Saturday 21 / December / 2024
Omani racing driver Ahmad Al Harthy will begin today’s fifth round of the FIA World Endurance Championship in Brazil from the sixth row of the LMGT3 class grid, having been achingly close to progressing into the all-important Hyperpole session – missing out by a mere 0.1 seconds.
Marking his first ever visit to the Interlagos Circuit, Al Harthy got down to work during the opening free practice sessions on Friday, 12th July, and after a third practice period on Saturday, 13th July, he had the task of qualifying the Team WRT-run No.46 BMW M4.
Posting the sixth fastest time in LMGT3 on his first flying lap of Saturday afternoon’s session, Al Harthy then improved to fifth the next time around as times started to tumble around the famous 4.3-kilometre track.
Continuing to shave time off his previous best, into the closing stages of the session the Omani was 0.9 seconds away from the quickest of all but then found another two tenths of a second on his final lap to be right on the cusp of progression into the top 10 Hyperpole shoot-out.
In the end, though, he just missed out by little more than 0.1 seconds with a fastest time of 1m36.163 seconds (250.18 km/h), meaning 12th on the grid for the Rolex 6 Hours of Sao Paulo in the car he shares with star team-mates Maxime Martin and Valentino Rossi.
After two FIA WEC races which haven’t borne fruit for the No.46 squad, in Belgium and France, the aim for today’s six-hour contest in Brazil is to deliver consistency – and hopefully enjoy Team WRT’s usual reliability as well – in order to capture some much-needed points in the LMGT3 Championship.
Al Harthy, backed as always by his prestigious partners OQ, Oman Ministry of Culture, Sports and Youth, Omantel and BMW Oman, goes into today’s encounter ninth in the LMGT3 standings with Martin and Rossi – only six points away from the top four.
Ahmad Al Harthy said, “It was a tough qualifying to be honest. We always want to get into Hyperpole but, unfortunately, with a very short lap the gaps between everyone were very tight and we didn’t have the pace to get through. Hopefully we will have a strong race, we’ve worked hard on the set-up as we always do and we’re all looking forward to it."
“It will be a long six-hour race. As I mentioned with the lap being short, and with such a huge grid of cars, there is going to be a lot of action for sure. We need to run our own race, stick to our plan and then hopefully we can come through to a strong finish and good result.”
The Rolex 6 Hours of Sao Paolo will get underway at 11.30 local time today, Sunday, 14th July.
