Darren Turner Joins Craft Racing AMR for Dubai 24hr
Friday, January 04, 2013
Darren Turner’s racing season gets underway earlier than usual this year as the British racer is set to compete in next week’s Dubai 24 Hours. This will be the first Dubai 24 Hours for the double Le Mans winner who will race the No.15 Craft Racing AMR Aston Martin Vantage GT3 in the A6 class.
“I raced the GT3 car at the Nordschleife last year and really enjoyed driving it,” said Darren. “It’s a very rewarding car with lots of power and good handling. Once we get it dialled into the Dubai track it should be an enjoyable experience for all of us.”
Joining the Craft Racing AMR team for this event, Darren’s team mates are Hong Kong racers Frank Yu and Darryl O’Young and Japanese driver Tomonobu Fujii.
“This is my first time out with Craft Racing,” said Darren. “I met Frank last year when we raced in Shanghai and I’ve already been out for a curry with Darryl as we have a mutual friend in my old touring car engineer.”
The Dubai 24 Hours has grown in stature over the last few years and now draws a huge grid of 85 cars from all over the world but it would take a much bigger grid than that to faze Turner.
“Having started the Nürburgring 24 Hours with over 200 cars, 85 doesn’t sound so much,” he explained. “Mind you Dubai is a standard-length Grand Prix track so that’s going to make it tremendously busy, especially with so many different levels of machinery. The hardest thing will be judging closing speeds and keeping up that focus for 24 hours.”
“It’s good to get into a new year of racing,” concluded Darren. “Going straight into a 24 hour race will be a great warm up for the rest of the season.”
Qualifying takes place on Thursday and the 24-hour race starts at 1400hrs on Friday (Dubai is four hours ahead of the UK). Sixteen hours of the race will be broadcast live on Motors TV and www.24hdubai.com will display all the results and live timing.
