Insight: Bortolotti, Lamborghini and The Win They Thought Would Never Come
Sportscar365 speaks to newly crowned 24H Spa winner Mirko Bortolotti on the significance of long-awaited victory in Belgian classic…
When Mirko Bortolotti drove his GRT Grasser Racing Team Lamborghini Huracan GT3 EVO2 to victory in the CrowdStrike 24 Hours of Spa last Sunday, it ended a decade-long struggle for victory for the Italian brand.
Ever since the Huracan GT3 debuted at Spa, all the way back in 2015, success in the event was a key area of focus for Lamborghini Squadra Corse, at the time under the leadership of Giorgio Sanna.
However, as good results came in the broader GT World Challenge Europe powered by AWS championships and the Huracan GT3 won the likes of the Rolex 24 at Daytona and Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring, Spa remained a consistent thorn in Lamborghini’s side.
Its first overall top ten wasn’t achieved until the fifth attempt, when Andrea Caldarelli, Marco Mapelli and Dennis Lind finished eighth. Last year, Mapelli, Jordan Pepper and Franck Perera improved upon that with fifth.
Now, however, ten years after its first factory-backed GT3 attempt at the race, Lamborghini is finally a 24H Spa winner, thanks to the efforts of Bortolotti, Jordan Pepper and Luca Engstler.
“It's been huge, definitely,” Bortolotti tells Sportscar365. “There's no other definition. I think it's a race where we've shown our potential many, many times, but for several reasons we never really managed to pull it off.
“And to be honest, at some stage, I started to lose the belief that we will ever get in a position to win, even though we knew we could be capable of it. I think that also explains how complicated, how difficult and how particular this race is.
“To take the victory in the last year of the Huracan, I would say the circle is complete now. Definitely an incredible fairytale as well from that point of view. So it's great to turn this dream into reality.”
In more ways than one, Bortolotti needed to be the one to deliver this victory for Lamborghini.
He has been a part of the Huracan GT3 program effectively from the very start, aside from one year at Audi in 2020. That year he did not compete in the 24H Spa, meaning every single one of his event appearances came with the Raging Bull.
In recent years, the Belgian endurance classic had not been kind for the 35-year-old. He finished eighth in 2021, his best finish to date prior to last weekend’s victory, and then went on a run of three consecutive retirements. In both 2022 and 2024, accident damage brought the race to an end, while a second-hour brake issue in 2023 was particularly painful.
With all that in mind, taking the checkered flag at the end of 24 grueling hours logically brought an outpour of emotions.
“Honestly, there were a lot of things going on in my head,” says Bortolotti. “For me, this is a success that was not only done in Spa in 2025. This was something that was steadily built step by step from day one.
“Honestly, I was thinking about the people working in the background, everybody involved in this project. Not only the people that are involved now, but also and especially all the people that were involved from day one that made this project happen, that made this project grow, that put the full trust into us, into the drivers, into the program, into the project.
“People who never stopped believing and supported us from day one. Especially considering the many setbacks we had and still believing. These things are making the difference at the end of the day. And so for me, it's a lot more than what we have seen in the garage at Spa.
“I want to thank all of the people that were involved from the first day of the Huracan.”
When we caught up with Bortolotti, it had been a few days since he stood on the top step at Spa. For that, there was a good reason. When his co-drivers Engstler and Pepper arrived at the post-race press conference on Sunday afternoon, large trophies in hand, Bortolotti was notably missing.
Instead, he had been taken to the on-site medical center, having buckled under the intense heat that characterized this year’s running of the Belgian classic.
“In the car I felt really good until the very last lap and even after the checkered flag,” Bortolotti recalls. “So I was actually ready to do another stint if I had to. There was no issue. But, to be honest, the in-lap was really slow. Probably a bit too slow, so no air flow really came into the cockpit.
“Then obviously doing an extra lap and then obviously trying to park the car in the paddock where you have to do this little road through the fans and stuff, all the heat really from the car came into the cockpit.
“The temperatures were super high, and that really was the issue. We had some ventilation, but it broke after a few hours in the car. It was not an issue driving the car doing double stints, in my case it was almost a triple stint, but the issue was when there was no air coming in.
“When you were driving at very low speed, like it happened on the in-lap, so basically that was the reason why I started to feel really bad. I got out of the car and I really needed to cool down basically. I did not really need liquids, what I really needed was the cooling down.”
By his own recollection, Bortolotti recovered relatively quickly but spent an extra day in Spa to recuperate before moving on towards his next race weekend as he’s competing at this weekend’s DTM round at Norisring.
Although the win was, as Bortolotti himself said, a “fairytale” for all involved, it very nearly wasn’t to be.
As happens so often in endurance racing, the race had one final twist in the tail when, with Rutronik Racing’s Patric Niederhauser breathing down his neck, Bortolotti’s blue and white Lamborghini initially refused to fire into life after the final pitstop.
“It was a few seconds that felt like a few hours, to be honest,” he recalls. “It is a situation that I don’t wish upon anyone. Basically, the same procedure as usual, waiting until the refueling was done.
“The moment the car hit the ground, I did the same procedure as usual, trying to fire it up, but it didn't want to start. I heard the noise of the starter motor in a really weird way. It kind of felt like it failed.
“But then I just relaxed. I released the clutch and stuff and tried to redo the full procedure. Luckily, the thing started up, but I can tell you that in the moments the car dropped and I just wanted to leave and had those noises like two, three times in a row, I thought, ‘F*** me, what the f*** is going on?’
“Luckily, I stayed calm also in the car to just redo the whole thing. Luckily it started and in the end we lost six or seven seconds. I knew it would have been close on the out lap. I think Patric was some traffic on the laps after his pitstop. Maybe that helped a bit, but it was good to see that we were still in front of him. The pressure was on, that’s for sure.”
Ultimately, Bortolotti was able to stretch out an advantage over the No. 96 Porsche 911 GT3 R to take home the emotional win, with the outpour in the garage clearly showing the significance of this achievement.
In the middle of the celebrations was a man that Bortolotti has built an incredibly close relationship with over the past decade: team owner Gottfried Grasser.
“If there's one guy out there that deserves it, it's definitely him and his team,” Bortolotti says. “Simply for the fact that everything we have right now, we’ve built with our own hands. Nobody has really given us a winning product or a finished product on day one.
“It was all learning by doing and all hard lessons that we had to learn over the years not only in Spa but in general and I think that being able to take and to win the biggest GT3 race in the world together with Gottfried ten years after the beginning it's just a dream come true for me.
“I’ve always said Gottfried is more than just a team [boss] for me, more than just a friend. It's a family. It's hard to put into words what it means to us.”
It’s an achievement worth celebrating. For a decade, Lamborghini was pushing to win the biggest GT3 race in the world. Now, through years of setback and heartbreak, they finally have it.
Photos: JEP, VSA, Lamborghini