AJ’s Final Qatari Write-Up

17 Jan AJ’s Final Qatari Write-Up

Upon returning from his trip to Doha with Craig, AJ set to work putting together one last big write-up on his time spent on the other side of the planet. Without further introduction, here it is, in all its glory.

Candyland…

This was the farthest I had been away from home…and I was only halfway there. The sound of the four giant turbine engines on the airliner screamed as we tore through the sky into our seventh hour. Their stamina seemed to be unlimited and they were bent on proving it. They ripped me away from time itself. Today was yesterday at home…and yesterday was still getting farther away. Family trips across country in the Chevy when I was young quickly became walks in the park. This was the real thing. I was officially not in Kansas anymore.

We landed in Doha more than twenty hours after our departure from Chicago. Seven thousand seventy four miles had passed between us and home. Soaking in the differences of the city surrounding us, it was hard to stay focused on what brought me here. Fluid was quickly gaining ground in the US; now was the time to make our presence known in the Middle East. My little brother, a nuclear engineer for one of the biggest aircraft carriers on the planet, is routinely stationed off the coast of Dubai. He tells me the Middle East is a great place to visit; it’s full of incredible architecture, great food, and amazing landscapes. But never lose sight of who you are and keep your head up…stay confident. My struggle now was to have that same confidence without a 97,000 ton warship backing me up.

Buildings look different. Clothes are different. Language is different. Without my ride waiting for me at the gate, I would have been lost within five minutes. Walking across the parking lot I see a glimmer of hope. Bus lane, taxi lane, walking lane (or more aptly described as an imaginary lane where you play Frogger with the residents of the first two lanes), and then we’re here. The parking lot… Hani, our guide and Fluid’s ambassador to the Middle East, has a slight grin on his face. My first taste of familiarity…Porsche, Porsche, BMW, Audi, Porsche, Land Cruiser, Land Cruiser, BMW; I have arrived. What do we have in common with our Middle Eastern brothers? We both share a passion for cars.

As comforting as it is to know I have found something here I can relate to, it takes no time at all for me to realize even this has an obvious difference. In the US, cars are a status symbol. The same principle applies in the Middle East, only the status symbol goes beyond representing what you can afford to drive; it represents how you can afford to live. Everything about a person’s vehicle defines who they are. Here, even the numbers on your license plate tell other drivers how powerful you are. Vanity plates stating how much of a SHPRMOM the woman driving (usually terribly) the XXXXXL SUV in front of you is, are non-existent.

Case in point: a chrome and purple Rolls Royce Phantom slowly cruises the streets of the city. Gliding down a four lane highway practically fifteen mph below the posted speed limit, and not a single driver dared to pass the car. With windows tinted and no security traffic present, only one thing identified the importance of the driver. License plate number 18. Pausing at traffic lights, red changes to green, everyone stays; the young driver seemed intent on proving his rank at every possible chance.

Here, license plates are made up of two things; sequential numbers, and number of digits. The latter being the bigger fish in the pond. A four or five digit plate can still cost upwards of a million dollars if the numbers are sequential. However, the closer you get to number one the closer you are to the king. It is reported that the “1” plate was recently sold for 14 million dollars to an oil prince. Why? Because he said it was the best number. Makes you want to slap that driver of the gun rack laden, “LOV2HUNT” pick-up truck you see, doesn’t it?

Our goal is simple: make an impact in the automotive industry doing what we do best – creating a product that is unmatched in quality, design, and fabrication. However, achieving that goal will be anything and everything but simple. Fluid MotorUnion founders OJ and Craig have only accumulated members at the top of their field. Finding that level of skill in the US is difficult; finding that level of skill in this city-in-the-sand is nearly impossible. We will take Doha by storm…in baby steps.

The first taste of Fluid candy was the shipment of three custom vehicles over to Qatar to sell. The shipment consisted of a BMW X5 4.8 IS, a BMW 750li, and a completely worked Dodge RAM limited edition turbo SRT-10. Fluid wanted to get their name into the city not by word of mouth but by sight. They see it driving through town, they want it, and they buy it. The plan worked well. Not everyone can afford to make a statement with a million dollar plate. What they witnessed they could get from Fluid was a less expensive, and, I might add, a more fun approach. We could make what they already own and have invested money in even better. Now we had to figure out what parts to start with.

