Mr. 24 Hours: Nick Tandy! The British racing driver wins 24 Hours grand slam.

24 Hours of Le Mans 2015: The biggest

The first of the big wins, and according to Tandy, the “pinnacle of motorsport”.

Tandy, Formula 1 driver Nico Hülkenberg and Earl Bamber headed to the Circuit de la Sarthe in just their second race outing in the Porsche 919 Hybrid, having made their debut in the previous round at Spa.

Tandy was the only driver of the three to arrive with experience of the endurance classic, having already competed in two races at Circuit de la Sarthe with Porsche in the GT class.

Lining up third on the grid for the world’s most famous race, it was a tough start for the #19 crew, dropping down the order to eighth after the first two laps before settling into sixth as the race bedded in.

Tandy recalled: “There was an early safety car and we got caught in a group of cars that we basically lost about a minute due to being on the wrong part of track at the wrong time early in the race, and that's when I started to worry.

“I think we were a minute behind early in the race, but that inspired us all to really get on with the race, to be honest. Because there's times when you want to settle into a 24-hour race, especially when you know the car is fast.

“You always want to settle in before you put the car under too much stress and take more risks, whereas I think that inspired us all to just crack on and start driving as fast as we comfortably could do. So it wasn't really an issue, but it was the only kind of hiccup that we had during the race.”

The trio were spurred on in the face of adversity and fought back, capitalising on troubles for those in front to eventually cross the finish line a lap ahead and secure the seventeenth overall victory for Porsche at Le Mans.

Tandy continued: “I remember there was a point when there was us and one of the Audis left on the lead lap early in the morning, and it was still kind of nip and tuck and we were ahead, we had a decent lead, but if anything went a little bit wrong, then they were right there.

“So there was always this big pressure still, as we were coming into the morning up towards the end of the race. At one point it [the Audi] had an issue, I think the bodywork came detached, and it lost a lot of time in the pits, and then all of a sudden we were a lap ahead of the field, and we've got this comfortable margin.

“It turned from being stressful from the point of view of trying to be competitive, into even more stress hoping we didn't have any issues. I think we had three or four hours left to go and we just had to drive around, basically, and hope that nothing happened. So that was by far the most stressful part of the race.

The #17 crew of Timo Bernhard, Brendon Hartley and Mark Webber, who would go on to win the World Endurance Championship that year, finished second in a glorious 1-2 for Porsche - the fourth time in history such a feat had occurred.

Nürburgring 24H 2018: The hardest

“I've always said that the Nürburgring is the hardest race to win out of all the majors,” says Tandy, and the 2018 edition of the Eifel epic was no different.

It was a fierce battle against not just the strong field, as Tandy explains, with “about 20 or 30 cars that are capable of winning”, but also against the elements, pitching man and machine against Mother Nature and an onslaught of torrential rain, thick fog and the treacherous 25.378 km / 15.770 mile track - including the infamous Nordschleife.

The #912 Porsche 911 GT3 R, run by Manthey Racing and shared by Tandy, Richard Lietz, Patrick Pilet and Fred Makowiecki, lined up sixth on the grid, but the race took an unfortunate turn before the second lap was even complete.

“We got a puncture as we started the second lap,” Tandy recalls. “But we were quite lucky really, because it happened on the Grand Prix circuit, and at the Nürburgring you can come in the back door of the pits before you go out onto the North Loop, the Nordschleife.

“If we'd have got a puncture about 30 seconds later, we'd have probably been out of the race or lost 20 minutes trying to do the 12 miles of the Nordschleife to come back, so we were lucky in the fact we got it on the Grand Prix circuit and we could pit.

“I think we lost six and a half minutes on lap one. We were dead last, but we had a fast car.”

So, the race was not off to a good start. But the quartet pushed on, going flat-out, attacking where they could and taking risks in order to steadily chip away at the gap to the leaders.

Tandy reels off a list of incidents which hampered their progress - a spin on the Nordschleife in the rain behind crashing cars, contact from another competitor as they exited the pits - but, as he says, “all these things happened, and we kept going, and the car was good, and we were up there in the top three.”

