Ferrari World non-event

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Ferrari World in Dubai. The opening was postponed after the death of Sheik Saqr, the last of the original "magnificent seven" who created the UAE.
Neil Dowling
Contributing Journalist
3 Nov 2010
4 min read

Then the Sheikh - the last of the original magnificent seven who created the UAE - died and all the music stopped.  The beer ran out, Ferrari World didn't open, the parties were cancelled and a sombreness closed in as depressing as the dust storms that swirl Dubai's heaven-reaching buildings.

Later that day, at a post-launch dinner, two tables were empty.  The Chinese journalists, I was told, were shopping.

"Really?"  "No, not really," came the response.  "They're in gaol."

Welcome to Dubai. A city or a kingdom or a country or a shopping mecca. You decide. Dubai can be a lot of things to a lot of people but it comes with silent warning tags.  It reminds me of the US. Complex and brash, excesses of poverty and wealth all topped by a thick coating of hypocrisy.

You don't show affection when walking with your wife/partner/girlfriend in Dubai. You don't show emotion of any kind, really, except to recognise you are in another person's country and you do as they do. Wear what they wear, drive like they drive.

When it comes to the car, they drive pretty much like what we drive. There's a lot of Altona-built Camrys and Elizabeth-sourced Commodores.
They're not big on luxury Europeans. In 300-plus kilometres, I counted four Audis, about the same number of BMWs though there were a few more Mercedes. And four motorcycles.

Commodores with Chevrolet badges were relatively common, though Hyundais were dominant. The deserts crowd the city but SUVs are few and the only 4WD of note was the Toyota FJ which we get in March.

They drive on the other side of the road and tend to disregard speed limits, though just recently the police - who, you will learn, are not to be argued with - were issued with hand-held cameras and the revenue is soaring, according to a taxi driver on the windswept trip to the hotel from the airport.

On the road test in Kia's promising Optima, the bitumen through the sand was impressive in quality. You can build up a bit of speed out here, too, but the car moves around a bit when the winds whip the flanks and the steering gets uncomfortably light.

Caution, too, for the camels. Australians may be practised at screening the rural horizon for kangaroos and this augurs well for a blast across the sands towards Abu Dhabi.

Camels are the same colour as kangaroos are the same colour as the sand, so can easily become invisible save for the fact they prefer to walk on the road. Where you are. At 120km/h or more.

It's all good for the heart.  Wadis (oases) come and go in a blink of palm leaves and the road finds interest as it climbs towards Hatta through rich red rocky earth piles that show no vegetation.

Further, at Kalba, the road skims the edge of the Gulf of Oman with its flat, pale water and distant oil rigs.  The car is very comfortable, notably quiet and the features and fittings reflect a thoughtful and careful methodology. It should do well, even though the car wasn't exactly the one bound for Australia in January.

On the return to Dubai, a coffee stop filled us with sticky buns and Nescafe from a jar at a wadi with beige buildings and beige dust interrupted only by a few green palm trees and a black bitumen highway.

I expect Dubai's 850m-odd high Burj Khalifa to become the lighthouse to guide me back to the hotel but it's clouded by dust.  It is an uninspiring return, repeating the almost full stops over countless speed humps - yes, on the freeway - and the tedium of dozens upon dozens of roundabouts.

At dinner, with Kia bosses, talk moved from the death of Sheikh Saqr to the postponement that day of the Ferrari World opening to new cars to free trade to Chinese journalists.  "Why are they in gaol?"

"They were arrested after photographing the police station. You are not allowed to photograph public buildings in Dubai. The Chinese were photographing everything."

"Are they still there?"

"I don't know."

Neil Dowling
Contributing Journalist
GoAutoMedia Cars have been the corner stone to Neil’s passion, beginning at pre-school age, through school but then pushed sideways while he studied accounting. It was rekindled when he started contributing to magazines including Bushdriver and then when he started a motoring section in Perth’s The Western Mail. He was then appointed as a finance writer for the evening Daily News, supplemented by writing its motoring column. He moved to The Sunday Times as finance editor and after a nine-year term, finally drove back into motoring when in 1998 he was asked to rebrand and restyle the newspaper’s motoring section, expanding it over 12 years from a two-page section to a 36-page lift-out. In 2010 he was selected to join News Ltd’s national motoring group Carsguide and covered national and international events, launches, news conferences and Car of the Year awards until November 2014 when he moved into freelancing, working for GoAuto, The West Australian, Western 4WDriver magazine, Bauer Media and as an online content writer for one of Australia’s biggest car groups. He has involved himself in all aspects including motorsport where he has competed in everything from motocross to motorkhanas and rallies including Targa West and the ARC Forest Rally. He loves all facets of the car industry, from design, manufacture, testing, marketing and even business structures and believes cars are one of the few high-volume consumables to combine a very high degree of engineering enlivened with an even higher degree of emotion from its consumers.
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