Giti Takes on the Green Hell: Inside the 2026 Nurburgring 24-Hour Campaign

An all-female lineup, a sustainability-led race program, and 26 years of endurance engineering. Here is what Giti is bringing to the most demanding race circuit in the world.

The Nurburgring Nordschleife does not forgive weak engineering. At 25 kilometers of undulating, unpredictable asphalt through the Eifel mountains in Germany, with more than 70 corners, sudden weather changes, and over 1,000 meters of elevation variance across the full circuit, it has earned its name. Drivers call it the Green Hell. Tire engineers call it the most comprehensive test environment in the world.

Giti Tire returns to that test on 14 May 2026 for the Nurburgring 24-Hour race, continuing a relationship with this circuit that now spans more than a decade. This year’s campaign carries additional weight: an all-female race crew, a sustainable fuel initiative, and the presence of Formula 1 World Champion Max Verstappen elevating global attention on the event.

For Giti, every lap of the Nordschleife is accelerated R&D. What the circuit exposes in a tire, no controlled test facility can replicate in the same depth or at the same speed.

The “Girls Only” Campaign: Racing with Purpose

At the center of Giti’s 2026 Nurburgring involvement is the “Girls Only – Ready to Rock the Green Hell” project, run in partnership with WS Racing. Competing in the AT2 class, the team fields car number 146, a Porsche 911 GT3 Cup driven by Carrie Schreiner, Janina Schall, and Fabienne Wohlwend.

The three drivers bring genuine credentials to the program. Janina Schall has been a consistent presence in the NLS Ladies Trophy, defending her lead in that category as recently as the 2025 ADAC Barbarossapreis, where the WS Racing squad ran four cars simultaneously on the Nordschleife. Carrie Schreiner and Fabienne Wohlwend add depth and experience to a lineup that makes no concessions to the difficulty of the circuit.

The “Girls Only” initiative is not a one-off. It is part of a longer-term talent development commitment, with the “Girls Only Talent Pool” introduced by WS Racing as a structured pathway for female drivers in motorsport. The 2025 season marked the debut of that program at the Nordschleife. The 2026 Nurburgring 24-Hour is the next chapter.

Sustainability on the Grid: Racing with eFuel

The 2026 entry does not just carry Giti colors. It carries a sustainability statement. The Porsche 911 GT3 Cup will run on environmentally friendly fuel supplied by “German eFuel One, sponsored by the eFuels Forum” – a demonstration that endurance racing does not have to depend on conventional fossil fuels to remain competitive.

For Giti, this aligns with a broader direction the company has been moving toward. Giti earned the EcoVadis Platinum Medal for sustainability performance for the second consecutive year in 2026, placing it in the top 1 percent of companies globally assessed by the platform. The same period saw Giti secure ISCC+ certification for its manufacturing plants in Anhui and Fujian, China, covering responsible sourcing and supply chain transparency.

Running a race entry on eFuel is not a marketing gesture in isolation. It connects to a company-wide position on sustainable mobility that Giti has been building with growing specificity, from manufacturing credentials through to what fuel fires the engine at one of Europe’s most-watched motorsport events.

Placing an eFuel-powered entry at the Nurburgring 24-Hour puts Giti’s sustainability commitments in the most visible possible context: 24 hours of live racing in front of a global audience.

What the Nurburgring Actually Tests

The circuit’s reputation is not mythology. The Nordschleife subjects tires to a combination of stresses that is genuinely difficult to replicate through conventional testing. Heat management is one dimension: tires cycle through extreme thermal loads across 25 kilometers, with high-speed sections generating significant compound temperatures followed by hard braking zones that drop them rapidly. Over 24 hours, that thermal cycling occurs hundreds of times.

Wet-weather performance is another. The Eifel region is notorious for localized weather that can have one section of the circuit in dry sunshine and another in heavy rain simultaneously. A tire that performs in one condition but degrades in the other becomes a liability at the worst possible moment. Giti engineers stationed at the circuit during race events gather real-time feedback on exactly this kind of condition variation.