Next came a red flag, as heavy rain fell on the notoriously changeable circuit, at which point the #912 crew, though having caught up to the pack overnight, were still minutes off the leader. But the restart reset the order, and with three cars on the lead lap with two hours remaining, the race was heading into its most crucial stage.

“Fred was the driver in the car for the red flag, and I think he had the most experience of the heavy rain conditions, so we said ‘we want you to go back out there, and we want you to drive for the win, and only for the win,’ because we'd done all this work and effort and taken all this risk to try and come back from adversity in the race,” Tandy says.

“We didn't want to say ‘drive safe and see what happens’, and give all that up. We said ‘if you crashed, if you destroyed the car now going for the win, but we could see that you were trying to win the race, then we would be behind you 100% of the way’. Because obviously, if you crash car in a 24-hour race, or any race, there's people to answer to as to why you did it.

“So we said, yeah, go out there, do everything you can. And he got the job done.”

A masterful move from Makowiecki with just 70 minutes remaining allowed the team take the first Porsche win at the event for seven years, and its 12th overall - “a mega one” for Tandy.

Spa 24H 2020: The most physical

18 full course yellows, 14 safety cars, and the only time Tandy has cried at the wheel of a race car: The Spa 24H in 2020 was another gruelling exercise in endurance that almost made his Nürburgring win look like a walk in the park.

Described by Tandy as “the hardest physical race that we do,” due to the circuit’s unrelenting nature, the Rowe Racing-run entry shared by Tandy, Earl Bamber and Laurens Vanthoor was struggling for pace heading into the COVID-delayed event, moved from July to October due to the pandemic.

Lining up 20th, the trio dropped back in the dry and continued to struggle for pace in the wet, but crucially avoided mistakes and remained on the lead lap “always in and amongst it, but we were never at the front, because we were never fast”.

With rivals dropping out heading into the morning, the team’s prospects improved, before it began to rain with five hours remaining. Tandy recalls a conversation with Bamber in which the pair agreed that it was their best chance yet at victory, with this event the final 24-hour race in which Tandy was yet to take a class win.

The pair agreed that they would give it everything they had, and began to gain on the lead Audi. A crucial pitstop gamble, where the team kept the same tyres while the Audi switched, gave them the perfect opportunity to take the lead - and from there, “with five minutes to go, the race was done, it was over.”

But, of course, things could not be straightforward.

“We were comfortably cruising around without care in the world, and then the gearbox blew up on the penultimate lap,” Tandy says. “It was the penultimate lap, I remember exactly where it was - so I exited Bruxelles, Turn 10, in second gear, and I heard this almighty bang.

“I thought ‘what the hell is that?’ and I let off the throttle and coasted into the next corner. Then I went back to the accelerator again after the next corner, and the thing just started making the worst noise you could imagine going down the straight. I knew that we had damaged something seriously, but the car still had drive.”

With just one-and-a-half laps, or three minutes, left of the 24-hour epic, Tandy was in “mass panic.” He was in the car, brutally aware of the “feeling going through the car of the drivetrain knocking and this horrendous noise, this horrendous knocking noise inside the car,” while the team was desperately examining telemetry for any clues as to what had gone wrong.

Meanwhile, just five seconds behind, the #66 Attempto Racing Audi was catching. A frantic Tandy - one hand on the radio button calling for help from his team, the other attempting to hold off the Audi - was practically crawling around, hoping for a miracle that meant he could cross the finish line.

Fortunately, the odds swung in his favour.

“I said [to the team] I need you to tell me the gap to the car behind, because we were coming to the end of the penultimate lap. They said it was two seconds, and then it became four seconds, and then it became four and a half seconds. And I thought, what the hell is going on? Because I'm pulling away yet I'm driving as slowly as I possibly can.

“Of course, as it turns out, the part that broke was the main differential, and it had fired one of the big teeth through the gearbox casing. So the gearbox now had a massive hole in it, and lo and behold, as I was driving around the track, I was leaving a huge oil slick.