The lack of highly skilled Middle Eastern mechanics is half of a problematic equation; how and where do we make our product? After concluding it would make the most sense to produce in the US and ship to the Middle East, the second dilemma, product installation, reared its ugly head. We need to make a product so simple and so easy to install that even SHPRMOM could get it right…even if she tried to do it wrong. And we needed to produce everything in the US for vehicles that are only available seven thousand miles away.

This leads us to the reason for our December trip – research and development on as many cars as we can get our hands on. Our mission? To tear down, photograph, document, and reassemble those cars in a maximum two hour time span. Other trips have been made to Doha, but the pure purpose of this trip was to gather information that would enable us to design, mass produce and sell custom Fluid MotorUnion products. Basically, we needed the corresponding information for three potential products, all of which had been theoretically designed back home, before we boarded the plane.

First is the Fluid MotorUnion Black Box, OJ’s creation. It’s intended to mount into the glove box compartment of any of the popular SUVs. Keeping the main theme under wraps until the unveiling, the system basically enables the driver to control all the upgrades added to the car with the touch of a button. Research and development are still in progress but with the “want it, want it now” attitude drivers in Doha have, it’s sure to fit in well.

Second are exhaust upgrades to the vehicles. In Doha it is not necessarily about what is good for the car. In fact, as long as they do not void the vehicle’s warranty, drivers really have no desire for upgrades that make their cars run better; it’s all about sound, speed and visual appeal. Craig documented cat locations, space constraints, and necessary materials to produce the sound that only Fluid’s custom systems create.

Third on the list of products is a performance intake which will fit within multiple models’ engine bays. Aside from mounting-arm lengths, there will be no need for alterations. Mounting locations are basically identical on Range Rover, Lexus and FJ models, with only minor throttle body and initial intake location differences.

Finding the vehicles we needed to document was the easiest of the hard tasks…getting each car torn down, documented, reassembled and back to the client in the allotted time was a tad tricky. Especially on certain occasions when the customer has no idea what is being done to his vehicle. What do you get when you add a brand new seventy-thousand dollar SUV, two guys tearing the front of it off in a parking garage and a guy in a white robe who only agreed to his car being photographed? You get a lot of screaming in Arabic and a cell phone thrown at you…twice.

Well into our sixth vehicle of the trip, Craig and I were approached in the garage by two men who had leisurely made there way down to our chop shop. Since two guys disassembling vehicles in a parking garage using a Dodge SRT-10 as a work bench isn’t common, we were used to people stopping and staring. This was no different until, after observing the extent of missing parts, this individual flipped open his phone. One of our local connections quickly made his way down to the garage to handle the situation. Neither Craig nor I know a single word of Arabic, but the ensuing conversation assured us the individual felt exactly the way we would were we to witness two foreigners laying our vehicle in pieces all over a parking garage floor. In our defense…we tore into that car as gently as possible and treated those pieces with the utmost respect. Result? Our contact buys the vehicle to shut the guy up.

Events weren’t serious the entire time, though. We learned that with the right amount of coaxing, you could get Burger King to make you whatever kind of sandwich you could dream of, including, but not limited to, a “Pizza Burger” the size of…well…a pizza, and a Whopper with SIX patties just in case you feel like eating two pounds of meat in one sitting after certain amounts of alcohol consumption during your only night out. We learned that a guy in a robe and headdress driving us in a Ford F-650 through the city of Doha draws just about as much attention as one doing it in the US would. And we learned you can drive a Cadillac CTS in the sand…

On one of the slower days, our host decided we needed to see the dunes. The dunes are the place to be on the weekends according to the locals…apparently ALL the locals. I had been to the dunes to ride quads back in the states but this was a whole other animal. We drove for nearly an hour once we had broken the boundaries of the park until finally getting past all the parked vehicles, vendors, and weekend tents which had been set up complete with satellite dishes and interior decorations. Once completely in the sand, the air pressure was reduced in our vehicle’s tires to the appropriate dune driving level, and our fourth lesson of the trip was learned…our driver was not just bad…he was f@cking homicidal.

