Torrente bags fourth World Championship title in Sharjah

SHARJAH: The Victory Team’s Shaun Torrente confirmed a fourth UIM F1H2O World Championship title in a thrilling Road to Sharjah-Grand Prix of Sharjah, despite retiring with a broken engine after just 14 laps of a pulsating race on Sunday.

While the Dubai-based Victory Team celebrated the American’s world title and a first ever UIM F1H2O Teams’ Championship, the actual race day belonged to the triumphant Sharjah Team. Twenty-three-year-old Estonian Stefan Arand delivered the drive of his short career to take victory by 12.594 seconds on only his ninth Grand Prix start.

Canadian team-mate Rusty Wyatt finished third with Team Sweden’s Grant Trask finishing the 40-lap race sandwiched between the two Sharjah boats in second place. The podium finish for Wyatt enabled him to confirm third place in the Drivers’ Championship.

Torrente duly equalled the four world championship victories also achieved by Scott Gillman and Alex Carella and became the equal second-most successful driver in history behind 10-time champion Guido Cappeliini.

He said: “There was a lot of work for this fourth World Championship. 380 days ago, when we signed to come back, we said we would win the World Championship. Not if, but when. 780 days ago, I left this place on a stretcher and I didn’t want my career to end like that. I have worked for two years to get back to being here. It means such a lot. You never stop fighting. Right now, I am a four-time World Champion. The Victory Team believed in me and took a chance on me. Here we are...”

An ecstatic Arand said: “No words. That definitely wasn’t on my bingo cards for today but I couldn’t be happier, obviously. It’s an extreme honour to win in front of the home crowd and to make everybody proud. I feel like this was coming for the entire season. We were here with the pace in Shanghai and then we had an unfortunate engine change. It’s an amazing feeling to end the year on such a high.

“When that yellow (flag) came out, I said to myself ‘I want this’ and I ended up getting it. I knew Rusty was behind me and I backed off a little to save it to the end and then I heard that Grant was behind me. I pumped up the pace again and kept up that gap to the finish.”

Third-placed Wyatt said: “We got third in the World Championship and we got third here today. It was one heck of a race. It didn’t start right and it was very rough at the beginning but I am just happy to stay dry today. We will have to see all this data and decide where we want to go next year.”

Outgoing champion Jonas Andersson started on pole, retained his lead after a first lap yellow flag but was not able to take advantage of Torrente’s retirement. Needing to finish first or second to wrest the fourth title away from the Florida driver’s clutches, Andersson began to struggle with power issues and slipped behind several of his rivals. He had no answer to the pace over the closing laps and had to settle for sixth position and the runner-up spot in the Drivers’ Championship for the third time in six seasons.

Andersson said: “I broke something that we should not break. I don’t want to discuss it but it’s not any fault of my team. It was broken right from the start and then it got worse and worse and I was not able to push for the win. I was thinking about stopping but I am proud of the guys. You are not going to be World Champion when you have three bad races in a season.”

The China CTIC Team’s Peter Morin finished the season in encouraging fashion with fourth place. Torrente’s team-mate Alec Weckstrom battled back from 16th on the start pontoon after an engine change to initially round off the top five until he incurred a two-position penalty after the race for not maintaining his lane at the start. That pushed him down to seventh with the Red Devil-SMC F1 Team’s Ferdinand Zandbergen finishing fifth ahead of Andersson.

The race provided Maverick Racing with their best result of the season: Cedric Deguisne picked up three points for finishing eighth, one place ahead of his French team-mate Alexandre Bourgeot. Only nine of the 19 starters completed one of the most exciting races of the modern era.