Saturday 21 / December / 2024
Muscat: Oman’s Al-Faisal bin Khalid Al-Zubair, Austrian Dominik Baumann and Canadian Mikaël Grenier begin their challenge for honours in the 2024 Fanatec GT World Challenge powered by AWS Endurance Cup at the wheel of the Al-Manar Racing by Getspeed Mercedes in France this weekend.
The world-famous 5.791km Paul Ricard circuit was used for a recent pre-season test and the trio will race their Mercedes-AMG GT3 Evo there in the first of the programme’s five endurance races. The calendar then heads to Belgium, Germany and Italy before the conclusion in Saudi Arabia in November.
Al-Faisal said: “Very excited for the race weekend in France. I think we have an extremely strong line-up in the Gold Cup and the package with the team. The whole set-up is something we are all very happy with. Of course, it’s the GT World Challenge and I think this is the most difficult GT Championship in the world. It won’t be easy to get any result. I am quite confident that we can, hopefully, start off strong and keep the momentum going for the rest of the championship.”
Last year, Al-Zubair did not take part in the Paul Ricard race, but Maro Engel, Luca Stolz and Fabian Schiller guided the Al-Manar Racing Mercedes-AMG to a close second place behind the AKKODIS-ASP Team Mercedes of Raffaele Marciello, Timur Boguslavskiy and Jules Gounon.
Competition is sure to be intense in the Gold category this year with the likes of the Audis from Saintéloc Racing, Tresor Attempto Racing and CSA Racing and the 2 Seas Motorsport Mercedes making its debut after success in the British GT Championship last year.
They are set to offer a fierce challenge in the Gold section amongst the bumper 55-car entry that features GT3 machinery from nine car manufacturers.
A condensed programme of events at Paul Ricard starts with free practice from 09.00hrs on Saturday morning (April 6th) and a pre-qualifying session from 15.05hrs. Sunday’s April 7th) hectic programme gets underway with the three qualifying stints, starting at 09.45hrs, 10.07hrs and 10.30hrs, respectively. The three-hour race will then take centre stage from 15.00hrs.
