Bortolotti and Engelhart Storm Hockenheim for a Third Season Win
Mirko Bortolotti and Christian Engelhart, driving the #63 Lamborghini Huracán GT3 Evo for Orange1 by GRT Grasser, took their third ADAC GT Masters victory of the 2019 season at the Hockenheimring. More than a standalone result, the win distilled everything that made the Huracán platform so stubbornly competitive: patient racecraft rewarded by a car whose pace never faded when it mattered most.
The pair started the first of the weekend’s two races from second on the grid, slotting in alongside pole-sitter Dennis Marschall. Bortolotti ran strongly in second through the opening stint, biding his time rather than forcing an early move. As the mandatory pit stops approached, the #63 car’s pace advantage became obvious. Marschall got baulked by a slower car, and Bortolotti seized the lead under braking for the Turn 4 hairpin.
“I had a good restart and got myself alongside Dennis Marschall, but I had to back off because it was all rather tight. I then opted to stick behind him and only went back on the attack towards the end of my stint. I had some luck with the traffic coming out of the pit lane and managed to get past.”
Bortolotti handed the car to Engelhart, who controlled the gap through the remaining laps to cross the line ahead of the Mercedes pairing of Maxi Goetz and Indy Dontje. Former Lamborghini Super Trofeo driver Carrie Schreiner claimed her first series podium alongside Marschall in third, a noteworthy result that underlined the depth of talent feeding through Lamborghini’s own single-make ladder.
A V10 That Kept Winning While the Grid Kept Changing
The Hockenheim victory gains sharper meaning when you consider the age of the weapon doing the winning. The Huracán GT3 platform first appeared a decade ago, and Lamborghini continued to campaign updated versions of that same car for much of that period. As Road & Track noted when the Temerario GT3 was finally revealed, eleven different brands introduced entirely new GT3 cars during the same timeframe. Porsche alone released three distinct GT3 iterations.
The Huracán GT3 Evo kept winning anyway. Its naturally aspirated V10, displacing 5,204 cc and producing 640 PS, gave customer teams a known quantity: a predictable powerband, a reliable mechanical package, and a sound that could wake the dead at Hockenheim’s long back straight. The car weighs 1,230 kg and sends power through a six-speed sequential gearbox, a layout that rewards smooth driving inputs and teams who understand tire management over raw qualifying pace.
One report indicates the later EVO2 iteration’s bodywork was developed in collaboration with Dallara Engineering, the same firm behind some of the most successful single-seater chassis in history. That partnership, combined with a reported 42/58 front-to-rear weight distribution optimized for circuit work, helps explain why the platform remained a threat at tracks from Zandvoort to the Sachsenring even as competitors arrived with more modern aero philosophies and turbocharged powertrains. The Huracán GT3 was not the newest car on any grid in 2019. It was frequently the most effective.
The Championship That Got Away
Winning races and winning championships require different kinds of consistency, and the 2019 ADAC GT Masters season illustrated that gap with painful clarity for Lamborghini fans. After the Hockenheimring victory, Bortolotti and Engelhart sat 38 points behind the championship leaders with 75 points still available. The math was technically alive, but barely.
A third-place finish in the second race on Sunday kept the pressure on, yet it proved insufficient. South African Kelvin van der Linde and his Swiss co-driver Patric Niederhauser clinched the overall title before the season finale at the Sachsenring, leaving the Lamborghini crew as the most prolific winners of the year without the trophy that mattered most.
The season featured sixteen different race winners from eight teams across six brands, a level of competitiveness that makes any championship run a war of attrition as much as outright speed. Bortolotti and Engelhart led more laps than any other pairing that season (114 of 538 total), a statistic that tells you everything about the car’s raw pace and nothing about the points it left on the table at rounds where mechanical gremlins or qualifying positions cost them dearly. For teams evaluating customer GT3 cars, that kind of data point matters: the Huracán could lead, could win, and could do it repeatedly. Converting that into a season-long title required the kind of luck and consistency that eluded Lamborghini in 2019.
Why GT3 Wins Matter More Than the Scoreboard Suggests
Lamborghini’s GT3 program operates on a different logic than factory prototype racing. Every Huracán GT3 Evo on the grid is a customer car, purchased and campaigned by private teams like GRT Grasser. Squadra Corse provides technical support and development, but the teams bear the operational costs and make their own strategic calls. When a customer car wins, it validates the product in the most public and measurable way possible.
For prospective buyers of GT3 machinery, results like the Hockenheimring victory function as a real-world durability test. A car that can survive the punishment of ADAC GT Masters sprint races, with their mandatory driver changes and aggressive multi-brand grids, demonstrates reliability under conditions no test session can replicate. The Super Trofeo one-make series, widely recognized as the world’s fastest single-marque championship, serves as a feeder system, and Schreiner’s podium at Hockenheim after graduating from that series shows the pipeline working as intended.
GT3 racing also serves a brand function that Lamborghini understands acutely. The sound of that naturally aspirated V10 at full throttle, reverberating off grandstands at circuits across Europe, reinforces an identity that turbocharged competitors simply cannot replicate in the same visceral way. Every customer team running the Huracán GT3 Evo is, in effect, a rolling advertisement for what makes Lamborghini different. That distinction carried weight in 2019, and it frames the challenge facing whatever comes next.
From Huracán GT3 to Temerario: What Changes and What Carries Forward
The Lamborghini Temerario GT3, the brand’s next-generation GT3 contender, represents the most significant platform change in Lamborghini’s customer racing history. After a decade of iterating on the same V10 architecture, the shift to an entirely new car raises questions that the 2019 season helps frame.
The Huracán GT3 Evo’s greatest strength was its known-quantity status. Teams understood its behavior intimately, mechanics could service it in their sleep, and drivers trusted its progressive handling characteristics. Replacing that institutional knowledge with a new platform carries real risk, particularly when competitors like Porsche and Ferrari already have current-generation GT3 cars with seasons of data behind them.
Lamborghini’s broader motorsport ambitions add another layer of complexity. The SC63 prototype entry, which faced an early retirement from the 24 Hours of Daytona due to an apparent powertrain issue, showed that expanding into GTP-class endurance racing brings growing pains. Road & Track reported that Lamborghini’s racing team maintains its GTP program continues to move forward despite early setbacks. Running two major development programs simultaneously stretches resources in ways that the Huracán-only era never demanded.
The practical takeaway for anyone following Lamborghini’s racing trajectory: the 2019 season proved that the Huracán platform could win races deep into its lifecycle against newer, more expensive rivals. The Temerario GT3 needs to establish that same kind of longevity quickly, because customer teams making six-figure purchasing decisions care less about launch-year headlines and more about whether the car will still be competitive in year three, four, and five. Bortolotti and Engelhart’s Hockenheimring victory, years into the Huracán’s competitive life, remains the best argument Squadra Corse can make for what their engineering philosophy delivers over time.
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