MOMO made a successful comeback at Daytona this weekend. The MOMO NGT Motorsport team had a great driver line-up with Porsche Super Cup and Porsche GT3 Cup Champions and Vice Champions Henrique Cisneros, Sean Edwards, Carlos Kauffmann and Nick Tandy. The MOMO team also had a very fast Porsche GT3 that really could have finished in the top five of the 50th running of the Rolex 24 At Daytona.
The team practiced well on Thursday and Friday and Sean Edwards was the qualifying driver. For his second participation in the Rolex 24 At Daytona Edwards was given the honor to qualify the No. 26 MOMO NGT Motorsport Porsche GT3 on Thursday afternoon. Sean qualified the MOMO car in 13th place and he started the race from the 7th row before an estimated 80,000 spectators.
NGT Motorsport has announced MOMO as primary sponsor for the team’s No. 26 GT class entry in the 50th Anniversary Rolex 24 at Daytona to be run Jan. 28-29 at Daytona International Speedway. The MOMO brand is closely associated with the great history of the Rolex 24 At Daytona, having achieved an overall win in the event back in 1998.
The No. 26 MOMO Porsche GT3 entry will be driven by Porsche Carrera Cup standouts Nick Tandy and Sean Edwards, 2011 IMSA GT3 Cup Challenge Champion Henrique Cisneros and multiple IMSA GT3 Cup race winner and pole award winner Carlos Kauffmann.
The car bears bears a striking resemblance to that of the MOMO Ferrari teams from past Rolex 24 events, including the 1998 race-winning Ferrari 333SP. Gianpiero Moretti, who had made it a personal goal to win the Rolex 24, finally won the event that year in his 15th attempt in a Kevin Doran-prepped machine. He was joined by drivers Mauro Baldi, Arie Luendyk, and Didier Theys.
NGT Motorsport came back from a weekend seemingly filled with adversity to earn a hard-fought third place in the Grand Touring Challenge (GTC) class in the Time Warner Cable Road Race Showcase at Road America, Round Six of the American Le Mans Series presented by Tequila Patron.
Porsche Carrera Cup point leader Sean Edwards shared driving duties during the four hour endurance event with IMSA GT3 Cup Challenge by Yokohama standouts Henrique Cisneros and Carlos Kauffmann, taking the #30 NGT Porsche from its last place starting position to first at the white flag, as the team gambled on fuel strategy in an attempt to earn their first ALMS victory. In the end, NGT duplicated their maiden effort at Sebring with a third place finish.
SEBRING, Fl (March 20, 2011) – NGT Motorsport’s Sean Edwards, Henrique Cisneros and Carlos Kauffmann combined for 12 grueling hours of racing Saturday and when the day was done, the team had earned a third place finish in their first ALMS Presented by Tequila Patrón effort at the 59th Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring.
Cisneros and Kauffmann are entering their second year in the IMSA GT3 Cup Challenge by Yokohama, and the drivers and team owner Ramez Wahab decided to step up the program in 2011 to contest the highly competitive GTC division in ALMS. When British European Porsche Supercup veteran Edwards joined the team in time for February’s winter test, the pieces were in place.
In one of the toughest competitions in the history of the race, team ‘tolimit arabia’ achieved an amazing fourth place and only hardly missed the podium of the 24 hour race in Dubai. Due to a technical problem that required a change of the drive shaft, the team lost 27 minutes during the night. Having fallen back on position 11 therefore, the team fought back to position 4 in an exciting catch-up race and finished as the best Porsche team.
Khaled Al Qubaisi, the team’s local hero and first sports car driver with Abu Dhabi origins, is satisfied with the result: “Being the first 24 hour race that ‘tolimit arabia’ competed in, it was only for a technical problem that we didn’t win the race. It was a very good result for us as a team. We showed that we are a winning squad.”
