Dubai: Ireland’s Ryan Cullen extended his lead at the top of the Porsche GT3 Cup Challenge Middle East driver’s championship by 17 points after winning both races in the third round of the six stage series at Dubai Autodrome on Friday and Saturday.
Cullen finished ahead of Al Faisal Al Zubair and Bandar Alesayi in race one before denying Charlie Frijns and Tom Oliphant in race two.
Frijns is Cullen’s nearest challenger in the driver’s championship and they started the weekend level on 90 points, but Frijns’ failure to finish race one while only salvaging second from race two sees him languish behind in the standings.
“My performance this weekend puts me in a strong position now going into the next round,” said Cullen. “The other drivers know they will have to catch me now, which means I need to concentrate on being consistent, as we have seen from this weekend that anything can happen out there on the track.”
Frijns said every effort would now be made for the next round of the series in Abu Dhabi, on February 10-11.
“This weekend I think I lost 27 points on Ryan. For Abu Dhabi there’s one goal — win both races. We will take each race at it comes and see what happens at the end of the championship.”
After Abu Dhabi, the last two rounds of the series both take place in Bahrain, March 10-11 and April 15-16.
