The Black Falcon Mercedes team repeated its 2012 victory in this year’s Dubai 24 Hours with Khaled Al Qubaisi, Sean Edwards, Jeroen Bleekemolen and Bernd Schneider.

In a race marked by a high attrition rate, the four drivers racked up a total of 600 laps.

The team had worked through two days and nights to get the car ready after losing its original machine in a test crash on Wednesday.

With many of the contenders for victory, including the Saudi Falcons/Schubert factory-backed BMW Z4s and British team RAM Racing’s Ferrari having retired, the AF Corse Ferrari with Lorenzo Carvalho, Lorenzo Case, Marco Cioci and Mika Salo finished second.

Factory Aston Martin duo Darren Turner and Stefan Mucke joined Frank Yu, Tomonobu Fuijii and Darryl O’Young to take the Craft Aston to third.

The Preci Spark-team of the Jones family came fifth overall and second in the amateur class with a Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG.

Porsche Cup class honours were taken by French drivers Francois Glenmor, Sebastien Crubile, ‘Mr John of B’ and Soheil Ayari.

RJN Motorsport’s two Nissan 370Z cars with the winners of the various Nissan PlayStation GT Academy competitions were first and second in their GT4 class for the first few hours, but they both dropped back after incidents in the first half of the race.

A great recovery saw the car of Lucas Ordonez, Wolfgang Reip, Mark Schulzhitskiy, Steve Doherty and Roman Rusinov still finish second in class behind the winning Cor Euser Racing Lotus Evora.

The other Nissan with Sabine Schmitz, Peter Pyzera, Mark Schulzhitskiy, Steve Doherty and Alex Buncombe was classified ninth in class.