The Dubai Brothers - 1 Phil Quaife

Here’s a short series of race diaries from just some of the contenders in the 2011 Dubai 24 Hours – seemingly an event growing in popularity with Dunlop backing and 85 race starters – Amongst them were five fine fellows who are sharing their experiences with dsc – Johnny Mowlem, Sam Hancock, Matt Griffin and Wofgang Kaufmann will follow – but first up here’s Phil Quaife:

Phil Quaife - #44 MSW Racing Seat Leon Supercopa

It’s a great place to go to in the winter.

I travelled out on the Monday and the team put me up in an apartment on the Palm resort with some of the mechanics.

I often take some bits and pieces out with me for the cars when I come out from the UK and this time was no different – I brought out a water bottle system for the drivers and spent part of Tuesday fitting it to the car.

I trained as a mechanic and will hep out when and where I can – particularly in the prep stage before it hits the track – MSW is only a small team and , particularly in the earlier part of the week I was chipping in a fair bit.  The team had arranged for additional help for the race but generally there are only two or three people involved so an extra pair of hands can be useful.

Tuesday afternoon saw the cars at the circuit for scrutineering and the paperwork formalities.  Half of the teams took the opportunity for an additional test session.  We felt we didn’t need to  - The car runs regularly at the circuit, all the drivers know their way around so e already had a pretty good base set-up and saved the car a bit.

We finally got on track on the Thursday and I thought it was important for John (Simmonds) to get to grips with the car – it’s a very different animal to the Porsche he races rather more regularly.

Andre (Ramdhanny) is relatively new to racing and has certainly never raced in an event like this with so many cars, passing traffic and much slower cars to pass too.

Raed (Hassan) is rather more experienced – he races a Ginetta Zytek in the middle East GT Series and has done the 24 hours before too.

As for the Seat – I was actually quite impressed.  I’d only ever raced two front wheel drive cars before – oddly both of them in the Dubai 24 hours! A Golf and a Clio, and both of them some time ago.

The Seat though had a fair bit of aero, plenty of grip on entry and quite a bit of power, around 280 bhp and a paddle shift – The idea was that this would be an easy car over 24 hours and that’s how it turned out  - The car didn’t miss a beat either!

That said I’m still a dyed in the wool sportscar man – I’m not converted to Touring cars!

The objective then, beyond the usual “bring it home” was to be the top finishing Seat.  And that wouldn’t be easy because Sunred had entered a similar car (one of 6 Leons in the race) and they had a lot of experience with the car, and an experienced driver squad too, two or three of their four drivers had raced Sets in the Euro Series.  A class win was going to be tougher still because the race organisers had but a BMW M3 GTR in our (A3T) class!

I qualified the car P4 in class but in the pre-race session we found a real sweet spot that meant that we might be able to take the fight to Sunred.

In the race, I started and was going to go on the attack.  But then we had a 10-15 minute ‘Code 60’ caution period while the marshals dealt with the aftermath of a big shunt for the JetAlliance Porsche.

The rules state that a driver can only drive for 2 hours at a time, actually we were planning on an hour and 50 minutes each – the car will do way more than that on fuel so you had the option to stretch it a little or run with a lighter fuel load.

After the Code 60 I got down to it and with the Dual Racing Leon (with Stuart Hall on the driving squad) hitting trouble by the time I handed the car over we were right there with the Sunred car for P2 – and in the midfield overall.

At about 10 or 11 pm Raed got hit in the right rear corner and that knocked the rear tracking arm out.

We brought the car in and it cost us probably 5 or 6 laps, very frustrating and a huge shame – Up to that point we’d been still on the same lap as the Sunred car.

The good news was though that the boys did a fantastic job – after the car came back out it ran like clockwork again.

It wasn’t plain sailing though for the Sunred car either though.  They’d had a puncture before dark that actually allowed us to get ahead for a short while and then with 3 hours to the finish, with us between 3 and 4 laps back now, they had another.

It was time for us to put them under pressure so we decided it was John and I to the finish, Sunred were clearly a bit rattled, they were checking our pitstop, including a pad change, to make sure we didn’t do anything wrong – I see that as a compliment actually, and we ended up bringing it home less than a lap back on them.

It’s a really good fun event all round and over the past 5 years the quality and depth of the field is much improved.  There’s a growing motorsport scene out in the Gulf and who knows where the race might be in global terms in 3 or 4 years time?