Neither Nak nor Roc Floranjcic registered for the Freestyle discipline at the second round of the UIM-ABP Aquabike World Championship in Sardinia and that left the door wide open for Team Abu Dhabi’s Rashed Al-Mulla to deliver another impressive artistic set on the water with his customary flips, spins and somersaults in pole position qualifying.

The Emirati impressed the judges with a pole-winning score of 97 points, including a massive 34 for variety and 30 for quantity. His closest rival was Italy’s Roberto Mariani on 82 points and Paolo Nunes, Alexander Kurumshin and Alberto Camerlengo were a distant third, fourth and fifth.

Al-Tayer qualifies second in Runabout GP1

Team Abu Dhabi’s Rashed Al-Tayer was seventh in the opening Runabout GP1 practice session on Friday and improved his best lap time by eight seconds in a pre-qualifying session that was won by Denmark’s Marcus Jorgensen.

But the Emirati left his best form to the qualifying session on Friday evening and a lap of 1min 21.80sec placed Al-Tayer in second position for the Moto 1 race behind pole winner Jorgensen and in front of Kuwait’s Youssef Abdulrazzaq.