One month to go until Le Mans 24 Hours opens a gripping QMMF FIM Endurance World Championship The 2007 QMMF FIM World Endurance Championship will get underway on the 21st April with the Le Mans 24 Hour race. The 30th running of this historic race will be the first of six races which make up the 2007 Championship, which visits France, Spain, Japan, Germany, France again, and concludes in Qatar on 10th November. The FIM, the joint organisers and promoters of the Championship, has assembled an impressive line-up of 20 permanent teams who will be fighting it out over the course of the season. The Le Mans 24 Hour is one of the most demanding events in the calendar, always approached with trepidation by the teams and is extremely closely fought. There will be no shortage of challengers looking to start the season with a victory and beat the current World Champions – the Suzuki Endurance Racing Team (SERT). SERT will enter two Suzuki GSX-R 1000s into the Superbike class, one entrusted to the World Championship-winning team of Vincent Philippe, Matthieu Lagrive and Julien Da Costa, while the other is in the hands of William Costes, Guillaume Dietrich and the German Max Neukirchner newly recruited from the World Superbike Championship. Among Suzuki’s closest rivals, Yamaha GMT 94 winners of the race in 2001 and 2005 have recruited Olivier Four – the ex-Suzuki rider and winner at Le Mans last year with Honda National Motos – to join Sébastien Gimbert and David Checa. Kawasaki France, a permanent team this year, is pinning its high hopes on the ZX10R of Gwen Giabbani and the Englishmen Steve Plater and Scott Smart. Second in the 2006 World Championship, the Yamaha Austria Racing Team has engaged the services of Damian Cudlin, formerly of the Yamaha Phase One team, as team-mate for Igor Jerman and Sébastien Scarnato. Yamaha Phase One has retained its headline rider Warwick Nowland who will team up with Glen Richards and Didier Van Keymeulen. The Kawasaki Bolliger Team Switzerland of David Morillon, Patric Muff and Horst Saiger will also be in with a chance, and not forgetting the winner of the 2006 Le Mans 24 Hour the National Motos Honda of Frédéric Protat, Dani Ribalta and Denis Bouan. This year’s 24 Hours will also be the first opportunity to see the Qatar Endurance Racing Team (QERT) in action a new permanent team entered into the Championship by the Qatar Motor and Motorcycling Federation (QMMF), the official sponsor of the 2007 Endurance World Championship. Also lining-up in the open class at Le Mans will be a BMW R1200S, entered by the German factory and ridden by, among others, endurance specialist Stéphane Mertens. This grand season-opener starts on Thursday afternoon with the opening qualifying rounds and night qualifiers. Following the second series of qualifiers on Friday morning, the grid will be determined by taking an average of the best times of each of the three riders on every team. The Le Mans 24 Hour race itself gets underway on Saturday 21st April at 15:00.