The 2026 season is officially underway with a solid start for Calan, Ahmad Al Harty and Javier Sagrera with Oman Racing by Century Motorsport.
Conditions were fine and relatively warm for a week full of action, commencing with 2 days of offical testing, followed by a day of free practice and then qualifying and the race on Saturday.
The race was the 6 Hours of Paul Ricard, starting in the evening at 6pm and racing through twighlight and night conditions to finish at midnight.
The two days of official testing progressed very well for Calan and the team, with all drivers showing strong pace throughout. Competing in a very competitive field of 20 Bronze class cars, the team are confident of racing for wins through the season, and their pace supported this.
In qualifying, Calan started his flying lap on the new tyre extremely well, with a purple sector 1, and a quick sector two. On completing the lap, another competitor slowed at the final two corners to create a space for themselves to start their lap and in doing so ruined Calan's. Calan reset his focus, sacrificed his next lap to create a space and then delivered a strong performance on his next push lap.
With all three driver times combined, they were to start the race from P9 in class, with 6 hours ahead of them to force their way through the field.
Ahmad Al Harty started the race for the team and performed exceptionally well. After firstly evading a hugh start line incident prior to turn 1, he proceeded to fight his way up the leaderboard across his two hour stint.
In bringing the car into the pits for the first driver change to Javier, he had impressively worked his way up to be leading the race for the Bronze class.
The plan was then for Javier to take the wheel for an hour, followed by Calan for the 4th hour. This would allow them both to use their remaining set of new tyres each for the final two hours of the race with Javier doing hour 5 and Calan finishing off hour 6.
In night conditions Javier performed well, but unfortunately picked up two penalties under questionable circumstances. This meant that in handing over to Calan they needed to remain still in the pits for 60 secs prior to working on the car and changing drivers.
Although the time penalty was significant, the team were still in the hunt for a podium with a strong second half of the race, along with the chance of some luck through many similar penalties being given.
Calan drove very well and progressively moved the car forward through the field as did Javier in his second hour.
Taking the car for the final stint to the line, and on new tyres, the race was immediately neitralised to a full course yellow when Calan took to the circuit. After 30 mins, this was converted to a safety car and the entire field was brought together with the car sitting P8 in class. Although the entire field of 60 was brought together in a line, they were not in race order, so there were a large number of cars between Calan and the next class positions.
At the restart, Calan pushed aggressively and made up an impressive 7 positions in the complete darkness of night. For the Bronze race, this moved the team up to P6 which would be the final position.
At the end, this was a week of solid performances which bode well for the season ahead, though obviously the team is here to win and there certainly was that opportunity on the table.
Next is official testing at Spa ahead of the 24 Hours of Spa (mid May), and then at the end of the month will be Round 2 at Monza, Italy.
