Victory 3’s Arif Saif Al-Zafeen and Nadir Bin Hendi left it until their third run to triumph in the Kilo Run, while Team Abu Dhabi 6 topped practice at the UIM Class 1 World Powerboat Championship.
In a new concept to the schedule, boats ran in reverse order from how they finished pole position qualifying on Tuesday before their maximum speed was measured by radar between a designated buoy and a gate.
Al-Zafeen and Bin Hendi knew they had to beat Team Abu Dhabi 6’s 139mph attempt and they did exactly that with a flying final sprint of 142mph.
In practice, Teams Abu Dhabi 5 and 6 were the first two boats on the water in a slight breeze and they carded laps of 2min 48.187sec and 2min 44.322sec, respectively.
Relekta ran a 3min 01.46sec opener, but the session was red flagged soon afterwards when Al-Tayer and Al-Mansoori carried a little too much speed into the top turn by the Marina Mall approach road and spectacularly spun and flipped their MTi.
“We had a little too much speed, spun the boat and we got some lift,” said Al-Tayer. “Thankfully we managed to get out very fast and are both perfectly okay.”
