{"id":343914,"date":"2025-12-12T20:54:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T20:54:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/343914\/"},"modified":"2025-12-12T20:54:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T20:54:07","slug":"international-effort-natural-progression-for-tigani-sportscar365","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/343914\/","title":{"rendered":"International Effort \u201cNatural Progression\u201d for Tigani \u2013 Sportscar365"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Photo: Davey Euwema<\/p>\n

Tigani Motorsport\u2019s first international outing in the Gulf 12 Hours is part of a \u201cnatural progression\u201d for the Australian squad according to team owner Nathan Tigani, having recently also announced a Pro entry into the Meguiar\u2019s Bathurst 12 Hour.<\/p>\n

The Wollongong-based operation is one of seven teams representing Mercedes-AMG in this weekend\u2019s Abu Dhabi enduro, fielding a Pro-Am entry for Jayden Ojeda, Brendon Leitch,\u00a0Sergio Pires and Marcel Zalloua.<\/p>\n

First founded in 2021, the team has undergone significant growth recently, having been named Mercedes-AMG\u2019s official service provider for the Australia-New Zealand region in the wake of Triple Eight Race Engineering\u2019s impending move to Ford.<\/a><\/p>\n

The entry into the Gulf 12H is part of an ambitious growth plan for Tigani, who stated that racing outside of Australia was part of the team\u2019s ambition since it was founded in 2021.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo be honest, it\u2019s always been in the pipeline for me to go international and race the big boys,\u201d Tigani told Sportscar365.<\/p>\n

\u201cLuxuriously enough, we have a customer\u00a0base that want to come and do these types of events now.<\/p>\n

\u201cAustralian GT racing is booming at the minute and it\u2019s opening up the new market for us down there.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe good thing for us is what we race there, we\u00a0can ship and race here, so it makes it pretty streamlined.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s nothing exuberant that we will do differently here that we won\u2019t do back home so it kind of makes it an easy\u00a0enough step to do that.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just been a natural progression. I guess getting the right people around the organisation has been a massive influence on that trajectory.<\/p>\n

\u201cMatt Harvey, who\u2019s our technical director, he\u2019s an Aussie that lives abroad\u00a0and has worked for all the major GT3 teams and across the globe.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo it was natural for us when he came on board to work with us in Australia through the Jayden Ojeda connection to kind of entertain the idea of lifting our team\u00a0and bringing it here.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe could see what we were doing in Australia and how we grew and what we\u2019re growing into. He couldn\u2019t see why it wasn\u2019t achievable to go and do that overseas.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou always have aspirations or goals or ideologies of where you want to\u00a0go.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes it seems that is in the realms of unachievable, but the last couple years a lot has been happening with us and everything\u2019s possible. So yeah, we just keep building.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Tigani, the Abu Dhabi outing also \u201cabsolutely\u201d serves as an opportunity for the team to measure itself against a number of top-level European squads, including the likes of GetSpeed, Winward Racing, Garage 59 and Optimum Motorsport.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe end goal is to go to these big events, where it\u2019s a purely Pro-focus entity,\u201d said Tigani.<\/p>\n

\u201cCommercially, at the minute, we\u2019re not there yet. But this is why we\u2019re here.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s one of the closest regions to get to where we can do it. This is where we\u2019re going to see where we stack up.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hold Australian GT in a pretty high level of regard. I think it\u2019s prepared us well for for this event, but we\u2019ll see.\u201d<\/p>\n

When asked for his target for the event, the Australian stated that the No. 44 Mercedes-AMG GT3 Evo should be considered a contender for victory in Pro-Am.<\/p>\n

\u201cLook, definitely the expectation is to perform and to win in class definitely,\u201d said Tigani.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe driver lineup we have here is solid. Jayden\u2019s factory, Brendon is well versed\u00a0in every manufacturer and Sergio and Marcel, they want a result.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s why they\u2019re here, so that\u2019s why they\u2019re making the investment. So the idea is to win definitely class and see how far we can get up the overall order.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tigani Eyeing IGTC Appearances Outside Bathurst<\/p>\n

Looking towards the future, Tigani expressed an ambition to expand his team\u2019s efforts beyond the Bathurst 12H and contest more of the Intercontinental GT Challenge calendar.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe goalposts keep shifting at the minute with what\u2019s achievable and what what we want to do,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I think\u00a0the next set of goals we want to achieve is to do something like the IGTC.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose kind of big endurance events on those big amazing tracks against the best teams in the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is\u00a0kind of where I want to end up and where I\u2019d like to head. I guess that\u2019s kind of the end goal.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor GT racing, they\u2019re the big events on the world\u00a0stage with those guys. One aspect is to get there and the other one is to be competitive.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Davey Euwema is Sportscar365’s European Editor. Based in The Netherlands, Euwema covers the FIA World Endurance Championship, European Le Mans Series and Fanatec GT World Challenge Europe powered by AWS, among other series.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo: Davey Euwema Tigani Motorsport\u2019s first international outing in the Gulf 12 Hours is part of a \u201cnatural…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":343915,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-343914","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-motosport","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-motor","11":"tag-motor-sports","12":"tag-motosport","13":"tag-motosports","14":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343914\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/343915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}