Racing News

17-Jan-08

DUBAI 24hr report

Dubai gets 3 days of rain a year and as luck would have it, we got one of those days. Not a big deal in normal circumstances, however Dubai Autodrome has no drainage and we had no wet weather equipment, including wet tyres!

This race was a true test of survival unlike any other 24hr race I had done before. Not because it was physically demanding but because we were not equipped for the weather and as such a moving liability on track.

We encountered the usual 24hr race gremlins, broken gearbox in qualifying but suitably recified, electrical gremlins in my opening stint and the rare issue of wheel studs sheering, not to mention another electrical fault preventing the battery from charging, but that aside the car ran like a train. No, the the biggest test of survival was racing at night in Dubai with worn road tyres that were never designed for wet use.

You see Dubai Autodrome doesn’t have drainage… why should it, it doesn’t rain! Add to that an 800kilo supercharged car on worn Kumho road tyres, a track that when its wet is like a polished black piano with the lights from all the construction around the circuit reflecting off it. As if this isn’t enough, the wet dust is like driving on a salted winter road but without windscreen washers (its a racer after all) and the mirrors don’t work because they to are also plastered in dirt. All of this is quite manageable if you can circulate at a comparable pace to the field, but when you’re the only car on road tyres against Porsche RSR's and even Clio Cup cars on full racing wets there is a significant speed differential and we had no idea what was coming and from where. Its not dangerous because there’s loads of space and the Lotus Exige is a well built car but you cant help think what’s the point in risking your teams retirement and maybe someone else’s just because you have the wrong tyres. We were loosing time hand over fist to everyone as it was.

After all the drivers had driven at night in these conditions a set of new Yokohama wets was found! My first lap around on these tyres was 10 seconds faster than any previous wet lap in the race showing the difference and of course I was going to get faster. Where before, the 997 Porsches were driving around the outside of us in corners, we were now driving around their outside. We also went from running 15 seconds a lap slower than the P2 car to running 5 seconds a lap faster and this with the cars tracking all messed up after a previous crash which left the steering wheel pointing 45 degrees to the right.

Anyway, some bad luck befell the P2 car and we took the position from them eventually. But to be honest this is the first and only race where the finishing position stopped mattering and just finishing became the challenge.

Having now driven a Lotus Exige in a 24hr race, I am very confident that given the right preparation, a fairly standard version could easily take the fight to BMW in the up to 3000cc class and maybe achieve a staggering overall result.

A special thanks must go my team mates Andrew Donaldson, Martin Richter and Mirco Schultis who went through these conditions and to the Lotus factory engineers David Wilson and Russell Gibbons who came out with us and straight away operated at a level that convinced me a Lotus is capable of 24hr racing glory.

The regular RED Motorsport team members led by Martin Roos made the best they could and were great bunch to go racing with.