A historic moment for Timo Bernhard and his team

Even before the start of the new 2023 DTM race season, on 22 March Porsche brand ambassador Timo Bernhard and his team ‘KÜS Team Bernhard’ received a very special honour: the revival of a lost legend.

First things first: it was a memorable, historic summer’s day on 2 July 2022 when Thomas Preining, the Austrian factory driver at the wheel of the 911 GT3 R with the starting number 24, crossed the finish line in first place on the Norisring city circuit in Nuremberg in front of 70,000 delighted spectators, thus achieving the first victory of the KÜS Team Bernhard’s debut season – and the historic first DTM triumph for Porsche in this motorsport series steeped in tradition. 

Thanks to subsequent top results during the race series, the team headed by two-time World Endurance Champion and Le Mans overall winner Timo Bernhard even had a chance of finishing the season as overall winners upon reaching the season finale at the Hockenheimring. Sadly, it did not work out quite that way: the team’s championship dreams were quite literally shattered when the 911 GT3 R suffered a violent collision with a rival car during the race and was badly damaged.

The historic motorsport team under the Porsche Heritage and Museum division took on the task of attending to the vehicle casualty. The restoration specialists managed to work with the team to rebuild the vehicle.

22 March saw this historic ‘winning Porsche’ be officially included in the corporate collection of the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart. In a public presentation to experts and some of the team, Timo handed over the racing car, which visitors can now see in exhibition space with its beautiful atmosphere and decoration.

This was a huge honour for the team owner, who was filled with pride in the exceptional work and support from his team and family that made this success possible.

This is not the first of the endurance racing legend and successful German motorsport racer’s cars to end up in the Zuffenhausen sports car maker’s museum: this week, Timo Bernhard came across three other racing cars in the Porsche Museum in which he had won titles for the German sports car manufacturer in his many years as a racing driver.

As well as the Porsche 919 Hybrid which gave him the 2015 championship title in the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC), there is also the RS Spyder that took Bernhard to success in 2007 and 2008 in the American Le Mans Series (ALMS/LMP2), plus the 911 GT3 Cup in which he won his first Porsche championship title – the Porsche Supercup – in 2001.

And so, for the first time, this team owner from the Palatinate region has been immortalised in the eternal halls of the Porsche Museum as a team boss with a winning car. The fact that this happened in the 75th anniversary year of the Porsche sports car is a happy accident and an amusing quirk of numbers, but for once this was not coordinated or planned, despite all of the perfection, passion and determination that has shaped the many years of collaboration between Timo and Porsche.