Dubai 24 Hour

The journey to Dubai was not much fun. BA cancelled Sunday's 09:05 flight from Glasgow to Heathrow but managed to re-book us on the 16:00 which they then cancelled on Sunday morning, so we ended up catching the 14:00 to London an then had the Dubai flight delayed untill 22:00. I could have coped with that but upon arrival in the hotel, I found that my bag had been opened and one race boot and the back piece of my rib protector had been taken. I managed to buy a new pair of boots, and I'm waiting on BA's response.

So we spent a couple of days aclimatising to a balmy 25 C and even manged to meet of with a friend of mine who moved out here a couple of years ago, Paul Healy. We did some karting with his kids of 7 and 4 who both have their own karts, as does the 2yo ( but he's too young for the circuit!).

On Thursday it was time to meet my team mates and see the car. The car is a standard BMW M3 which has been stiriped out and had a roll cage installed. They use it to race in the VLN series in Germany, so the only other changes that are allowed to make are racing brake pads, and racing springs/dampers. The rest of the car is bog standard - unlike our competitors :-( There were 2 BMW z4 coupe's in our class driven by the Japaneses GT champions for car one and the runners up in car 2. The cars have carbon fibre roofs and bonnets for weigt saving, full race brakes, 100 litre race fuel tank (our's is the std 55), racing suspension that is cockpit adjustable, fully mapped ingnition giving them 400+bhp (ours is 320) and areodynamic splitters and wings and a pit crew that can do a full tyre change and a driver change ion arround 45 seconds (that's with 5 bolts per wheel). In all they are over 150KG lighter than us and even in a straight line they leave us standing. They were joined by another Z4 coupe of similar construction, a fully race prepard M3 and a Porsche 911 (964) again with pro Japanese drivers. It's pretty much the same throughout the field with only 2 other 'road spec' cars in a field of 81 cars, so on raw pace we are slow. But we shouldn't have any reliability issues. We've already seen a Mitsu Evo blowing an engine and a few other having issues during practice and qualifying.

After 9 laps in the car I was a second away from the fastest lap time in our team in the day light and I was quickest in the night practice. So I was reasonably sure that I could get some more pace as I got used to the car.

The car is owned by Tefilio Massera and Lorenzo Rocco, with Didier Denat and me making up the team of drivers. The car is run by Jaco's Paddock Motorsport who are based at the 'ring. Both the other drivers and the team were really great to work with and deserved a better result, but while it's a good car, it was up against some serious race cars - it's really soft compared to a pukka race car, but it is what it is.

Race day was the usual Dubai January weather, a very pleasant 24 C and no wind to speak of. Didier Denat started the race for us from our starting position of 64th (we only did 8 laps in qualifying to preserve the car). We had also decided that allthough the rev limit on the car is 8.5k, we would limit ourselves to 7k as finishing was our main goal. we then rotated in Lorenzo, Tefilio and me, an order we kept untill the end of the race when Lorenzo took over from me to take the chequered flag. We had a few issues, with the worst being a front left hub failure for me near the end on my 19th lap of the daybreak session, which resuled in the wheel parting company with the car. We laso had a front right wheel bering fail around 3AM and we constaltly suffered from fuel surge on the long left hander - race tanks have a compartmented bag type construction so that in long corners, the fuel doesn't all go to one side - It's not an issue until the standard tank gets down to around 10 litres remaining, but it meant that we couldn't run more than 80 minutes without pitting, even though we had fuel left. The only other issue is that with the soft suspension, we were burning up the rear tyres really fast. and by the second stint, the car was very loose (lots of oversteer).

So we finished 5th in class and 38th overall, beating the 911 but way behind the 3 Z4's and the other M3, which despite being stuck in 4th gear for the last 8 hours, was still faster than ours :-( But plenty of more exotic cars failed to go the distance, and we really enjoyed the race. There is already talk of a modified tank and suspension for next year.

I did find some more pace posting our fastest night and day laps at 2:24.564 and 2:22.894, so given I'd never driven the car before, I'm happy I did the best I could.

I really hope I can somehow manage to give this event another go - On paper the circuit looks reasonably simple, but it's deceptively tough - a real challange that I need to try again!

Edited to add: There are some pics on FaceBook.....