Nasser Al-Attiyah

Qatari rally hero Nasser Al-Attiyah is the first Castrol EDGE Performer of the Month for 2011.

The 40-year-old's victory on the Dakar Rally, in which he beat factory Volkswagen Touareg team-mates Giniel de Villiers and Carlos Sainz, means that he topped the Castrol Rankings scorers for January, and also took an early lead in the EDGE Race for 2011.

It means that Al-Attiyah, who missed a medal by one place in the 2004 Olympic Games clay-pigeon shooting, certainly hit the target in the Castrol Rankings...

Three-time world champion Jackie Stewart is probably motorsport's most-celebrated clay-pigeon expert. But whereas Stewart hung up his weaponry before embarking on racing, Al-Attiyah started with rallying, took up shooting during a sabbatical from four-wheeled competition, and now continues to be a formidable exponent of both sports.

Ranking Year

He contested the Olympics again in 2008, two years after becoming the Production World Rally champion in a Subaru.

Then, in 2010, he took second with VW in the Dakar Rally, gave the Ford Fiesta S2000 a victory on the model's sensational debut weekend in Qatar's round of the Middle East Rally Championship (simultaneously, Mikko Hirvonen was winning the Monte Carlo Rally in another Fiesta), won a gold medal in the team shooting at the Asian Games and, just for good measure, contested a programme of international rallies that featured a mid-season switch of teams and manufacturers.

Al-Attiyah embarked last year upon a programme in the S-WRC with a Super 2000 Skoda Fabia run by the Rene Georges team. His best performance was in Jordan, where he led before damaging the radiator in an accident and dropping to an eventual fourth place. After an acrimonious split with the team, Al-Attiyah switched to the Autotek Motorsport squad and a Fiesta S2000, and his rallying season culminated with victory in the final round of the Intercontinental Rally Challenge in Cyprus (pictured).

His next challenge? That'll be the forthcoming Qatar International Rally, the opening round of the Middle East Rally Championship, a title he has won six times in the past eight years. And looking further afield? He's got his eye on the clay-pigeon gold medal at the 2012 London Olympics.