Now, in my experience racing, the term “when in doubt, throttle” is used on occasion. Sometimes just as a joke, but there are many instances when this is sincerely the solution to the problem. For instance, coming out of a corner at 100 mph with your knee slammed on the ground, there is a tendency for the rear end of the bike to slide while still leaned into the turn… When this happens it often causes the tire to skip while trying to regain traction thus taking the front end into a “tank-slapper” (The front forks of the bike vibrating back and forth violently causing the handle bars to slap the sides of the gas tank) when the bike straightens up. What is the best thing to do in this situation? Throttle…. This unloads the front end enough the bike will settle into the next straight smoothly.

With this being said, it is obvious the throttle is not always the best answer…as is true for the brake. But when a driver seems to have them completely backwards in his tiny little head it makes you wonder what is it you did to piss God off so much and what do you need to do to correct it, while in the back of an SUV bracing yourself with every muscle in your body as your driver throttles going into turns, brakes going out of the turn (I don’t even know how the laws of physics let this happen) and apparently has no concept of gradual pedal control…its either to the floor with the wide one on the left, or to the floor with the skinny one on the right. It’s like he’s giddy that he has finally grown up enough to reach those little black things on the floor. This is bad enough on pavement…when twenty-story dunes are involved, it just becomes wrong.

Being close to death in the middle of literally millions of acres of sand, hills rising up like skyscrapers and not a single emergency vehicle in sight, gives you time to think. In between flashbacks of your life, you realize two things: first, if you concentrate hard enough between dry heaves, you can see out your window a simply gorgeous landscape of dunes stretching out beyond the horizon, and you would really like the chance to appreciate it if only you could exit the vehicle. Second, rules are good.

What we are trying to harness over here is an extremely old culture that is just a baby when it comes to wealth. When you take into consideration how long these ancient civilizations have been in this part of the world and compare it to how long they have made money off the oil and natural gas they are harvesting, it’s like watching a bunch of kids with everything they could ever dream and no rules set in place, aside from the obvious rules ingrained into the culture. For thousands of years, when two guys would meet in the middle of the desert on their camels, they would politely alter paths slightly, enabling each to pass safely by at the leisurely two mile an hour pace a camel moves.

Now substitute the camel for a 1200 horsepower sand-rail and the leisurely two mile an hour pace to well over a hundred, add two heaping tablespoons of ego, and top it off with an endless desert and no rules. As I stated earlier I have experience on dunes back in the states…these parks have excruciatingly strict rules. There is a constant clockwise circulation of the park, hills can be climbed in the direction of circulation but once crested can not be climbed in the opposite direction unless a spotter is present, certain areas have speed limits, safety gear is a requirement not a suggestion, there are no more persons per vehicle than the vehicle is built for (two up on quads and such), and when the sun goes down so do the throttles. You know…rules that do little things like keep people breathing and stuff. Now, I don’t mean to list some of the rules just to show that I know them…what I need you to do is re-read the sentence and imagine thousands of people on some of the meanest desert dunes on the planet with insane amounts of money to spend on toys doing the complete opposite of everything stated. Add on to that the nearly non-existent presence of emergency vehicles and see if the image going through your head doesn’t turn ugly. Quickly.

This scenario does not stop with the dunes. This is a culture that has been handed trillions of dollars to literally play with. The cities are growing so fast that before one building gets completely built another starts to go up. This area of the world contains over ninety-percent of the world’s tower crane population. To make your vehicle an exotic you have to go farther than dropping a couple hundred thousand on a car; you have to drop another half a million on a license plate that has just the right amount of numbers in just the right order because the next guy two lanes over has your car already…and so does his neighbor…and maybe his wife uses it when she goes grocery shopping. It’s a place of no restraint. They buy what they want and have no “getting to know it” stage. It’s just full out off the showroom floor. The roads grow because the number of cars grows…street signs, posted speed limits, and speed cameras are saved for rare stretches of highway.

The means have become vastly greater, boosting the material wealth through the roof, and the rules that have been set in place to keep these ancient cultures running in a nice safe laid back flow can not handle the new population’s toys that need to be governed. It is literally kids in a candy store.

So…just call us Fluid CandyUnion.