The first 24 Hour race of the 2022 season is over and once again the 24H Dubai provided an incident-filled hors-d’oeuvre for the season to come in this its 17th edition.
79 cars would start the race of the 82 which formed the provisional entry with a couple more forced to obtain spare cars after incidents during the week’s preamble to the main event.
It would be a race punctuated by no fewer than 23 Code 60 full course cautions – but some had departed the field even before the first!
The biggest casualty of the weekend was the #91 Herberth Motorsport Porsche 911 GT3 R, the car ending up on its roof on Wednesday, unrepairable for the weekend after luckless Daniel Allemann tangled with the #103 Cupra, which itself ended up with a comprehensively destroyed front end.
The Herberth team tried hard to find a replacement car but neither GPX Racing, nor Dragon Racing had a GT3 Porsche in country – the team’s de facto lead car, and three of the team’s overall race winning drivers from 2017 were out! One valuable asset though was in the UAE, and that played a big part in the run to victory for the #7 MS7 by WRT Audi effort.
Michael Vergers has been a key figure in developing the international racing ambitions of a number of key figures in Saudi Arabia and it was horrible luck that he tested positive for COVID-19 on arrival in the UAE. Happily he tested negative later in the week, but not soon enough to take his place in the team, and to be a part of the first ever Saudi flagged winning effort, also featuring the first Saudi driver to form part of a winning crew since 2018.
Vergers loss though was locally-based Axcil Jeffries’ significant gain, he was ‘super-subbed’ into the crew and helped them to the win, his second consecutive overall victory, a feat not seen at the 24H Dubai since Khaled Al Qubaisi, Jeroen Bleekemolen and the late Sean Edwards went back to back in 2012 and 2013.
Another significant regional plus was the fact that in teams and drivers, not only Saudi Arabia, but also the United Arab Emirates and Oman all featured in the overall in top 5. It’s been a while coming but motorsport in the Gulf is emerging as more than just a place to have hot-weather Grand Prix – fast!
A word again here for WRT, between the winning #7 MS7 by WRT and second placed #31 car the Belgian team led all but 85 of the 596 laps, a hugely strong performance in a 28 car GT3 field. The led battle may have lacked drama after the retirement of the Barwell Lamborghini, but perfection should always be celebrated, and that’s what the Belgian team produced – again!
That was WRT’s second win here – and Audi’s third, levelling the score with BMW – Mercedes have 5 wins overall and Porsche seven – We are still waiting for the first win by anything other than a German marque.
Dries Vanthoor adds a Dubai 24 Hour win to his overall win at Spa and a class win at Le Mans – so far! It also means that both of the Vanthoor bros. Now have wins at 24H Dubai after Laurens took victory in 2016 – also with WRT!
Also pretty much faultless was the performance in GT3 Am by the CP racing team, the #85 AMG leading overall and playing to perfection a playbook that held a couple of trump cards for the ‘Am’ division with a power boost and the oppotuniay to fully fuel under a Full Course Caution (other GT3s could only take 50% of their full full load).`
None of that though should take away from the fact that the experienced crew drove faultlessly, this despite being another squad that required a late replacement driver, Phil Quaife drafted in after Joe Foster suffered an ankle injury and was forced to pull out.
Quaife knitted well with team regulars Charles Espenlaub, Charles Putnam and Shane Lewis and the combo produced not only a class win but a top 10 finish for the 24H Series regulars.
A little lost in the storyline at the end was the Pro-Am class, finishing behind the Am winners (see above for at least part of the reason!) the top three were covered by just 2.5 mins with MP Racing taking the honours.
One of the big headlines pre-race, the debut in customer hands of the BMW M4 GT3 with ST Racing and Schubert, was not underlined by stellar results for the cars.
Two suffered delays, the #1 ST Racing car docked to laps after failing to make the start, the car pushed back into pit lane where the car was successfully started, but Harry Gottsacker then blew the red light at pit out, joining the race as the cars started the race and filtering into the 79 car field in 35th place! That car also suffered a delay to a suspension issue, believed to have been caused by the car hitting kerbs – it would finish 25th overall 5th and last in GT3 Pro-Am.
The #30 Schubert Motorsport’s car suffered a long delay – over 90 minutes in the garage – after contact caused significant suspension damage to the left front corner. That car would finish 10th in class (38th overall), with the second ST car, the #28 9th in the GT3 class and 21st overall.
Kenneth Tan, ST racing Team Principal: “The BMW M4 GT3 is potentially very competitive. We saw it in the early stages of the race; we were in the top five for quite a while and in the first half of the race we always were up in the overall top ten, so we know that the BMW M4 GT3 has the potential. At the moment, our car is still not there obviously. We just got the car straight from the factory and started working with it here at the track. We have a long list of things we want to do to develop it further for the next race at Mugello and I am very excited about that because I know where we can get this car to. The other part is of course our team. It has expanded and we needed to work together in a GT3 setting and we did that. We worked really well. We achieved the objectives we came here for. It would have been nice to be on the podium but we always knew that it’s a new car and that there are so many unknowns at the beginning. We finished the race and that’s amazing. I am very happy.”
Torsten Schubert, Schubert Motorsport Team Principal: “We knew that the first race would be a challenge. We began testing on Tuesday here in Dubai. It was important for us to work with the car under racing conditions. That is better than any rollout where you are working alone out on the track. We have learned a lot. Unfortunately, there was an accident when we were hit by a competitor. A top ten finish in the overall standings would otherwise have been possible, and I could hardly have wished for a better result than that. The BMW M4 GT3 is a very balanced car. Apart from a few minor issues, which you always get with a new car, we had no problems.
