Nick Tandy doesn’t chase records. He just keeps winning races, and the records chase him.
The 41-year-old Brit became the first driver in motorsport history to claim overall victories at all four major 24-hour endurance races — Le Mans in 2015, the Nürburgring in 2018, Spa in 2020, and Daytona in 2025. Then, for good measure, his win at last year’s 12 Hours of Sebring made him the first to sweep all six major endurance events. Names like Bernhard, Haywood, and Kristensen never pulled that off. Nobody did, until Tandy.
And yet, talk to the man and he sounds almost indifferent to the enormity of it. I never thought I was going to win a 24-hour race,” Tandy said in a recent interview with Car and Driver. “I never actively chased any of the records. I attained them by winning the next race.”
That matter-of-fact approach is either extreme humility or extreme focus. Probably both.
This season marks a notable shift for Tandy. He left Porsche’s factory-backed Penske team to join AO Racing, the scrappy IMSA squad that fields the fan-favorite Porsche 911 GT3 R known as “Rexy.” The car has become a cultural phenomenon, transcending the paddock in ways few customer-racing entries ever do.
Tandy says people back home in England who have never set foot on this continent know about Rexy. Lego even made it a Technic set.
The move could look like a step down on paper — from a manufacturer giant to a privateer operation. It isn’t. AO Racing is a championship-winning team on both sides of the Atlantic, and Tandy insists the attention to detail matches anything he’s experienced in 15 years of top-level competition. “If you put the work in and you work well together, the end result can be fantastic,” he said.
His career was built almost entirely in Porsche cockpits. Getting into the Porsche Carrera Cup as a young driver leveled a playing field that had been tilted against him. Same car for everyone, pure talent on display. It was the break that turned a promising racer into a professional, and eventually into the most decorated endurance driver of his generation.
Tandy’s insights on the circuits themselves reveal a driver who understands risk at a gut level. He calls the Nürburgring Nordschleife the most dangerous track in the world — not because of its length or its infamous lack of runoff, but because of its relentless speed. “There are hardly any slow-speed corners on the whole of the Nordschleife,” he said. “Everything is third-, fourth-, fifth-gear stuff.”
Couple that with the unpredictable Eifel Mountains weather and you get an event that, if proposed today, would be laughed out of every sanctioning body’s office. “They would turn around and go, ‘No, you’re absolutely stupid, we’re never going to do that,'” Tandy said. He’s right. The Nordschleife exists because tradition trumps modern safety logic, and every year it reminds everyone why it earned its nickname.
At 41, Tandy shows no signs of slowing down. There is no bucket list, no target number of wins, no retirement timeline he’s willing to discuss. The motivation is deceptively simple: win the next race.
Win enough of those and you end up with a Grand Slam, a Big Six sweep, and a nickname like “Mr. 24 Hours” — whether you were aiming for it or not.
The endurance racing world is full of fast drivers. It is not full of drivers who remain fast, consistent, and lucky across four different 24-hour events spanning a decade. The combination of skill, reliability, team chemistry, and sheer survival required to win even one of those races is staggering.
To win all four, plus Sebring and Petit Le Mans, suggests something beyond talent. It suggests a driver who understands that endurance racing rewards patience above all else.
Tandy’s next outing is at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, piloting Rexy through the Corkscrew. For most drivers, that would be the headline. For Tandy, it’s just the next race.
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