Weather was the talk of the track leading up to Round 3 and 4 at the Dubai Autodrome. The track lay flooded on Wednesday but we was dry for free practice on the Thursday morning, thankfully.
With 4 new faces for this round, some of which were previous race winners the pace was looking like it was going too fast this weekend.
In Q1 it was in indeed one of these new faces this season, Ollie Smith, putting in a 2:04.194 for the Pole, despite this only being his second best lap. The reason being that his fastest lap was dis-allowed due to a track limit infringement. This was also the case for second place setter Janni Hjerppe who also had his fastest lap dis-allowed for track limit infringement, just goes to show how hard everyone was pushing.
Race one started with pairing of Lutter and Zimmerman taking the lead, hotly pursued by Roberts. Going into turn 7 Mughal was able to slip past Roberts to take second. This left Roberts, Hjerppe and Smith trading places for some 3 or 4 laps. Unfortunately for Roberts with Hjerppe inches from his tail he spun out at Turn 14, and while going off backwards clipping rear wings with Smith. Damage to both cars took them out of the race. This allowed Hjerppe some space to try and pursue Mughal leading up to the pitstops, but with a 15 second pit penalty as a result of his race win at Yas a win here was looking in doubt.
So as the pit stops came around attention drew to the first two places. Mughal came straight into the pits at the first opportunity with Zimmerman coming a lap later, but after the dust had settle it was Mughal that came out in the lead, saving 7 seconds overall in the pits to his rival Zimmerman. Mughal was focused, getting straight back to 2.06’s, taking the car all the way to the end of the race in first.
The following day was round 4 and it should have been James Edmeades lining up of pole, but with his race partner Jeff Curtis unable to make the second day the car would remain parked, handing pole position to Usmaan Mughal, also out for the second day was Ian Roberts (with flu), he had placed his car on P3, so with him missing the whole grid bummed up another step. That left Mughal and Lutter on the front row. Romain got away well, leaving Mughal floundering in 4th with work to do. Romain led up to the pitstop but with a penalty from Race 1 and the with the Hjerppe/Mantyla duo having no penalty the lead was handed to them. Sean Simpson was pushing in 3rd, but pushing harder was Mughal in 4th, closing the gap to within 0.5 of a second on the last lap it wasn’t quite enough to steal the last spot on the podium from Simpson who held his nerve to not make any mistakes.
On reflation of the event Usmaan added:
“The car came alive after the pitstop in Race 2 and I was able to push the car to the end, almost snatching a podium away from Sean. This was an emotional victory for me in Race 1 and credit to the Gulfsport team for providing me with a perfectly prepared race car.”
Its a quick turn around for Rounds 5 and 6 back at the Dubai Autodrome, will all the racing and qualifying taking place on the 6th, with testing on the 5th.
