Drift UAE then is just the tip of this particular conglomerate iceberg. Regular crankandpiston-ites may be familiar with our recent coverage of The Chase, the third such street racing festival to have taken place at the Dubai Autodrome after the original event was staged in April last year. There are already plans to make The Chase a bi-season tradition. And of course, there’s more to it than a pseudo-amateur concour’s d’elegance.
“The Chase concept is a big part of supporting motorsport awareness in the region. People often think of car people as hooligans, and that’s not right. There’s a passion shared by young and old, male and female alike: a community we like to bring together at The Chase with drag racing, Drift UAE, stunt bikes and RC drift. All this represents the car culture and I was very keen to build a safe platform for this group to express its interests. I’ve received good support from the police, civil defence and the RTA in this endeavour.”
Also on duty during The Chase was the Auto-X championship, a longstanding discipline within the region that may only have been on Motorsport Solution’s books for a year but one which still continues to draw a crowd.
“Running Auto-X was actually a request from the Emirates Motorsport Federation (EMSF) once they saw how Drift UAE was being managed. It’s been going for a long time now but it’s been struggling. Only this year I took over from EMSF to push it and try to introduce new drivers and reach out to the local community. I have a team that is working on that.”
RING
Mohammad’s phone interrupts him again, following a few hastily ignored text messages, and the Emirati excuses himself. After a few speedy words in Arabic, he turns back to the voice recorder on the desk to continue where we left off. Rather embarrassingly, I’ve already forgotten my train of thought, and decide instead to ask him about his own early motorsport aspirations.
“I used to study in New Zealand at university,” Mohammad explains. “In 2001, I had a Mazda RX7 and took part in some gymkhana events, grass rallies, hillclimbs, and some drag racing. I quickly got the bug, so when I came back to the UAE in 2005, I went to the Dubai Autodrome” – which, by the by, was gearing up to host its first major championship since opening, the FIA GT Championship – “to see what they had going on
“I was the first local driver to compete in the Volkswagen Golf GTI Cup: there was 17 drivers, and I was always number 17! But I joined the Autodrome racing school, learnt quickly, and was soon driving quicker and more consistently. I’ve done a bit of everything since then: Formula BMW in Bahrain, the UAE GT Championship with a Corvette ZL6, Auto-X and the Middle East V8 Supercars. A racing driver doesn’t stop competing but a few years ago I decided to take some time off.”
