Season finale
For the sixth straight year, the Estoril Classics was the season finale for the Historic Racing by Peter Auto season. As always, the 2025 edition was organised by the French organisation together with local specialists Race Ready. The packed programme featured seven familiar Peter Auto grids ranging from the Gentlemen Challenge for 1950s and early 1960s sports racers to the Classic Endurance Racing 2 field for 1970s and very early 1980s sports cars and GTs. For many of the grids the championship was also still up for grabs, which added an extra layer of excitement to the individual races. The undulating Portuguese track is still best remembered as the scene of Ayrton Senna's first Grand Prix win, in 1985 aboard a JPS Lotus in absolutely horrendous conditions. It was only fitting that one of the additional races during the 2025 Estoril Classics was for the three-litre Formula 1 cars. Race Ready's own Iberian Challenge served as the finale of the weekend.
Our photographers travelled south to enjoy a lovely final few days of summer. They spent this time in the sun well and have captured all the action in a class-by-class 170-shot gallery.

Fifties and sixties delight
One of the star grids of the Peter Auto weekend is the one-make 2.0L Cup for early, short-wheelbase Porsche 911s. Great racing and a level playing field is ensured by penalising crews that use one or two professional or 'elite' drivers by just the right amount of time at pit-stops. For the 90-minute race at the Estoril Classics, it was the Gentleman/Elite pairing of Max Moritz and Vincent Kolb that claimed pole position ahead of newly crowned champions Kyle Tilley and Oliver Bryant. Although ranked a gentleman driver, Moritz decisively grabbed the lead and was still ahead of 'elite' Tilley when Kolb took over to claim the pairing's first outright win in the series.
Tilley more than made up for his second place finish in the 2.0L Cup by scoring a pair of wins from pole position in the Gentlemen Challenge with his newly acquired and very bright Lotus 15.
The action on Saturday concluded with the two-hour Sixties' Endurance race, which saw the two championship leaders line up on the front row of the grid. Pole was for challenger Jonathan Mitchell in his Jaguar E-Type, while Maxime Guenat started second with his Shelby Cobra Daytona. Mitchell grabbed the lead in the first corner, while Guenat held station in second ahead of his Equipe Europe team-mate Armand Mille in a sister Cobra Daytona. This was sufficient to claim the championship but things got even better for the Cobra pairing when a front wheel bearing on Mitchell's E-Type failed. Guenat and Mille went on to score a resounding one-two victory.

Touring car titans
While most other grids did not really suffer from competitors decided to skip the late-in-the-season, often far-away Estoril Classics, the Classic Touring Challenge was sadly down to just eleven cars in Portugal. That did not mean the racing was not great as François Rivaz and Frank Stippler put on a great show in the former's ex-Autodelta Alfa Romeo GTA. Sadly, it developed a problem in the race, which allowed John Spiers and Nigel Greensall to score what was ultimately a straightforward victory. The one-hour race was another notch on the belt of Spiers in his quest to make 100 starts in a single season.
Maxime Guenat was also out to secure the championship in the Heritage Touring Cup with his Ford Capri. His biggest challenger was Sebastian Glaser, who duly qualified his Warsteiner liveried BMW 3.0 CSL on pole position. The two rivals ran nose-to-tail in the opening laps with both cars spitting flames on the downshifts. They swapped the lead several times until Guenat made the winning move for both the race and the championship on lap seven of 32. Later in the race, Glaser's CSL developed a mechanical issue, which forced him to retire from the race. That promoted Armand Mille to second for another Equipe Europe one-two finish.

Golden era of sports cars
Many sports car racing enthusiasts consider the period from the mid 1960s through to the mid 1970s is the golden era. They are perfectly catered for by the two Classic Endurance Racing grids that have been the heart of the Peter Auto events from the late 2000s. Starting on pole position for the CER1 race for the earliest cars were Jan Magnussen and Chris Ward in a Lola T70 Mk3B. They shared the front row with the sister car of Armand Mille, who was looking to complete a successful defence of his 2024 championship win. Ward started from pole position and held on to the lead before handing over to the blisteringly fast ex-Formula 1 driver. As had been the case all season, he had to claw back the time penalty he had to serve as a professional driver. Mille had no such issues and kept his head cool and claimed victory with less than two seconds to spare.
Going into the final weekend of the season, Maxime Guenat held a near unsurmountable lead in the CER2 championship with his Lola T286. There was a small upset in qualifying as Emile Breittmayer snatched pole position from Guenat in the very wild Group 5 Ford Zakspeed Capri Turbo. Within a lap of the race, the natural order was restored and Guenat would not give up the lead for the remaining 32 laps. He lead another one-two for his team, and indeed his family as second-place finisher was his father Dominique, who was in his Cosworth DFV engined TOJ.

The turbos are coming
Among the most evocative grids of the 2025 Estoril Classics was the the 'Classic Grand Prix - Pre-1986 F1.' Up until this year, this was for three-litre Formula 1 cars but since the Monaco Historic Grand Prix announced turbo cars would be allowed from 2026 onwards, a more accurate description would be 'three-litre era Formula 1 cars.' The Estoril Classics served as a prelude as for the very first time, a turbo-engined Grand Prix car was entered and raced at a historic race meeting. This was the 1985 Ligier JS25 Renault of Evgeny Kireev, which had just been completely restored with an eye on competing at Monaco in 2026. The car played no major part in the races, mainly due to the lack of suitable tyres, which forced the Ligier to run a type of slicks that are designed to only really work with heaters.
Fastest of all in qualifying was Yutaka Toriba with his Williams FW07C. The hole in the gearbox that had sidelined him at the Spa Six Hours just a week earlier had clearly been fixed in record time by his team. The Japanese driver had to concede the first race to the ever quick Nick Padmore and his Lotus 87 Cosworth but Toriba then went on to win the second 25-minute race unchallenged.

Final Thoughts
The curtain fell on a fascinating Historic Racing by Peter Auto season when Tom Canning crossed the line to win the 50-minute Iberian Historic Challenge race in the very rare Ginetta G10. It was a year of great racing on fabulous tracks with the Estoril Classics as a more than fitting finale. For 2026, there will be a lot of changes with a new name, the Le Mans Classic Series, and a new grid for Group A cars to look forward to. For now, we can highly recommend to sit back and enjoy our 170-shot gallery from the season finale.