Dubai 24 hour race

I recently came back from Dubai after spending a week there with the Brunswick team for our 3rd assault on the 24 hour race at the Dubai Autodrome.

We would be using our Mazda RX7 and had 5 drivers, 2 English, 1 Belgian, 1 russian and a Kiwi - talk about multinational!

Qualifying was a steady affair with several of the drivers getting in the car for the first time, we were a few places behind our class competitors but not too far away - 24 hours is a long time after all!

The race started without incident on an extremely hot Friday afternoon at 2pm local time, within 90 minutes we had our first drama when the driver reported that he couldn't select 5th gear anymore, whilst the car circulated at a reduced pace we tried to figure out the best course of action - the ideal answer was to change the gearbox but we would lose the best part of 4 hours doing so.

The option we chose was to change the diff from the race version to the standard road version, this would have the effect off dropping the gearing and therefore making the gears longer so we wouldn't actually need 5th gear at all!
This was completed in 1 hour 45 minutes.

The Mazda continued to circulate at a good pace for a few more hours before the driver reported the engine had gone flat - we knew the engine was a strong unit so it had to be something silly - we traced the fault back to a faulty injector so we replaced the set and fixed a broken wire on the fuel pump which was giving intermittent problems.

The car was now charging pretty hard and even though we were missing 5th gear and the drivers were having to regulate the engine revs down the longer straight we were still going a few seconds a lap faster than we had in qualifying, we started to gain positions as other cars ran into problems and we overtook some of the slower cars.

We didn't really suffer any major problems after that, brake wear was good, fuel consumption was good and the well set up chassis hardly touched the Toyo tyres, each driver reporting that the car was a joy to drive!

At 2pm the whole team were up on the pitwall for the finish, the car came over the line 2nd in class a long way ahead of 3rd and overall we finished 49th from almost 80 cars, we had qualified 61st so we made up plenty of spaces during the night and the morning.

On the whole we had a very good race, without the diff change we would have been challenging for the class win and a position inside the top 30 but that's endurance racing for you - you never know what the day will throw at you.