Proton Competition, the Emirates Global Aluminium and Abu Dhabi Racing-backed team, will start the penultimate round of the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) in Bahrain from sixth position in class on the grid today.
The team, competing in class LMGTE Am, is led by Abu Dhabi resident Khaled Al Qubaisi with German Christian Reid and Klaus Bachler of Austria also doing driving duties at the wheel of Porsche 911 RSR at the 6 Hours of Bahrain.
Having been on the pace in FP 1 and 2, the Abu Dhabi-based team had a disappointing outing in the final free practice yesterday morning and the subsequent qualifying.
However, Al Qubaisi is nevertheless optimistic of a good result when the six-hour race gets underway at the Bahrain International Circuit in Sakhir this afternoon at 16:00 UAE time.
Ahead of this weekend’s penultimate race of the season, Al Qubaisi had said the primary goal of the team would be to protect its third position overall in class while also trying to get as many points as possible to boost his fourth place in the drivers’ standings.
Currently, Proton Competition are third overall in class, a clear 11 points over their fourth-placed opponents and 26 points behind a second place on the podium.
Similarly, in the drivers’ standings Al Qubaisi is fourth; just three points away from moving up to third on the podium, and a good finish in Bahrain would not only protect the team’s third place but may well propel the Abu Dhabi resident into podium contention in the drivers’ standings on his debut season in the championship.
Al Qubaisi said: “I know we are not in the position that we would have liked to be on the grid following the qualifying session.
"But then this is the nature of endurance racing and we can only give out best shot during the race tomorrow and hope to fare much better.
“We have a good car and the setup is also very good for the race, which is more important than the qualifying result.
“The goal is to protect, if not improve upon, our position in both the team and drivers’ standings going into the final round in Sao Paolo, Brazil, at the end of the month on November 30.”
Meanwhile, the No14 Porsche 919 Hybrid LMP1-H car took a second consecutive pole position in Bahrain yesterday.
Neel Jani and Romain Dumas split their qualifying duties in the 25-minutes session to combine an overall four-lap average time of 1m43.145s, some 0.264s clear of title leaders Sebastien Buemi and Anthony Davidson in the No8 Toyota Racing TS 040 Hybrid.
The Porsche Team is confident that some small but significant mechanical changes to the car will contribute to challenging Toyota Racing in the race today.
