Dubai 24 Hours

18 January 2007

Phil was invited to drive in the Dubai 24 hours by one of his sponsors Motorsport Wheels Middle East. There is a single make Championship that is run in Dubai using the Volkswagen Golf and the team was going to run one of these cars in the event, shared between 4 drivers. The car is a standard road going car, which has been stripped with the only modification to the car being upgraded suspension. However for the event the team used upgraded AP brakes, a Quaife differential and an FIA approved fuel tank. This car was front wheel drive, which meant that Phil had to get to grips with learning a new circuit as well as driving a type of car on track, which he had never done before.

Phil says " We experienced mechanical problems with the car during testing which unfortunately caused us to be late for qualifying and there was only enough time for each driver to complete his compulsory laps resulting in us qualifying in 66th position.

The race ran fairly smoothly for the first hour or so before we hit some further mechanical problems where we lost 2 hours whilst the car was being worked on in the garage. Once these problems were resolved we all pushed hard to try and make up some lost ground. About 8/10 hours in we were beginning to make good progress moving up the grid until the half way distance when we experienced power steering failure. This problem was easily cured by plugging into the ECU. The race continued to run pretty well until the drive shaft failed in the early hours of the morning, which stopped us for about 30 minutes. The remainder of the race was trouble free although the car started to feel very tired with 4 hours to go. Our main criteria was to finish the race and a team decision was made to back off a little. We successfully completed the 24 hours finishing 46th which was a real achievement that the team was proud of.

This was a great opportunity for me not only to learn how to drive a front wheel drive vehicle but also to compete in a 24 hour Endurance race on an awesome circuit. I am very grateful to Jon Simmonds of Motosport Wheels Middle East for offering me the drive.