Inventive speed junkies around the world have always come up with different forms of motorsport that capitalize on the environment around them.
Which is why you’ll see people chasing top speed records at Bonneville, ice racers tobogganing through twisty channels cut into the snow in Scandinavia, and rally fans carving between trees in Welsh forests.
But what do you do if you’re located in the Middle East? If you live in the UAE, you build the most stupidly crazy SUV drag racer and try to drive up a sand dune the height of a mid-century skyscraper as fast as possible.
The Liwa Hill Climb is an an annual event hosted at the Moreeb Dune, a humongous pile of sand that measures 300 m (984 ft) high and 1600 m (5250 ft) across. Drivers start at the flat ground at the bottom and launch so hard you’re guaranteed to see engines and transmissions grenading themselves, as this video shows.
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Those engines are mostly heavily boosted six- and eight-cylinder motors pushing out the kind of power that would make a Bugatti Chiron feel inadequate, and since the surface isn’t exactly what you’d call stable or predictable, drivers often find it tricky to keep their vehicles on course. The winner of each class is awarded a brand new Nissan Patrol.
Drivers that managed to stay straight and make it to the end of the course without spraying oil and bits of engine block all over the sand can expect to make the run in as little as six seconds, treating the audience in the grandstand to an earful of bah-bah-bahs as each engine bounces off its limiter while the tires struggle to get traction all the way to the top.
Even just watching the action on YouTube is guaranteed to raise your pulse, so what it must feel like uncorking one of these machines with 1000-ft of sand filling your windshield and towering over you, heaven knows. Now if only the Lima Sport Club would run the cars side by side. That really would be explosive action.