A win at the 4 Hours of Sepang would be a nice way to end the Asian Le Mans Series season for United Autosports, but a second place for Phil Hanson and Paul Di Resta in the No. 22 Ligier helped them to get the title as Algarve Pro Racing got first place in the race. The race settled things in other classes and highlighted the excellent season of newcomer CarGuy Racing in the GT class.
The race started with the polesitter No. 8 Spirit of Race Ligier pulling off quickly to defend first place, with Pipo Derani accelerating a bit before the lights go out. In fact, his early move wasn’t at all valid as Phil Hanson in the No. 22 United Autosports Ligier was keeping track of the Brazilian at quite a short distance. Of course Derani’s move would bite back, and the drive through penalty that the No. 8 had to serve sent the car to third overall.
Eventually the No. 8 was delivered to Alexander West while the No. 22 United Autosports Ligier took the lead, and things went down to worse as the No. 8 Ligier had a brief stop on track, only to go back to action, although it was way down the LMP2 order, which brought a Safety Car intervention.
The LMP3 class had the No. 3 United Autosports Ligier leading, thanks to the traffic from other classes halting the No. 13 InterEuropol Ligier, while the No. 11 CarGuy Ferrari was leading the GT class coming from behind, as it was the trend in all of their wins in the season. The lower prototype class the table been turned during the third hour, with a spin of the No. 3 United Autosports Ligier gifting the No. 13 InterEuropol Ligier with the class lead, and about the same time the No. 66 TSRT Audi stopped on track, bringing another full course yellow and another visit from the Safety Car.
The No. 24 APR Ligier was keeping the overall lead for quite a while, but it would depend of abnormal circumstances to stay on it, especially with the No. 22 from United Autosports closing in and the sister No. 23 coming in third with Guy Cosmo at the wheel.
Near the final 30 minutes the LMP2-Am entries had to deal with their problems, with the No. 25 APR Ligier and the No. 23 United Autosports Ligier stopping on track. While the former had to be rescued from the track, the latter limped back to the garage for further checks.
Coming to the final minutes, most of the class leaders were in comfortable positions to win them, thanks to their own efforts and some unfortunate things happening to the opponents, and the No. 22 settling for second, the No. 24 had no problem to get the checkered flag.
InterEuropol Racing won the LMP3 class and the No. 11 CarGuy Ferrari won the GT class, both in dominant fashion in the final moments of the race.
As for the titles, the No. 22 crew of Paul di Resta and Phil Hanson took the LMP2 title while ARC Bratislava got the LMP2-Am title with Darren Burke, Kang Ling and Miro Konopka. The win at Sepang settled the LMP3 title for InterEuropol Racing, Jakub Smiechowski and Martin Hippe, and the GT title was conquered by CarGuy, James Calado, Kei Cozzolino and Takeshi Kimura with a perfect streak of four wins out of four races.
The champion teams also secured their slots in the 24 Hours of Le Mans grid, with the full list to be announced on March 1st.
PHOTO: Asian Le Mans Series
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