Proton Competition team principal and driver Christian Ried will bring down the curtain on his driving career at the 8 Hours of Bahrain today.
The last-remaining ‘ever-present’ FIA WEC driver will then finish his run with a total of 85 consecutive World Championship races.
To date that has included 13 class wins, including a win at Le Mans in 2018, plus 52 consecutive ELMS races, including Championship wins in 2020 and 2022.
To date Ried has taken 28 race wins in GT2 and/or GTE Porsches plus a pair of Asian Le Mans Series wins in GT3 Porsches.
“With the increasing pressures of running the new programmes (in Hypercar and GTP with Porsche and with Ford in LMGT3 – plus LMP2 and Carrera Cup Deutschland), plus the fact that this is the end of GTE, a class I have loved, this feels like the right time to stop driving,” he told DSC.
Going forward 44-year-old Ried will remain as the team principal for the family-owned team with his brother Michael, leading the technical team.
Ried’s driving career started back in 1996 with a debut in the now-defunct Global GT Championship. He raced for many years alongside his father Gerold Ried in the FIA GT Championship, before the team switched to ACO rules racing with long runs initially in both GTE Pro and Am before the factory team returned to take on the Pro mantle.
Ried has another looming responsibility in his new role away from the driver’s seat, with two of his sons now involved in the sport.
“Yes, that is taking time too, as it should,” he continued. “I want to make sure that they are properly focused and safe of course. It’s good that the family story carries on.”
Ried was part of the winning squad in the GTE Am class’s opening FIA WEC race in 2012, a season where the team dominated but where there was no Driver’s Championship title. He’s looking to bookend his WEC driving career with a win at his last appearance.
There will be a special edition of The Marshall Pruett Podcast with Christian online next week as he looks back at his driving career and forward to the future of Proton Competition.
