Hyundai Brings Back a Macau Winner to Lock Up Two Titles

Hyundai’s factory-backed touring car team will run a third Elantra N TCR at the Kumho FIA TCR World Tour finale in Macau. The driver it has chosen for the extra car won there a year ago. Néstor Girolami returns to BRC Hyundai N Squadra Corse for the Macau Guia Circuit round with one job: help Mikel Azcona and Norbert Michelisz close out the drivers’ and teams’ championships.

Azcona arrives in Macau leading the drivers’ standings by 33 points over his teammate Michelisz and by 39 over Santiago Urrutia, the best-placed driver not in a Hyundai. The team’s position is less comfortable. Azcona and Michelisz’s combined results leave BRC Hyundai N Squadra Corse 48 points behind in the teams’ standings going into the last round, which is where a third scoring car can change the arithmetic.

Hyundai Motorsport announced the entry on November 6 and said Girolami strengthens the team’s challenge for both 2026 titles. The Argentine drove for BRC Hyundai N Squadra Corse in 2024 and 2025, taking four victories with the team, including a win in Race 1 from pole position at Macau in 2025, and finished sixth in the drivers’ standings in both seasons. He left the World Tour line-up for 2026 to race an Elantra N TCR in TCR South America with the Hyundai MSA team, where he has won four races in his first full season and sits second in the standings with four races to go. The first two of those are this weekend.

The Macau round is scheduled for November 19 to 22 on the Guia street circuit, according to Hyundai Motorsport’s events calendar. The TCR version of the Elantra N is a customer race car built by Hyundai Motorsport on the same sedan Hyundai sells in the United States as the Elantra N, which makes the World Tour the most visible racing program for a car Americans can actually buy.

The HyundaiHQ Take

A 33-point lead for Azcona should be enough, so the third car is really about the teams’ title, where Hyundai is the one chasing. Adding a driver who has already won on the trickiest street circuit on the calendar is the cheapest insurance the team could buy, and if it works, Hyundai gets to sell the Elantra N in American showrooms with two world titles on the window sticker instead of one.

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