Dubai: A month after winning the FIA World Endurance Championship in Bahrain, Dunlop head back to the Middle East for one of the biggest races of the year — the Dunlop 24 Hours of Dubai to be held over the weekend.
The ninth edition of the race at Dubai Autodrome promises to be more competitive than ever with a prestigious entry list of cars and drivers for the race at the Dubai Autodrome. The event is open to touring cars, GT cars and 24 Hour special cars with the race starting on January 10.
Last year’s race was won by the Team Abu Dhabi by Black Falcon AMG Mercedes SLS of Khalid Al Qubaisi, Jeroen Bleekemolen, Bernd Schneider and the much-missed Sean Edwards just two laps ahead of the SRL AF Corse Ferrari 458. Black Falcon will be aiming for a hat-trick, having also won in 2012.
In addition to the defending Team Abu Dhabi by Black Falcon squad, which includes Jeroen Bleekemolen and Bernd Schneider, top international racers like Gianmaria Bruni, Stefan Mücke, Darren Turner, Emmanuel Collard, Johnny Mowlem and Rob Huff will be in the fray.
Dunlop is providing a tyre service for the entire grid and 7000 tyres have been shipped to the Dubai Autodrome circuit. A total of 38 Dunlop engineers and support staff will travel to the event to provide assistance to the teams with fitting and engineering advice. The Dunlop engineers are able to converse in ten languages in order to get the best for the multi-lingual teams from around the world.
Gary Wassell (Dunlop manager Car Motorsport EU) commented, “This is our biggest event in terms of numbers of cars and a great way to start the new year. Winning in open competition ‘tyre war’ events such as Dunlop did this year in Nurburgring 24h and FIA World Endurance helps us develop tyres for one brand events such as Dubai where we also try to give a balance of performance across the whole grid. History suggests we’ve got it right as no one make of car has dominated.”
Track action starts on Wednesday (January 8) with optional private testing which should see most of the ‘big guns’ out to dust off the festive season cobwebs.
The first of three Free Practice sessions will get underway at 11.30 am on Thursday (January 9), to be followed by three qualifying sessions, the first of which gets going at 3pm the same day.
Track action starts at 10.30am on Friday with a half hour warm-up, with the race set to be flagged off at 2pm. The chequered flag will wave, to bring proceedings to an end 24 hours later, on Saturday at 2pm.
