International GT Open champions Emson and Lebbon on a title that was “way closer than we ever thought”

Tom Emson and Tom Lebbon are the 2026 International GT Open champions, but the Elite Motorsport pairing admit the Barcelona finale was far tougher than they had expected. Speaking to GT REPORT after the final race, the British duo looked back on a weekend that started with no points on Saturday and ended with the title secured by a single point from Greystone GT’s Zac Meakin.

How the title was won in Barcelona

Christian Mansell and Maximilian Götz won Saturday’s race in the #71 Team Motopark Mercedes-AMG GT3. Emson and Lebbon were innocent victims of a first-corner incident and finished 14th in the #17 Elite Motorsport with Entire Race Engineering Ferrari 296 GT3, scoring no points. Meakin and Macdonald recovered to third in the #33 Greystone GT McLaren 720S GT3 despite a ten-second penalty, which cut Meakin’s deficit to six points before the final race.

Macdonald started Sunday from pole, and Meakin brought the McLaren home 4.626 seconds ahead of Pietro Armanni and Alex Fontana in the #911 ZRS Motorsport Porsche 911 GT3 R. The Elite Ferrari started seventh, and Lebbon fought his way up to third on lap 24. He then traded places twice with McKenzy Cresswell in the #44 Greystone McLaren and held him off by 0.7 seconds at the flag. That left Emson and Lebbon on 148 points and Meakin on 147. Greystone GT had already secured the Teams’ title on Saturday.

Tom Emson and Tom Lebbon winning the International GT Open title

“Way closer than we ever thought”

Emson didn’t hide that the Ferrari lacked the pace the team had hoped for in Barcelona, and Saturday’s incident made the weekend much harder than planned.

“Obviously, I think we didn’t have the pace this weekend that we’d hoped we would have. We put the car where we needed to, maximised where we needed to, but obviously race one put us at a disadvantage, you could say, with the incident at the start, which we came into this weekend hoping it was going to be a bit easier, but obviously it was way closer than we ever thought in that last race.”

Saturdays were a recurring weak spot, but Emson believes the team got everything out of the car whenever it had the chance.

“Obviously, our Saturdays haven’t been very good for many reasons. We’ve had mechanical failures, we’ve had whatever, we’ve had two or three mechanical failures across the season, but again we’ve maximised what we have. I mean, we have five or six race wins, so every time we got given the car in a good position we always maximised and were able to capitalise on it.”

For Emson, the title is a reward for a season of personal investment, and he intends to keep that approach.

“I’ve put in so much effort for this season, personally, and it’s clearly paid off, so every season I’m going to approach it how I have done this season.”

His plans for 2027 aren’t settled yet, but talks with Elite are under way.

“We’re in the talks of stuff with Elite and going on to do bigger things, hopefully we’ll see, we’re not 100% sure yet.”

“We take it race by race”

Lebbon handled the pressure of the final race calmly and kept the same mindset the team had used all year.

“It was tough, to be fair, the pressure wasn’t the end of the world. We take it race by race like we have all year.”

Saturday’s result made Sunday harder, especially with the Ferrari short on pace.

“Obviously the poor result yesterday made today hard work and we lacked a bit of pace. I think we maximised the package we had, we held on at the end. Obviously it wasn’t easy, we had some good results over the year.”

Looking back at the hardest moments of the year, he pointed to Saturday’s crash and an earlier retirement at Paul Ricard.

“Yesterday, when we hit the wall was a tough one. Our DNF at Ricard earlier in the year was obviously difficult.”

“But we had five wins along the way, which is good and obviously helped us. I’d say thank you to everyone.”