Qatar Team S Rinker Snatches Superb 2nd Place in 14th Grand Prix of Sharjah

Sharjah, December 07 (QNA) -The Qatar Team s Terry Rinker finished a superb second overall in Friday afternoon s 34-lap Grand Prix of Sharjah, the final round of the 2012 UIM F1 H20 World Championship, on Khalid Lagoon, but the Qatar Team missed out to Team Abu Dhabi on the UIM F1 H20 Teams Championship. The shortened race was yellow-flagged on three occasions but each time Rinker was unable to overtake Al-Qamzi, who held on to record his first win of the season. Rinker finished second and Italy s Francesco Cantando pipped Sweden s Jonas Andersson to third place. Frenchman Phillipe Chiappe confirmed the runner-up spot in the Drivers World Championship with sixth position behind rival Sami Selio of Finland. Carella was forced to start from the rear of the field after Qatar Team technicians changed the Mercury engine on his DAC and it became a case of fighting his way through the field for Qatar s two-time World Champion. Unfortunately, he struggled with technical problems from the start and retired from 15th position after 14 laps. "It’s disappointing not to claim the clean sweep of all four trophies, but I am so pleased for Terry Rinker on a superb race today," said Khalid bin Arhama AL-Kuwari, head of formula racing at the QMSF, which runs under the presidency of His Excellency Sheikh Hassan bin Jabor Al-Thani. "He pushed Thani Al-Qamzi all the way and we must not forget that he was using an old boat from 2009 and this was only his second race with our team. I did not have chance to speak to Alex immediately after the race but I assume it was an engine problem that caused the retirement today." Khalid Abdullah Al-Kuwari qualified third for the final UIM F-4S race for the Eurofin Trophy behind Sweden s Jesper Forss and Matthew Palfreyman and went on to finish the race in a similar position. Palfreyman needed to win the race and hope that Forss finished outside the top three, but the Swede drove a measured race to shadow the Briton to the chequered flag and confirm the 2012 UIM F-4S Championship for the Eurofin Trophy. The race with Carella starting from the rear of the field because of a pre-race engine change, Qatar boats needed to make a good start through traffic from sixth and 18th places as attention switched to the battle for second place in the World Championship between Phillipe Chiappe and pole winner Sami Selio. Al-Qamzi and Rinker made the better starts and surged through into the top two places, with Cantando slotting into third and pole winner Selio slipping to fourth. Carella climbed from 18th to 12th, but the race was yellow-flagged when former Qatar stand-in driver Malcolm Goodman flipped his Dragon boat out on lap two. The race restarted on lap six with Rinker and Carella in second and 11th positions but Carella slipped to 17th with technical problems and dropped out of contention for the podium. Al-Qamzi continued to lead from Rinker, Cantando and Selio through eight laps, but Rinker closed the gap on the Emirati to 1.54sec through 10 laps and Carella climbed to 16th and then to 15th before retiring. The race was yellow-flagged for a second time on lap 21 when Jay Price lost eighth position after earlier steering worries and a racing line incident but action restarted on lap 26. Al-Qamzi managed to fend off Rinker s fierce challenge yet again, as Selio slipped behind Andersson into fifth before the race was yellow-flagged to replace a turn buoy and remove Stanislav Kurtsenovskiy s boat from the course. Eight laps remained when the green flag was raised and Rinker was not able to pass the Emirati from the restart, but race officials raised the chequered flag with four of the planned laps still to run in fading light, with Al-Qamzi taking his first win of the season and Rinker finishing second, as Team Abu Dhabi won the UIM F1 H20 Teams Championship by 12 points from the Qatar Team. Carella and Rinker shadowed Sweden s Jonas Andersson in the morning s free practice session and set the second and third quickest laps. Carella only ran for 18 laps to get his set-up right for the race, but Rinker used the time to run for 30 laps and was a mere 5/1000ths of a second behind the World Champion. Twenty of the 22 boats took to the Khalid Lagoon course. F-4S Jesper Forss claimed pole position for the final F-4S race of the season with a potent lap of 39.28sec during his 23 laps on the water in qualifying. Archrival Matthew Palfreyman was second and Qatar s Khalid Abdullah Al-Kuwari continued his run of good form with the third qualifying slot from the eight boats. Forss was unable to stay out in front through the first of the race s 28 laps and Palfreyman stormed into the lead with Al-Kuwari managing to pass the Swede and snatch second place. Forss knew that third would be sufficient to take the title, even if Palfreyman won the race and he settled into a comfortable third as the reached reached quarter distance. Palfreyman overtook Bincheng Wu on lap nine and Forss managed to squeeze through on Al-Kuwari and retake second position. The leading trio held station into the second half of the race and Palfreyman eventually reached the chequered flag 11.68 seconds in front of Forss to confirm his seventh win from 12 starts. Forss claimed the championship title with second position and Al-Kuwari finished third to snatch fourth in the Drivers’ Championship. (QNA)