Resolutions – January 2009

To start my 2009 resolution with a blast and to make sure that I did something uber fun as my January challenge for my New Year’s Resolution I headed to the Dubai Autodrome on 2nd January.

So, on this sunny Friday afternoon I sat down in a darkened room to watch Tarek give us the safety demonstration which lasted about 20mins. In this demonstration, we were told how to handle the corners on the Dubai Autodrome race track. We were also told generally how to behave on the track and the different driving technique used (9 & 3, not 10 & 2, crossed arms allowed as not allowed to let go of that position on the wheel etc etc). We then headed down to the pit lane to get our helmets before being seated behind the wheel of an Audi TTS.

I was a bit pants really at first. Mainly too slow and wasn’t going full throttle when I should and braking too much on the corners, but got going after a couple of laps. I even had to overtake about 4 other cars on the track (and was only overtaken twice myself) which must have been a bit of a dent to the other drivers considering I was the only female on the track at the time (men’s false claims about women drivers being bad and all that). I even got very close to 200km/hr on the straight at one point which isn’t really much on the Dubai Autodrome track, but was a lot for me considering it was the first time I had ever done anything like that.

It was an excellent experience which I hope to do again another time and am looking forward to the other 11 ‘challenges’ that I’m going to set myself for 2009.