Supercup champion Bastian Buus will make his DTM debut in a Land Porsche in 2026: How he overcame several setbacks since 2023 and saw his dream shattered last year
22-year-old Porsche youngster Bastian Buus has finally made the leap into the DTM in 2026. However, it has been a difficult journey for the Dane: the 2023 Porsche Supercup champion, who will drive a new Porsche 911 GT3 R Evo for the Land team, has been working on his dream for several years and has had to overcome a number of setbacks.
“When I won the Supercup in 2023, it was a dream for me to make the leap to the DTM, as it is also a sprint series. And I would say it’s also the toughest there is,” he said. “So for me, it was the right place to be. Unfortunately, there haven’t really been any opportunities for that since then.”
In 2024, it was “not possible,” he alludes to the fact that the Porsche teams Bernhard and Toksport WRT had left the series and only Manthey remained. “And the following year with Allied, it was planned, but then it didn’t happen after all.”
Buus drama: Already presented as a DTM driver a year ago
In fact, Buus had already been presented alongside Ricardo Feller as a driver for the 2025 DTM season a year ago, before there were initial delays with the Allied team in terms of test drives. Then the team filed for bankruptcy.
While Feller still made the leap to Land and competed in 2025 with his private Audi, Buus mainly completed Pro-Am races last year in addition to a Nordschleife program. His DTM dream seemed to have been shattered.
“That was a shame, because I was really looking forward to finally getting started. Now I’m just happy that everything worked out with Porsche and Land,” said Buus.
There were already talks about entering the DTM in 2024
There had already been rumors in 2023 that Buus was being lined up by Porsche as a DTM driver for Toksport WRT, but the team then went its own way with Tim Heinemann. “Not for 2023,” the Dane denies. “I was still a junior at the time – and my program was the Supercup.”
In 2024, the newly signed Porsche driver then reportedly missed out on an opportunity with Timo Bernhard’s racing team because the team withdrew from the DTM, partly for financial reasons. “There were a few talks, but since Manthey was the only team competing, there wasn’t really an opportunity for me to join,” says Buus. “The goal in recent years was to finally get in.”
But why does the DTM hold such a strong appeal for Buus? As a child, the youngster once attended the Zandvoort guest race with his father as a spectator – and “Mr. Le Mans” Tom Kristensen even showed him his Audi steering wheel.
Buus as a child DTM spectator: “I didn’t plan to drive myself”
“I remember that it was one of the first international racing events I attended,” he says. “But it was really just a father-son outing with a few friends to experience motorsport. I didn’t really plan to compete in the championship myself at some point.”
That changed for Buus in 2021 when he drove his first full season in the Porsche Carrera Cup and the DTM switched to GT3 regulations. “I thought the Class 1 cars were cool, but I think it was very good for the series to make this change and involve more different manufacturers,” he says. “At that time, I was still in the Carrera Cup and the junior program, of course. But yes, if I wanted to stay with Porsche, that naturally meant that participating in the DTM was suddenly a possibility.”
“If I want to be the best, I have to drive there”
Thanks to his successes in the Porsche one-make cups, entry into the series was then “within reach.” “I’m glad to be able to look back on this story and know that I was also there as a child. And now I’m actually part of it.”
And Buus has clearly come to stay. For him, the DTM is “the strongest championship” in terms of the field of drivers and the competition, as he himself says. “If I want to be the best, I have to drive there.” Where his motorsport journey will take him in the long term is unclear, “but at least for the next few years, that’s where I want to be.”
