Back by popular demand, the 24H DUBAI parade returns for its third edition in 2025, and is set to open the 24H SERIES season opener in typically fan-friendly fashion.

Hot on the heels of optional CREVENTIC Track Days across the Monday and Tuesday, on Wednesday 8 January, the 24H DUBAI parade will showcase all race cars participating in the 2025 event along the Dubai Motor City promenade. In a thrilling spectacle for attending fans, each race car will be driven to the location on public, closed roads from the Dubai Autodrome pitlane.

Alongside the Parade, drivers, team personnel, VIPs and local media are invited to the annual 24H DUBAI welcome barbecue on Thursday 9 January. Helping to usher in a new year of endurance racing, the BBQ is an opportunity for CREVENTIC to express its gratitude to competitors and its myriad supporters with local cuisine and entertainment.

After one final private test session, official track action for the 2025 24H DUBAI is scheduled to begin with a 90-minute Free Practice session on Friday 10 January. This will be followed later that afternoon by six, 15-minute qualifying sessions, the format for which made its debut in the 24H SERIES in Dubai in 2022. Friday’s track activities conclude with 90 minutes of official Night Practice. 

The 20th 24H DUBAI itself is set to begin with a rolling start at 13.00 hrs on Saturday 11 January, with the 24-hour race running uninterrupted throughout the night until 13.00 hrs on Sunday 12 January. CREVENTIC’s mid-race fireworks display, a landmark of the event, also return for 2025.

As part of CREVENTIC’s transportation package, and included within the entry fee, teams entering the 24H DUBAI have access to 50 per cent of a 40-foot shared container, used to transport car and equipment by sea to Dubai’s port in Jebel Ali (exclusive use of a full 40-foot container is available for an additional €3,500). As in previous years, containers will be shipped from London, Barcelona and/or Rotterdam, with loading scheduled to between 10 and 17 November 2024. Air freighting can be arranged upon request.

Competing teams can select one of three different loading options. Experienced teams can opt for free Terminal Delivery, and dispatch their container for departure through their own arrangements. For an additional €400 each way, teams can request Warehouse Loading, which is completed at a warehouse organized by CREVENTIC close to Rotterdam port. Upon request, and for an additional fee, a container will be delivered to a team’s home workshop for loading with CREVENTIC’s support.

Prior to loading, teams are required only to provide a shipping order form, transport documents, and, if optioned, travel insurance. As it has done since 2006, CREVENTIC personnel will take the lead thereafter on logistics and shipping matters, allowing teams to focus fully on pre-race preparation. 

Held on 11-12-13 January in 2006, the inaugural 24H DUBAI was the first official race organized by CREVENTIC, just over six months on from the independent promoter’s foundation. Designed for ‘gentlemen’ drivers and endurance racing enthusiasts alike, the 24H DUBAI was only the second high-profile motor race to be held at the Dubai Autodrome since the circuit opened in late 2004. Tellingly though, the 24H DUBAI remains the only international motor race to have been hosted by the Dubai Autodrome, without interruption, every year since. 

Austria’s Duller Motorsport made early event history by taking consecutive, overall wins in 2006 and 2007, the first with two-time 24 Hours of Le Mans winner Hans-Joachim Stuck and future Mercedes-AMG Formula 1 team principal Toto Wolff. 

Two-time victors Philipp Pieter and Dieter Quester meanwhile were later emulated by the UAE’s Khaled Al Qubaisi, Jeroen Bleekemolen and the late Sean Edwards when the trio took successive wins in 2012 and 2013, and by Saudi Arabia’s Abdulaziz Al Faisal, Yelmer Buurman and Hubert Haupt, who also won twice in 2015 and 2018. Al Qubaisi, Bleekemolen, and Haupt would eventually wrench the event record away, after 13 years, when they took their third overall wins together in 2020. 

Victory for Australia’s VIP Pet Foods in 2008 got a seismic ball rolling for Porsche: to-date, the German sports car manufacturer has the most overall wins at the 24H DUBAI with SIX, and is still the only marque to secure third consecutive wins, doing so from 2008 to 2010. Fittingly, this hattrick included Land Motorsport’s triumph in 2009, the only win for a Porsche ‘Cup’ to-date and the then-closest winning margin at just 49.676 seconds. A record that remained unbroken for 14 years, and only beaten in 2023 when Team WRT bested 2017 winner Herberth Motorsport by just 31.761 seconds!

Having celebrated back-to-back victories with ‘Abu Dhabi Racing,’ Black Falcon went on to secure a record FIVE wins at the 24H DUBAI in 2015, 2018 and 2020, the latter, thanks to the intervention of Mother Nature, yielding the event’s lowest lap count to-date at just 168. A stark contrast to a record 628 laps the German team completed en-route to victory in 2012 in a landmark performance for Mercedes-AMG. Indeed, the three-pointed star has amassed five wins to-date – just one less than Porsche – and the 2012 race remains the only edition to-date at which one manufacturer has monopolized the overall podium. 

Audi finally equaled its German rivals with its first win (of three so far, the latest being Eastalent Racing’s maiden triumph earlier this year) in 2016 with Belgian Club Audi Team WRT. This would be far from WRT’s final heyday in Dubai, however. Indeed, the Belgian team took its second event win in 2022 as ‘MS7 by WRT’, marking the first triumph for a team representing Saudi Arabia. One year later, Team WRT kickstarted its program as an official BMW M Motorsport customer in impressive fashion with its third event win to-date, and the third for BMW after a 12-year wait! 2023 also marked the first time one team had won Dubai’s biggest race overall with two different manufacturers. 

Were that not enough headlines, 2023 also featured the 24-hour racing debut of MotoGP icon Valentino Rossi. The nine-time motorcycle world champion finished 3rd overall on his debut (also with Team WRT), and became the latest in a growing list of high-profile racers to have competed at the 24H DUBAI. This includes Formula 1 Grand Prix winners Robert Kubica, and Johnny Herbert, F1 alumni Karun Chandhok, Mika Salo and Jan Magnussen, 24 Hours of Le Mans winners Jan Lammers, Brendon Hartley and Earl Bamber, two-time Formula E champion Jean-Eric Vergne, 2012 World Touring Car Champion Rob Huff, two-time Daytona 500 winner Michael Waltrip, five-time DTM champion Bernd Schneider, two-time V8 Supercar champion Marcos Ambrose, FIA GT and GT1 World Champions Karl Wendlinger, Marc Basseng, Michael Krumm and Markus Winkelhock, and even F1 design supremo Adrian Newey.