Sunday, December 21: 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 afternoon.
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 Weckström 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: Cédric 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.
The race
Forty laps would decide whether Torrente or Andersson lifted the world crown and joined Carella and Gillman as the joint second most successful racer in the history of the sport. Andersson lined up on pole ahead of Torrente but fifth place would be sufficient for Torrente to win the championship, regardless of Andersson’s result.
Weckström had originally expected to be second on the grid, ahead of his team-mate, but the Victory Team was forced to change his engine. The Finn slipped to 16th on the start pontoon ahead of Brent Dillard and Mansoor Al-Mansoori. Marit Strømøy was a late non-starter after discovering a lack of compression from the four-stroke APX V8 engine with insufficient time available to change the power plant before lights out.
The start was crucial: Torrente made a tremendous start to pull clear of Andersson in a strengthening wind but the race was yellow-flagged immediately when Bartek Marszalek took the commitment buoy too tightly, overcooked the turn and rolled into retirement.
Because the racers had not completed a lap, Andersson regained his lead at the front before the restart on lap two. Stark, Trask, Wyatt and Arand rounded off the early top six with Weckström climbing to 13th. Andersson began to stretch his lead over Torrente but his team-mate Trask dropped two positions to sixth behind Arand and Wyatt.
Stark hit trouble on lap four and retired the Team Abu Dhabi DAC with a propeller issue, the Swede’s demise lifting Arand and Wyatt into third and fourth and Trask into fifth. Morin climbed to sixth. The China CTIC Team’s Brent Dillard pulled out a lap later with power issues.
A storming Arand continued to apply the pressure on Torrente and the young Estonian was able to pass the American heading into one-quarter distance with Andersson leading by just 2.145 seconds. Disappointment continued for the Red Devil-SMC F1 Team’s Sami Seliö when he retired his Sharjah-designed boat on lap eight with power steering problems. Team Abu Dhabi’s misery was complete with Mansoor Al-Mansoori also falling by the wayside.
Arand was racing on the ragged edge in a desperate bid to hunt down Andersson but the outcome of the World Championship was thrown into turmoil on lap 15 when Torrente ground to a halt on the course with a broken engine and limped out of the race. Andersson needed to finish the remaining 26 laps in first or second positions to snatch a fourth world title.
After the yellow flag, racing resumed on lap 18 and Arand managed to pass Andersson and snatch the lead in dramatic style. The drama intensified with Wyatt and Trask also overtaking the Swede who slipped to fourth place and faced a nail-biting race through the field to try and salvage his title dreams. Andersson then lost another place to Weckström heading into lap 20 and the halfway point.
Andersson’s dream continued to unravel and the Swede lost out to Zandbergen and dropped to seventh and then to eighth behind Ben Jelf, as the Sharjah Team duo of Arand and Wyatt thrilled the local fans by pulling away from their rivals on home water.
Arand increased his lead over Wyatt to 5.303 seconds into lap 25 with Torrente standing on the sidelines watching the drama unfolding in front of him. Technical issues forced Jelf out of the race on lap 23 and lifted Andersson back to seventh, although the struggling Swede had been lapped by the top four. Alberto Comparato joined the growing list of retirements with fuel pump issues on lap 24 with just 10 racers still running.
Trask managed to pass Wyatt to grab second position and began to set quick times in a bid to catch runaway leader Arand. The gap was down to 6.786 seconds with eight laps to run but the Estonian stopped the time loss on lap 33 and began to manage his pace from the front of the field. Duarte Benavente withdrew his F1 Atlantic Team Moore four laps from the finish.
Trask had no answer to young Arand through the remaining few laps and Arand delighted the home crowd with a memorable maiden career victory on his ninth start and a stunning success for the Sharjah Team.
Trask held off Wyatt to claim second for Team Sweden and Wyatt gave the Sharjah Team a 1-3 finish with third place. Morin, Weckström and Zandbergen finished fourth, fifth and sixth but there was no champagne on this occasion for outgoing champion Andersson: he finished seventh and Torrente earned another world title from the shoreline in Sharjah. Weckström was later penalised and that lifted Zandbergen and Andersson into fifth and sixth in the final classification.
