With the Golf GTI now starting to cost Ala Malak and myself some serious repair money between races, I decided to get on the phone to a few friends in high places. The sponsorship from Octane to repair the car was one thing, but actual financial outlay for everything from tyres, to clutches, to entry fees was mounting up. Something that’s best not to tell your wife about in full.

Only a few days has passed, and each person I called had made arrangements within their respective company to forward us some funding. It is with great thanks to Apex Circuit Design (who designed the Dubai Autodrome and who are appointed to design the latest F1 circuit in Paris) and Alamo and National Car Rentals (who provide the cars for the Dubai Autodrome staff and safety teams) that we made it to the grid for the final race of the 2008/09 Yellow Hat Touring Car Championship. Ala was kind enough to give me the drive so that we could ensure I completed the mandatory ten National races needed for an International FIA licence. And I need one of those to race in the 24 hours of Dubai in January next year.

Just applying the stickers across the car gave me huge satisfaction. Not just because we had stickers, but because I wasn’t doing it only for us.  After all, who wants to sponsor a car that is running around at the back of the field…

With all the preparation work done, we rolled out into the pitlane and I got the car up to speed in the morning’s practice session. My times could’ve been classed as ‘okay’. They were an improvement on the last race. Then again, perhaps the International Circuit suited us better than the Club layout.

Although we were confident a little work on the car would improve it and bring us closer to the Renault Clio Cup cars and the other Golf GTIs, we were wrong to assume that they too hadn’t  been doing a lot of work to get their cars to lap quicker. I began to get the feeling that we were always going to be playing catch up, suffering from a converted, heavy road car that couldn’t really match the lighter and more focused racecars.

Qualifying was a fairly ordinary affair, with us eventually ending up on the last row of the grid.

As for the race, I had more positive thoughts. The car is quick in a straight line and also from a standing start, so it was critical to capitalize on our advantage and get ahead of a few of our lowly competitors before the first turn.

Get ahead I did, and it also made me realize that this is by far the best part of racing in this championship: blasting away as the lights turn green, 32 cars heading into the first turn, each driver trying to outwit the guy next to him.

That is, if nothing goes wrong. A slide from a car in front brings out blue smoke everywhere and everyone does their best to avoid the mayhem. In the middle of the havoc, I felt a bump. I was sure I’d smashed the front end in, collecting a fellow competitor mid-turn. Having never crashed a road car in 22 years of driving this was in the back of my mind for several laps.

It was only minor damage though, despite it happening at 120kph. All cars were travelling in the same direction at approximately the same speed, so it was more of a soft nudge than an impact you get in a crash. Nonetheless, the front guard had a small screw in it, and this chewed the tyre on each turn of Race 1. That meant we needed a new tyre as the canvas was exposed along the entire shoulder of the tyre. DXB Racing came to the rescue and we borrowed a tyre from one of their used sets that would probably be discarded after the summer, anyway.

‘It’s these kind of things,’ I thought to myself, ‘the trials and tribulations, the camaraderie that makes for a great national motor racing scene’.