You’re quite a rally enthusiast. How did you get into that?
Well, I passed my UK driving test when I was 17 and then joined the Newcastle and District Motor Club within a couple of months with a fellow student from college in Newcastle.
Over the next ten years or so I competed in local road rallies in the North East of England and special stage events through military ranges and the forests, in a range of cars including various Ford Escorts, Minis, a BMW 2002, Hillman Avenger, Talbot Sunbeam, Hillman Imp and so on — a complete cross-section of Seventies competition cars.
We travelled all over the country watching rallies, autocross and racing.
You must have a story or two to tell. Do share!
I’ve got a bunch! There was the time I competed in a charity race where the idea was to get as far as you could from Newcastle in 24 hours. Twenty hours later and after taking a ferry across the English Channel, we arrived at the Yugoslavia border nearly 1,500km away! But, we didn’t have insurance to drive any further! We won the cars event, but others used an RAF jet and managed to get to New York’s Empire State Building!
Then there was the RAC Rally-watching week where we lost the windscreen and broke the prop shaft in a hire car, and also the fortnight camping trip around the UK watching stacks of motorsport of all levels. We finished up watching the Ford Works Rally team practising in a farmer’s field in their BDA Escorts!
Blimey! And, I’m sure they weren’t dusting crops! Anyway, what was your first car?
It was a 1962 850 Mini, already ten years old, bought from an auction for £32 (Dh186) — it broke down on the way home!
I moved up through ten different Minis over the years, one highlight in 1983 being a brand new 1000 Mini Mayfair in pale metallic blue. I ended my stint with the new BMW Mini Cooper S.
You used to tinker with them a lot, right?
I used to buy second-hand Morris 1100 or 1300 engines at the scrap yard, hire a mobile hoist and replace the engine over a weekend in the street outside my parents’ house in all weathers. A big scaffold pole was used as leverage to swap over the diff drive, otherwise acceleration would have been pathetic.
I must have been through this process six or seven times — the “new” engines were always bags of nails and often worse than the original!
I’d have stuck a great big V8 in there! But why the fascination with Minis?
They have always been my favourites as they were cheeky, affordable and great fun (when they worked!) and in the UK I have a collection of almost 300 toy Minis and loads of Mini memorabilia.
I used to attend all the Mini meetings across the UK and a highlight was getting Paddy Hopkirk’s autograph on one of his books at Silverstone.
The collection is in the attic in the UK at the moment, but one day it’ll provide the kids’ inheritance — or that’s what I tell them anyway.
When you moved to the UAE, what was on the shopping list?
When I came out here in 2008, I was determined to have something that I wouldn’t be able to have at home. So, I bought a new 3.5-litre Dodge Charger, black with tinted windows. I called it ‘The Capone-mobile’. It was a brilliant car with all the toys; sat-nav, hard drive, MP3 player, etc. Then I bought a white Jeep Cherokee so that my wife, Janet, had something to go shopping in, but allowed us some fun at the weekends.
Off Road Zone in Dubai provided off-road lessons at their Jebel Ali centre and that gave us the confidence to go out into the desert with them on one of their trips. It was really good fun, exciting and hard work all at the same time. Janet was terrified most of the time but I was in my element. “It’s my shopping car!” she kept shouting as we went through impossible angles and enormous bumps.
Since then we’ve often been off-road and camping — much different to the cold and wet camping we were brought up on in the UK.
I could never get the tent up whenever I went. Right then, on to your Porsche. What made you buy this?
Well, in May this year we were invited to the launch of the new Dodge Charger at Dubai Autodrome, and I was very impressed with the 5.7-litre Hemi V8. So much so that, when they offered me “an excellent trade-in” I went straight to the showroom... but their interpretation of the word “excellent” was far from that so I didn’t bother.
But I was so switched-on to getting a new car and I couldn’t rest. Over the road from my office in Abu Dhabi is the Porsche showroom. Now which petrolhead hasn’t always had a hankering for a Porker? I’ve always been something of a realist and while I may have drooled over the windows of a Porsche showroom like a schoolboy at the window of a sweet shop, I’d never even stepped inside one. So to get over my disappointment at not getting a good price against the new Charger, I called in to the Porsche showroom on the spur of the moment. Within a week I had my own Porsche!
Boxsters are great fun. You must be very happy with it...
Oh yes. It’s incredibly quick, a lovely colour and simply gorgeous!
Now, I’m lucky enough to have an open-top two-seater German sportscar and a Jeep for the desert, as well as a Fiat Panda 1275 diesel sport in the UK for my wife and the kids when they go back home.
It looks like you’ve got every angle covered with those three! Where you do like stretching the Porsche’s legs the most?
My favourite road is the run between Hatta and Fujairah. The mountain roads are unbelievable. Then you have that lovely switchback down through the tunnels out onto the Indian Ocean — we are so lucky here. Open-top Porker, sun and fabulous roads.
So, the UAE has been rather good to you…
It has to be one the best playgrounds in the world for car nuts and I’m very lucky to be here and to be able to indulge.
May I never forget how lucky I am.
