diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index bc36e0513..86d6f8412 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -24,6 +24,7 @@
 - Wine: fix OS version detection and cross-compiling Windows builds from Linux. ([#2001](https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-native/pull/2001))
 - Destroy condition variables as approriate when no longer needed. ([#2004](https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-native/pull/2004))
 - Crashpad/Windows: preserve module CodeView UUIDs for minimal PDB70 records with empty PDB filenames. ([#2003](https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-native/pull/2003))
+- Prevent a race between SDK reinitialization and cleanup of the previous curl client when libcurl is linked directly. ([#2015](https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-native/pull/2015))
 
 ## 0.16.3
 
diff --git a/src/transports/sentry_http_transport_curl.c b/src/transports/sentry_http_transport_curl.c
index 83378f549..32296facb 100644
--- a/src/transports/sentry_http_transport_curl.c
+++ b/src/transports/sentry_http_transport_curl.c
@@ -45,7 +45,24 @@ typedef struct {
     void (*slist_free_all)(struct curl_slist *list);
 } curl_table_t;
 
+#ifdef SENTRY_LINK_CURL
+static const curl_table_t g_curl = {
+    .global_init = curl_global_init,
+    .version_info = curl_version_info,
+    .global_cleanup = curl_global_cleanup,
+    .easy_init = curl_easy_init,
+    .easy_cleanup = curl_easy_cleanup,
+    .easy_reset = curl_easy_reset,
+    .easy_setopt = curl_easy_setopt,
+    .easy_getinfo = curl_easy_getinfo,
+    .easy_perform = curl_easy_perform,
+    .easy_strerror = curl_easy_strerror,
+    .slist_append = curl_slist_append,
+    .slist_free_all = curl_slist_free_all,
+};
+#else
 static curl_table_t g_curl;
+#endif
 
 #ifndef SENTRY_LINK_CURL
 static void
@@ -165,19 +182,6 @@ curl_load(void)
 static int
 curl_load(void)
 {
-    g_curl.global_init = curl_global_init;
-    g_curl.version_info = curl_version_info;
-    g_curl.global_cleanup = curl_global_cleanup;
-    g_curl.easy_init = curl_easy_init;
-    g_curl.easy_cleanup = curl_easy_cleanup;
-    g_curl.easy_reset = curl_easy_reset;
-    g_curl.easy_setopt = curl_easy_setopt;
-    g_curl.easy_getinfo = curl_easy_getinfo;
-    g_curl.easy_perform = curl_easy_perform;
-    g_curl.easy_strerror = curl_easy_strerror;
-    g_curl.slist_append = curl_slist_append;
-    g_curl.slist_free_all = curl_slist_free_all;
-
     return 0;
 }
 #endif