With a Le Mans class win and multiple one-make successes under his belt, Morris Schuring tackles the DTM for the first time in 2025. Here's what he had to say midway through the season.
Morris Schuring is a pretty quick learner: the facts of his motorsport career before the age of 20 make this indisputable. These include a
But such are the realities of any sport, and motorsport in particular, that accolades like these at an early age mean you will quickly be challenged again and again.
Schuring's run in the #91 Porsche 911 GT3 R fielded by Manthey EMA in the
Sadly, that success meant he could not stay in the line-up, as it led to a change to his FIA Driver Categorisation status from Silver to Gold. The WEC LMGT3 line-up requirements are Bronze, Silver, Gold or Platinum for the three drivers respectively, so a reshuffle was inevitable.
"I expected it would happen," Schuring admits of his Categorisation upgrade - and he reveals that his team tried to argue against it. "At the end it's quite weird that you have to argue that you're not as good as you look on the results!”
He adds: ”And then DTM was kind of the most obvious championship to go to, knowing that [Manthey] are kind of a famous name there as well, and to build up this programme as a junior, joining Tommy [Preining] and Ayhancan [Güven]."
Obvious - maybe. Difficult - extremely. Not that the WEC is a walk in the park by any means, but Schuring doesn't shy away from the fact there are different pressures in the DTM compared to the life of a Silver-rated driver in a multi-driver endurance racing crew.
"I think it's mentally a really hard championship, if not one of the hardest," Schuring says at July’s Norisring round. "Because you will always be judged on only your own result, there is not somewhere to hide away or whatever, but I think it also makes it a cool championship, because you can really show what you can do.
"Doing it with a team like this, in my opinion the greatest GT team there is, feels like a big privilege.
"For sure the mentality is different from WEC, in WEC it's all quite laid back and relaxed, especially as a Silver, you have to make sure you don't make mistakes, and you do your pace and execute the strategy.
“But it's not that you have to perform 110 percent, because more often than not [if you try to] you will make a mistake. Whereas here you need to be on 100 percent every time.
"Every session is important, you need to be on full attack mode also in the race. It's not frowned upon to make contact or whatever, that's the style of racing here, so that was a bit of an adjustment for me."
It's not a style of racing Schuring is unfamiliar with, as one of the many success stories of the Porsche Carrera Cup system. He happily concurs with the description of DTM being like the Carrera Cup 'on steroids'.
"It's more aggressive,” he says. “The drivers have more awareness and ability, because even if you fight for P16 you're fighting Rene Rast [three-time DTM champion and another Porsche Carrera Cup success story] or whatever, top guys."
Schuring entered into that Carrera world very young, at an age many of his peers give junior single-seaters a go instead.
"For me it was always clear I wanted to be a GT driver, not a formula driver," he insists.
"If you look at formula drivers, at formula series - one, the budgets, they are crazy, and it never really leads to F1 except for really special cases.
"In the end you see a lot of drivers end up here or in LMP2, Hypercar, whatever. it was quite a thought-through decision to go into Cup racing really early - I was 15 years old my first year in Cup [in Porsche Carrera Cup Benelux].
“But I think it really paid off, because I got used to the whole GT environment really early on, and now that's also the reason that I can be in the DTM at 20.
"Otherwise it takes much longer because first at that age you finish formula at 19, then you have to learn the Cup car, so it takes longer.
"My father [Gerwin] was a driver himself, an amateur driver, and he knew the inside-outs of GT racing, and I was always really interested in it. So it was kind of a mutual decision that we would go into this direction.
"I'm really happy that we did this, and I would advise the decision."
During that path in Porsche racing, there was also a sudden DTM opportunity borne out of a test with a another GT customer team that his physio helped set up. It went "better than expected" and led to a call-up to the official DTM young drivers' test, "which also went well".
Another pathway opened, perhaps one leading to a much earlier DTM debut, but Schuring is convinced he was "too young".
