ZENDELI READY FOR PORSCHE MOBIL 1 SUPERCUP DEBUT AT IMOLA

May 17, 2024

Lirim Zendeli is getting ready to up the ante this weekend as he makes his Porsche Mobil 1 Supercup debut on the world stage in front of Formula 1 teams, drivers and fans. The German-Albanian driver will be lining up for the opening round of the prestigious one-make series at the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari circuit in Imola, Italy, in one of the support races for the 2024 Gran Premio del Made in Italy e dell’Emilia-Romagna.

Monaco Increase Management’s talented young driver, who scored a podium on his debut in round 1 of the Porsche Carrera Cup Italia domestic series two weeks ago at Misano World Circuit, now embarks on the next stage of his 2024 Porsche GT campaign; his first tough test this weekend will be a 14-lap race around the 4.909 km Imola circuit in a field made up of twenty-four veterans and rookies from eleven nations plus six guest drivers, all at the wheel of identical, synthetically-fuelled 911 GT3 Cup cars from the Stuttgart manufacturer.

As in the Italian series, the 24-year-old from Bochum will be competing for the Bergamo-based Ombra Racing team as a rookie, and a GT rookie as well in that all of Lirim’s previous racing experience had been done in single-seaters. But as he showed at Misano, he is not afraid to take on more experienced and seasoned regulars such as Larry ten Voorde (Schumacher CLRT Team), the two-time Supercup title winner from the Netherlands, Britain’s Harry King (BWT Lechner Racing), who was third last year, as well as his Ombra Racing stablemate, South African Keagan Masters.

”First, I’m super excited to be back in the F1 paddock, it’s always a special feeling, and after the testing it will be good to see where we stand,” said Lirim. “It’s at the first weekend that you really get the feeling of how you start the season. With Imola being a good testing for us last time, I just hope that starting well will give us a good push. I like this track, it’s very flowing and very technical with a lot of prestige and history and I think combined with the F1 it’s going to be a cool weekend. It’s always important to start well, and the podium from Misano really gave me the push to go into this weekend with confidence.”

The Imola race weekend schedule will see Lirim on track on Friday evening for 45 minutes of practice, then on Saturday morning for qualifying, and the race on Sunday morning.

WEEKEND SCHEDULE (all times CEST)