It’s been the prize for winning GT Academy for six years now, so this weekend’s Dubai 24 Hours shouldn’t come as a surprise to any wannabe-racer Gran Turismo fan out there.
As the race itself is celebrating its tenth anniversary, things will be a little different this time round though. With a class victory netted last year in the Nissan Nismo 370Z, the gamers are taking on the outright victory from the massive 95 car grid in a GT3 class Nissan GT-R, entered in the fastest A6 category.
The challenges don’t end there either, as the four winners – Gaetan Paletou (Europe), Ricardo Sanchez (International), Ahmed Bin Khanen (Middle East) and Nicolas Hammann (USA) – will be sharing a single car for the 24 hour race, with only the guiding hand of 2013’s German winner Florian Strauss for company. All already have some good racing experience in the dark, with Gaetan and Ricardo placing 1st in a Britcar night race at Silverstone and Ahmed and Nick finishing 4th in the same event.
The race gets underway at 2pm local time (10:00 GMT) on Friday 9th January (convert to your local time here) with practice and qualification sessions occurring during Thursday afternoon. As usual, you can catch commentary of all of the sessions on Radio Le Mans, with Motors TV broadcasting the entire race live for the first time.
Facts & Guides
- Car Number: 23
- Class: A6
- Team Name: Nissan GT Academy Team RJN
- Drivers: Gaetan Paletou, Nicolas Hamann, Ricardo Sanchez, Ahmed Bin Khanen, Florian Strauss
Race Coverage
- Starting Time: 10:00AM UTC/GMT (convert to your local time here)
- Race stream on 24hrseries.com – including live timing.
- Radiolemans‘ live radio broadcast.
- Highlights on NISMO.tv.
Community Discussion
- Join the discussion in the 2015 Dubai 24 Hours thread in the GTPlanet Forums.
- Live onboard with the GT-R NISMO GT3:
See more articles on Gaetan Paletou, Nicolas Hammann, and Ricardo Sanchez.
What is RJN? Is it a Nissan owned team or a third party sponsor? If the later, is RJN a business or an individual?
RJN is essentially still a customer team with some factory support.
RJN is a motorsport team – RJN Motorsport – founded by Bob Neville (his business cards say “Robert J. Neville”, so take a guess where the name comes from!) in 2000 and based in Oxfordshire. They’ve specialised in Nissans (Primera, 350Z, 370Z and GT-R) since they started – in fact the team was pretty much formed to continue running the Nissan Primera in BTCC when Nissan Motorsports withdrew at the end of the 1999 season.
I’ve already managed to miss a bit of this. But what I have seen has been some excellent racing. That’s my day sorted whilst I come up with setups for upcoming series!
After the early Code60 there has been more intense racing than in a whole F1 race. The slow cars/fast cars mix makes it more like an M25 car chase on an episode of Police Camera Action.
Great stream, brilliant commentary, put it on in the background.
Team GT Academy in 13th at the moment. Good luck guys.
At the race right now, the gt academy car is currently 16th :D
There has been a red flag and a lot of cars have entered the pits, but quite a few are still going
Got an invitation to go watch the race. Sadly I’ve got my exams :/ I might pop in a for a few hours but then leave
Good luck all!
Go GT Aliens!!!!!