"I'm happy that I stayed in Carrera Cup. And also I wanted to stay in the Porsche ecosystem because I feel like a driver with Porsche DNA, I've always driven those series and I know the car really well, I know the world really well, all the people, the teams, which is really important. So I'm really happy that I did it."
Even with him having waited, DTM at age 20 - with series champion Thomas Preining and the accomplished Ayhancan Güven as your reference points - is a real baptism of fire, even when you have the experience of the same car model from the WEC.
"You have a bit more power here, there's a different kind of BoP [balance of performance] - in WEC you have the torque/driveshaft measurement, here you just have air restrictors. The car is a bit lighter, and you have different tyres [Goodyear in WEC, Pirelli in DTM]. That's the main difference.
"The tyres you feel the most, and also the weight, to be honest. The tyre here, without heaters, is very sensitive and difficult. In WEC you also don't have tyre heaters but it's quite an easy tyre to warm up.
“Here it takes a lot of time and it's a very specific procedure to build up the tyre, especially in qualifying. I would say also for any new driver in the DTM that will be the biggest challenge, it's such a specific tyre."
The testing is also limited - "maximum five days, basically". "The way that we test is really efficient, so when we test we do over 150 laps and we go through everything that we planned up front. But still it's not a lot of testing."
Not too surprisingly, there were no points to pick up in his first round at Oschersleben.
Schuring says he "would be lying" if he claimed he'd been happy with that. "But I knew it's going to be difficult.
“You have to be realistic, and if you look at other rookies as well, they experienced the same thing, it takes time to get to the front. So it was just, again, reassuring me, OK, we have to really keep working hard to make the steps, but I'm sure that we can do this."
That was proven very quickly. At his home round at Zandvoort, Schuring brought home a top-five, and though Norisring was much more complicated, it did cement him as a points regular, 14th in the standings at the halfway point of the season.
But Norisring was also a weekend in which a Porsche 911 GT3 R - Preining's - scored the most points, driving home how hard it continues to be for Schuring, even as he builds experience, to match team-mates of this calibre so soon.
Preining and Güven, who has taken a big step forward in 2025, are not to be viewed as enemies though - Schuring is clear on that. "I don't see it as 'against' them. We're three drivers and also really working as a team.
"They are my last opponents on track - first we fight the 21 other drivers, and [only] then each other. I really enjoy it."
Schuring still has unfinished business in the WEC, though missing out on the LMGT3 title last year doesn't eat away at him.
"It would be really nice - but if I have to choose between winning Le Mans and winning the title, I would say... it's at a similar level. Le Mans has its nice bonuses, but also winning the title is really cool.
"But I don't look back at last year with any bad feelings, regrets, whatever - I'm really happy the year happened the way it did because it led to now being here.
"At some stage I would want to go back in my career, maybe in another class, but for sure Le Mans is a place I want to go back to at some stage, but I don't put a timestamp on it now, it will come at whatever time. If not, it's also what it is.
"But now I'm focused on where I am, which is now in Germany in the DTM."
The short-term ambition there is a first podium - "that's a clear goal". It's a no-brainer perhaps, and so are the longer-term aspirations.
"When I start a championship, I want to finish it becoming a champion. So like a medium-term goal is being a DTM champion.
"Long term, I want to keep racing, I want to be with Porsche for a long time, race in the highest possible categories there are and be successful."
Could racing with his brother be a part of that future vision? Maybe, given that the outlook is bright also for Flynt Schuring - a year and a half younger and currently a frontrunner in the Porsche Sixt Carrera Cup Deutschland and the Porsche Mobil 1 Supercup.
"I'm quite sure that at some stage he will make the step, and then there's still plenty of years ahead to do a race together," Morris says of Flynt.
"I would be really interested to see how it would work - you know, sometimes it clicks, sometimes it doesn't work. I think it would work if we both put our egos aside! But at some stage, it would be really nice, yeah.”
