2009 Nurburgring 24 Hours is over.

The 2009 24 hours has ended with a victory for the Olaf Manthey team's yellow and green Porsche no 1.
After 155 hard fought laps of the Nordschliefe the team was victorious for the fourth straight year, the 3rd year with this driver line-up of Timo Bernhard, Marc Lieb, Romain Dumas and Marcel Tiemann.
They fought initially against the pole-sitting Ford GT and then against their team mates in the no 2 car and the two fastest Audi R8'S, the lead changing constantly throughout the race.
They also successfully appealed against a 3-minute stop and go penalty that they suffered during the night. It was given for excessive speed during a yellow flag period for some track repairs, but subsequent examination of the on-board telemetry showed they had slowed as required and they were given the time back, actually 3 minutes 26 seconds.

Audi was able to retain 2nd place with the Team ABT no 97 car of Christian Abt, Pierre Kaffer, Lucas Luhr and Jean-Francois Hemroulle.
The No 2 Manthey car of Dirk Werner, Emmanuel Collard, Wolf Henzler and Richard Leitz finished 3rd, 3 laps down after a driveshaft had to be changed with 4 hours to go.
The remaining three Audis suffered a variety of problems and finished in 5th, 12th and 23rd places in the order car no 99 ( Basseng, Fassler, Stippler, Rockenfeller), 98 ( Fassler, Pirro, Biela, Stuck) and 100 ( Scheider, Werner, Ekstrom, Luhr).
Lucas Luhr managed to finish both 2nd and 23rd, Marcel Fassler managing 5th and 6th! - quite an achievement.
Uwe Alzen was 4th in his Porsche 997 GT3 no 18, the Sabine Schmitz car no 3 was in 6th place.
7th through 9th were also Porsches, Manthey car no 4 in 7th, Muhlner Motorsport car no 123 in 8th and the all-Australian team of Quinn, Quinn, Baird and and Denyer in the VIP Pet foods car no 29 in 9th.
In 10th place, and winner of "our" class, SP6, was the BMW Z4M, car no 69 of Adams, Ludwig, Meier and Grossman.

The Bonk Motorsport M3, car no 178, finished 35th overall and 2nd in class.