A 17-Year-Old Egyptian Just Rewrote the Record Books at Nürburgring’s Super Trofeo Europe Round

Nürburgring Delivers a Landmark Day for Lamborghini Super Trofeo Europe

Ibrahim Badawy, a 17-year-old racing under the Lamborghini Roma by DL Racing banner, became the first Egyptian driver ever to win a race in the Lamborghini Super Trofeo series when he took the Am class victory at the Nürburgring on 29 July 2023. In the same 50-minute race, VS Racing’s Gilles Stadsbader and Mattia Michelotto collected their third Pro class win of the season, reclaiming the championship lead at the calendar’s midpoint.

Those two results, separated by several classes and a considerable gap in experience, tell complementary stories about what makes Lamborghini’s one-make series compelling. One is a seasoned pairing executing a near-flawless weekend at a circuit Stadsbader had never raced before. The other is a teenager in his first full season of competition, capitalizing on chaos to deliver a result that resonated well beyond the Eifel paddock. Both played out on identical Huracán Super Trofeo EVO2 machinery, which is precisely the point: the car is the constant, the driver is the variable.

How VSR Controlled the Pro Class from Pole to Flag

Michelotto earned the extra championship point for pole position and converted it into an immediate lead off the rolling start. His early pace looked comfortable enough, but the real tension built behind him. Brendon Leitch of Leipert Motorsport, starting further back, used the mandatory pit window strategically, emerging in clean air and stringing together a series of fast laps that vaulted him past BDR Competition’s Amaury Bonduel for second in class.

By the time Stadsbader took over from Michelotto, Leitch was closing rapidly. The gap shrank to under six seconds before the New Zealander lost time with a mistake at turn four, a costly error of roughly four seconds that effectively ended the threat. Stadsbader, racing at the Nürburgring for the first time, held firm.

“I had to push as hard as possible, because Brendon was coming quite fast, and the tyre degradation was not so easy in the last laps. I saw Brendon in my mirrors, but I was far enough ahead thankfully,” Stadsbader said after the race.

Michelotto was equally direct: “We only missed the fastest lap to take it all.” Bonduel completed the Pro podium in third, while several Pro-Am entries running among the Pro cars on track added another layer of traffic management to an already tense second stint.

From Cairo to the Checkered Flag: Badawy’s Breakthrough

The Am class race was far less tidy, and that suited Badawy perfectly. Points leader Gabriel Rindone of Leipert Motorsport looked set to extend his championship advantage until Iron Lynx’s Marc Rostan, who had taken over from early leader Claude-Yves Gosselin, spun at the chicane. The incident disrupted Rindone’s rhythm, and a subsequent mechanical issue forced him to slow, dropping him off the podium entirely to fourth.

Badawy, running his first full season of any racing series, seized the opening and pulled away for a clear victory. Lamborghini confirmed it was the first time an Egyptian driver had won a race in the Super Trofeo’s history, a series that began in 2009 and now spans three continental championships plus a global World Final. The Am class exists specifically to give less experienced or gentleman drivers a competitive environment within the broader grid, but winning it still requires genuine pace and composure under pressure, particularly when the leaders ahead are tripping over each other.

Grzegorz Moczulski of GT3 Poland inherited second place, with Boutsen VDS’s Renaud Kuppens and Pierre Feligioni rounding out the Am podium in third. Rindone’s misfortune reshuffled the Am championship picture, making the remaining rounds considerably more interesting for anyone tracking the standings.

Pro-Am and Lamborghini Cup: Close Racing Across the Board

Target Racing’s Frederik Schandorff and Alex Au won the Pro-Am class, a result that looked relatively straightforward on paper but played out against genuine aggression further down the order. The battle for the remaining Pro-Am podium spots involved contact at the chicane in the closing stages, with Micánek Motorsport’s Bronislav Formánek judged responsible for a collision that also collected Iron Lynx’s Nigel Schoonderwoerd and Brutal Fish Racing’s Martin Ryba. Formánek received a 10-second penalty, promoting Schoonderwoerd and Yelmer Buurman to second. The sister Iron Lynx entry of Emanuele Zonzini and Emanuel Colombini held off VS Racing’s Loris Spinelli and Andrzej Lewandowski for third.

The Lamborghini Cup produced the tightest finish of the day. Bonaldi Motorsport’s Paolo Biglieri and Petar Matić won by a quarter of a second over Leipert Motorsport’s Jürgen Krebs after a race-long pursuit. That margin, roughly the length of a Huracán’s front splitter, is the kind of result that justifies the one-make format. When every car on the grid runs the same Huracán Super Trofeo EVO2 with identical 5.2-liter naturally aspirated V10 power, supplied on the same Hankook tyres, gaps that small come down to driver inputs and pit-stop execution. Iron Lynx’s Donovan and Luciano Privitelio completed the Lamborghini Cup podium.

Why Super Trofeo Still Matters in Lamborghini’s Motorsport Ladder

Lamborghini’s customer racing ecosystem operates on a clear logic. The Super Trofeo sits below the GT3 program as both a revenue generator and a talent filter. Drivers who prove themselves here, across Pro, Pro-Am, Am, and Lamborghini Cup classes, build the track record and team relationships needed to step into GT3 competition. Each continental series (Europe, North America, Asia) typically runs six double-race weekends before the top performers converge at the World Final, where continental champions race for a global title.

What the series offers is a controlled environment: identical cars, a single tyre supplier, and a class system that lets a 17-year-old Egyptian teenager race on the same grid as established professionals without being swallowed whole. Few rival one-make series, including Ferrari’s Challenge and Porsche’s Carrera Cup, attract quite this breadth of nationalities and experience levels on a single weekend, though each series structures its classes differently.

The broader strategic picture is also shifting. With the Temerario GT3 now confirmed as Lamborghini’s first fully in-house competition car, the Super Trofeo’s role as a feeder becomes even more significant. Drivers graduating from the Huracán-based one-make series will eventually transition to a turbocharged hybrid platform at the GT3 level, a fundamentally different driving challenge. For now, the naturally aspirated V10 remains the training tool, and results like Badawy’s suggest the pipeline is working.

Championship Stakes and What Comes Next

The Nürburgring was the third of six rounds on the 2023 Super Trofeo Europe calendar, placing it squarely at the season’s halfway mark. Stadsbader and Michelotto’s third win moved them back to the top of the Pro standings, but starting 15th for Race 2 on Sunday meant the championship arithmetic was far from settled. Leitch proved he can match their pace in race trim, and Bonduel remains a consistent podium threat.

In the Am class, Rindone’s mechanical failure opened the door for rivals who had been watching him accumulate points all season. Whether Badawy can convert his historic first win into a sustained championship challenge depends on consistency at circuits he may never have visited, a familiar hurdle for young drivers building international experience on the fly.

The weekend’s second race was scheduled for Sunday morning, with live coverage on Lamborghini Squadra Corse’s YouTube channel. For anyone following the series from a distance, the Nürburgring round offered a useful reminder: the most interesting stories in customer racing rarely come from the car at the front. They come from the ones fighting through the field, adapting to chaos, and occasionally rewriting the history books in the process.

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