Arjun Maini and HRT suffer DNF in GTWE’s Paul Ricard round
Arjun Maini continued his 2022 GT World Challenge Europe series’ Endurance Cup campaign for Haupt Racing Team alongside teammates Hubert Haupt and Florian Scholze. The second round took place at Paul Ricard last weekend, with the Indian racing in the Gold Cup class where the trio drove the #5 Mercedes-AMG GT3 machine.
The practice session saw them finish 27th overall and third in Gold Cup, while the Pre-Qualifying session saw them finish sixth overall and first in class. Moving on to Qualifying, as known, each of the three drivers had 15 minutes time in Q1, Q2 and Q3.
The final race start position is then calculated on the basis of the average of their best times. The Q1 saw them finish 18th overall and first in Gold Cup, while in Q2, they were 27th overall and third in class and in Q3, they finished 44th overall and ninth in category.
The combined time saw them start 31st overall, but their race was short-lived as a Lap 1 incident had their steering wheel bent which forced them to retire from the 1000KM race at Paul Ricard straight up.
“For sure, it is quite disappointing,” said Maini. “I think we had a really strong position in the championship entering the race but to be honest it is part of racing. And it looked like quite an unlucky situation why we had the contact and damage.
“In the end, we couldn’t have done a lot to avoid it, and this is racing sometimes. There’s still a lot of points on offer in Spa and we can still recover this but of course this is going to have a dent on our championship charge,” summed up Maini.
With the second round in the books, the next Endurance Cup event will be held at Spa-Francorchamps on July 28-31 weekend, but before that Maini will be in action in DTM with HRT on July 2-3 weekend.
