Behind the scenes on the most expensive drag race I’ve ever filmed

I’ve come to the Middle East to try and organise the craziest drag race of my life, but I’ve only got two days to find the right cars, put the races together and convince the owners that this is a good idea.

If I can’t make this work then I’ll have done a 7,000-mile round trip for nothing. I’m going to show you exactly what happened, warts and all.

Remember, you can buy a brand new or used car right here on Carwow. And you can sell your car, too. We’re here to help you through every step of your car-changing journey.

Getting the right cars

I landed in Dubai after an eight hour flight from London, and the first thing I did was head straight to Pupil Of Fate Motors. This is an insane dealership with some of the rarest Ferraris and Lamborghinis I’ve ever seen sitting in the showroom, so I was in the right place.

While I was told I couldn’t drag race any of the cars on the showroom floor, the dealership’s owner Yazan assured me that he could source anything I wanted through his clients and customers.

This made me a bit nervous, because by relying on owners I wouldn’t know what cars we had until the day of the shoot. Yazan didn’t seem worried though, so I just had to wait and see.

Race day

I arrived at the shoot location bright and early to see what Yazan had managed to magic up for me. We were at Tilal Swaihan Mile drag strip, a stretch of tarmac in Abu Dhabi owned by the government. It’s designed specifically as a place for owners of hypercars to come and max their cars away from the public highway, so it was perfect for a day of drag racing.

And as dozens of trucks started rolling in, I was starting to wonder what I was worrying about. A quick peak in the back revealed some of the rarest and most special hypercars on the planet.

You may have already seen some of the amazing races that we filmed that day. There was the bonkers 1,500 Xiaomi Su7 vs a Ferrari SF90 XX, a Ferrari Purosangue against the Chinese Yangwang U8, and a race which the comments had been begging for.

Last year I raced the Koenigsegg Jesko Attack against the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport, and you all said that I had to do it again but with the Jesko Absolut. Well we managed to pull that race together, so make sure to check it out.

So there were plenty of success stories, but not everything went to plan.

The races you never saw

Hypercars are delicate, highly strung machines which do go wrong from time-to-time, but the first race we had to abandon wasn’t down to reliability.

I managed to line up the incredible Bugatti Divo against the Chiron Super Sport. The Divo has the same quad-turbocharged W16 engine as the Chiron, but it makes 1,500hp. That’s 100hp less than the Chiron, but the seven-speed gearbox is tuned for better acceleration.

We started with the rolling race to get some heat in the tyres before the all-important quarter-mile drag race, but as we lined up to start there was a problem. The Chiron Super Sport was low on fuel, so it wouldn’t deliver full power. With no spare fuel on site, we had to abandon the race.

I was gutted. The crew had done all that work rigging the cameras and getting the footage for nothing.

Determined to get the Divo into a video somehow, I decided to try and get it in a race against the Koenigsegg Jesko Attack. They’re both track-focussed hypercars, but the Jesko’s twin-turbocharged V8 engine makes 1,600hp, which is 100hp more than the Bugatti. It’s only rear-wheel drive though, whereas the Chiron has all-wheel drive, so launching it could be tricky.

But this wasn’t meant to be either, because the Koenigsegg started making a strange ticking noise. Rather than risk breaking someone else’s multi-million pound hypercar, we retired it to go and be checked out at a dealer.

So that was that, two potentially great drag races that just wouldn’t come together. That’s just how it goes sometimes, and we still got some absolutely great videos from that day.

I’m hugely thankful to all the owners who came down and leant me their cars, and I’m also still amazed at how relaxed they all were. I was just getting chucked the keys to six-figure machines and told to have at it, they just wanted to see their cars used as intended.

And of course none of it would have been possible without the Carwow crew. We were working with a skeleton team of camera operators that day who worked their backsides off to capture all the footage we needed, and there were lots of people pulling strings behind the scenes to get all the cars to where they needed to be.

So all that was left to do was get all the cars together for a picture to use in the video thumbnail, and reflect on what was the craziest day of filming of my career.

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