
But of course, the desire for sporting success is also key.
“We’re very happy to do it,” Arkenau says. ‘In terms of sporting challenges, it will be a good mixture of DTM and WEC actually. You have the endurance character, you have the way the racing is, you have pitstops, strategy, driver changes, so everything we have also in WEC.
“But if it comes to the final hour where statistically there will be a yellow somewhere in between the last two hours to 30 minutes, you also come to a sprint race, which is more like DTM. So in the end this is where you actually do the race and where you definitely go for the results.
“This is a very good mixture of the two worlds. This is how we tackle it, we use our experience from both championships and try to do our best there and we’re definitely very much looking forward to it.”
With another Asian Le Mans Series campaign now underway ahead of IMSA’s season opener in January, there are plenty of opportunities for Manthey to continue its winning streak. And with such a strong season behind them in 2025, there are sure to be a few more trophies added to the cabinet in 2026.
The IMSA season gets underway with the 24 Hours of Daytona on January 24/25, before the Asian Le Mans Series continues with the 4 Hours of Dubai on January 31.
