Qasimi on the comeback trail

Dubai: Shaikh Khalid Al Qasimi entered international rally driving with a bang. The Sharjah-born driver won the 2002 Middle East Championship Group N title in his debut season. He went on to claim the overall FIA Middle East Championship two years later, making his debut in the World Rally Championship (WRC) in the same year.

But now, eleven years after his eye-catching debut, the UAE’s first international rally driver is on a comeback trail. Persistent hip and knee injuries have jeopardised the 36-year-old’s involvement in a sport that has seen him export the Abu Dhabi brand worldwide.

Having undergone serious surgery last year to rectify his physiological glitches, Al Qasimi took a year to convalesce. His international return in Portugal in March – his first WRC event since 2011 – showed exactly the tough task he is facing to get back to the top, after he picked up two points for a ninth-place finish.

Acclimatising to new ranges of movement, aches and pains, Al Qasimi told Gulf News it would “take time” until he is clocking up his fastest lap times again. “I know things will take time to come. The pain in my knee and hip [limited] me. But the reality is I didn’t drive in the gravel in a high-level factory team since 2011. If you skip weeks, your performance drops. If you skip years, you’re in a different world,” he said.

Al Qasimi, a member of the Sharjah royal dynasty, is straddling the FIA Middle East Rally Championship and the WRC to rediscover his form. Both competitions operate on starkly different conditions, with the gravelly surfaces of the WRC factory standard a far cry from the atmospherics of the Middle East’s dustbowl tracks.

As well as returning to peak personal performance, Al Qasimi has a new car to fine tune, which he says he finds “the most difficult” aspect of his comeback.

As the Chairman of Abu Dhabi Racing, Al Qasimi has been a key figure in striking up a lucrative five-year deal with eight-time WRC manufacturing champions Citroën.

Excruciating attention

The agreement will see up to four Citroën R5s, plastered with Abu Dhabi logos representing the Abu Dhabi Citroën Total World Rally Team competing at one time throughout the 2013 season, which has 13 pit stops in international locations from Monte Carlo to Australia.

The brand-new R5 needs excruciating attention to detail, Al Qasimi says. “Engineering wise, it’s complicated [to handle]. It’s difficult because the car is very sensitive. Even Mikko Hirvonen, [the 15-time Finish WRC rally winner], who has been using the Citroen for two years, his engineers say: ‘Mikko’s lost!’ So, if Mikko’s lost and he’s been using the car a long time, there’s a lot of pressure.

“Even when you think it’s running well, you only find out whether it’s truly good when you go to a level of competing in competition stages and you see your times. So it might be that you feel that car feels good, but you’re losing a lot of time and you don’t know why,” he said.

As with any sport, it’s the small margins that matter. And when time is of the essence, every split second counts. Al Qasimi’s second-place finish in Kuwait in March this year is an example of exactly that, he says.

“In Kuwait, although I came second, I could have won the rally. But the set-up was completely wrong. We were losing a lot of traction, there was a huge wheel spin, and it’s all to do with the car’s set-up.”

As an example of the difficulties he’s had adjusting to his new wheels, the first day of competition in Portugal saw the Abu Dhabi Citroën team ‘lose the clutch’. Al Qasimi and new British co-driver Scott Martin had to bleed the clutch to get the car running and ready to drive.

With the Jordan leg of the Middle East championships taking place next weekend (May 9-11), Al Qasimi and co see the stopover as another opportunity to hone the R5 to their driving requirements in the build-up to the upcoming WRC event in Acropolis at the end of May. It’s also a chance to gel the new Abu Dhabi Citroen team together.

“We’re a new team and I have a new co-driver. Scott’s a great co-driver, but we need time to build the chemistry between us to have 100 per cent confidence.

“In blind conditions, you need to build that extra trust. At narrow turns, you don’t realise it at the time, but if you back off a little bit you lose a lot of time,” Al Qasimi said.