“So then the car that was directly behind me was the chasing Audi, so he was the first one on the scene. And apparently he was off the track and sliding all over it because he's trying on my oil.”

The feeling once Tandy got out of the car was “incredible”. “I think it's the only time I've cried in the race car.

“This had been going on for, you know, a lap and three quarters, thinking we're gonna throw away this chance to win Spa 24H which may never, ever happen again. You know, it hadn't happened up to there.

“I had to nurse it through another lap, obviously still trying to get the gap to the car behind and we made it, by the skin of our teeth. We made it with no oil left in the gearbox, and I remember I crossed the line and I broke down into tears because it was so… I don't know what the feeling is, to be honest.

“It’s not relief, because you're not relieved to win, but it’s not in jubilation either. I guess it's just a release of everything. There was all this tension built up in me, probably from that moment that me and Earl talked before we both went in for the last stints, and it just built through the race, and we finally got to the lead and then this gearbox failure happened.

24 Hours of Daytona 2025: The smoothest… and the final hurdle

“Smooth as anything - unlike a 24-hour race I’ve ever experienced,” says Tandy of this year’s 24 Hours of Daytona, the 20th overall win for Porsche at IMSA’s biggest event.

Lining up third, the trio of Felipe Nasr, Nick Tandy and Laurens Vanthoor were consistently challenging the leaders, establishing themselves at the front of the field early on.

Maintaining their commanding position into the final hours of the race, it was a decisive sprint to victory in the last 40 minutes after the final yellow flag period which sealed the win - Nasr’s second consecutive Daytona victory.

Tandy says that though the team did not have the fastest car, flawless strategy and no penalties put them right into contention.

“That was the key for us, really, because, we didn't just drive around, but we drove around for 23 hours, 23 and a half hours, we just put fuel and tyres in the car and on the car,” he says.

“We didn't have a single penalty. We had almost zero damage on the car. We were almost never out of the top six, and very rarely out the top two the whole 24 hours. And like I say, I've never experienced such a clean race, ever in a 24-hour. But it was always the plan, it always is the plan, you know.”

He added: “It was great to be part of the team that executed that race. The team never made a mistake on strategy, we never made a mistake in the pits. We set the car up well, everybody that works behind the scenes on setting up the software and the power train, stuff like this, everything worked as we wanted it to.


“It’s actually the first time we've had it on the 963, so I think we're learning a bit about it. It’s just a massively proud thing to be a part of when you have a race run the way that did.”

Though he says the grand slam “doesn’t come into your thinking during the race… because all you think about is winning”, now that it has sunk in, he is able to reflect on what an “astonishing” feat it was.

“It’s never something I set out to do,” he says. “I've not finished yet, don't get me wrong, but when I started to take racing seriously and tried to make it my career, which wasn't that long ago, it was probably only 12 years ago, I wanted to win one of these big marquee events, whether that be Spa or Sebring.

“I thought if I could get a win, your name is forever in the history books. I remember when I won my first British Formula Ford race, and it was halfway through the season, but it was probably gonna be my last race because we'd run out of money.

“And I remember thinking, it doesn't matter now, because I've got my name as a winner of British Formula Ford, which is an incredible achievement, that in itself. I thought that was awesome, [even] if I stopped then.

“Luckily, we didn’t, my brother [the late Joe Tandy] had other ideas to let me carry on racing. And it was a similar thing, just to win something and have your name so you can always look back and go ‘yeah, I won a British Formula Ford race, or I won the Sebring 12 Hours and this bit of paper here proves it’. But yeah, to go any further is just unbelievable.”

With one enormous achievement in the history books, Tandy has the chance to set another record in March: An overall victory at the 12 Hours of Sebring would make him the first driver to take overall wins at the six major endurance races - the grand slam quartet along with Petit Le Mans and Sebring.

A Sebring win would also see him join the prestigious list of endurance racing icons to complete the Triple Crown: Le Mans, Daytona and Sebring.

With so much at stake for both Tandy and the team, follow all the action from the 12 Hours of Sebring and the rest of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship on the Porsche Motorsport Hub.