Structural durability under sustained load is the third factor. The 24-Hour format means high performance tires spend extended periods at speed, compounding fatigue stresses that shorter events do not expose. The tire constructions Giti deploys here – built around the GitiCompete GTR1 platform used at the Nordschleife, with its race-specific high-strength steel belts, optimized crown arc design to maximize contact area, and reinforced bead design to resist relative slip under aggressive handling – are validated against what the circuit actually does to rubber and casing over a full endurance distance.

From Circuit to Road: What the Data Returns

Giti’s motorsport philosophy is explicit about this transfer. Every lap generates quantitative and qualitative performance data that feeds back into the broader product development process. The company deploys tire engineers and specialists at race events specifically to capture this feedback – not just to support the race team, but to inform decisions about materials, tread design, and structural engineering that eventually reach consumer products.

The Nurburgring is particularly valuable for this because the conditions it generates – sustained heat load, mixed wet and dry, high lateral forces through long corners, hard braking from high speeds – map onto real-world driving scenarios more directly than many purpose-built test circuits. A tire that survives 24 hours here has been subjected to an accelerated version of what years of road use can deliver.

Twenty-Six Years of Building on This Foundation

The 2026 Nurburgring campaign does not exist in isolation. It is part of a motorsport program that Giti has been running for 26 years across multiple disciplines and continents. The NLS series at the Nordschleife has been a consistent fixture for more than a decade. Alongside it, Giti has competed in the Thailand Super Series, the Malaysia Touring Car Championship, the British Truck Racing Championship, the Idemitsu Super Endurance Race, the Formula Regional Middle East Championship, the Macau Grand Prix, the Polo Cup Germany, and a sustained off-road endurance program through the Giti 4×4 Extreme Series.

That breadth is intentional. Different racing disciplines stress tires in different ways. Truck racing imposes extreme load-bearing demands. Off-road endurance tests sidewall integrity, compound flexibility at low pressures, and resistance to debris damage. Formula-category racing pushes thermal performance and grip at the edge of adhesion. Running across all of them simultaneously gives Giti’s engineering teams a data set that no single-discipline program can match.

The GitiCompete race tire family reflects this. The GTR1 is optimized for circuit racing with its angled cross-structure for rigidity and fast handling response, and its special cap ply materials for reduced weight with improved cornering performance. The GTR2 Pro addresses wet performance specifically, with three main grooves of varying depths for drainage and anti-hydroplaning, and large-angle diagonal tread blocks for braking stability. The Race-Tuned V1 uses a special polymer compound with CB/silica blending for tear resistance and a nalo-filler for stiffness in tough conditions. Three different tools, built from the same underlying engineering philosophy, tested across 26 years of competition.

Twenty-six years of motorsport is not a marketing timeline. It is a development timeline. The compounds, constructions, and structural decisions in Giti tires today carry the accumulated learning of every race, every failure, and every data point collected since 2000.

The Broader 2026 Calendar

The Nurburgring 24-Hour is the headline event, but Giti’s 2026 motorsport calendar extends well beyond it. The NLS endurance series at the Nordschleife runs across eight rounds through the season. The British Truck Racing Championship covers circuits from Brands Hatch to Donington Park to Le Mans. The Thailand Super Series and Malaysia Speed Festival provide an Asian circuit racing platform. The Macau Grand Prix in November adds one of motorsport’s most technically demanding street circuits.

Each event contributes differently. The truck racing program tests load capacity and durability under commercial-scale stresses. The Asian touring car series tests performance across high-humidity, high-temperature conditions that European circuits rarely generate. The street circuits test tire behavior on surfaces that change character over the course of a race weekend.

Together, the calendar functions as a global testing network running in parallel with conventional R&D – with the added pressure of competition ensuring that every result is a real-world verdict on performance.

What to Watch at the 2026 Nurburgring 24-Hour

For the 2026 race, the Giti and WS Racing entry to follow is car number 146, Porsche 911 GT3 Cup, AT2 class, driven by Carrie Schreiner, Janina Schall, and Fabienne Wohlwend. The race starts 14 May. The circuit is 25 kilometers. The field will include Formula 1 World Champion Max Verstappen among its competitors, bringing a level of international attention that makes this edition of the event one of the most-watched in recent years.

For Giti, the result matters. But so does what the circuit teaches. Twenty-four hours on the Green Hell is 24 hours of data. And that data, as it has for 26 years, finds its way back into the tires that reach everyday drivers.