CX owner and Citroënvie member Benoit Marcille came across a video about the Citroën CX Celebrity Race held in Dubai in 1981. It was the opening race of the first-ever Gulf Grand Prix, an event that the United Arab Emirates hoped would lead to the country officially hosting the F1 Grand Prix.
The 1981 Gulf Grand Prix was held on a 2.6km long circuit constructed especially for the occasion.
Dubai’s Citroën importer, Abdul Wahab Galadari, provided sixteen CX GTi’s, fitted with roll cages and some other necessary modifications to make them comply with racing safety rules but otherwise they were stock.
They were to be driven 10 laps by the main event race drivers that included:
- Richard Attwood
- Derek Bell
- Jack Brabham (retired in Lap 6)
- John Fitzpatrick
- Bruno Giacomelli
- Dan Gurney
- Phil Hill
- Denny Hulme (retired in Lap 3)
- Innes Ireland
- David Kennedy
- Stirling Moss (retired in Lap 2)
- Marc Surer
- Patrick Tambay (retired in Lap 8)
- Roy Salvadori (retired in Lap 4)
- John Watson (retired in Lap 1)
Spoiler alert: Bruno Giacomelli won the race.
Initially the race was to feature Citroën Visas, but when the F1 drivers discovered they would be in economy Citroëns, the Visas were quickly replaced by the premier CX model, a better display too for the organizers hoping to sell Citroëns to the rich spectators.
Here is how Driven To Write described it: https://driventowrite.com/2020/09/01/citroen-cx-dubai-race/
While the CX was a formidable rally contender, on the F1-like track body roll and flat out driving made for attendees to experience quite a spectacle.
As a former racer, Benoit found the video very amusing and thought to share it with us in case we had never heard of the event. Some of the drivers didn’t take the CX seriously, treating it as a joke and a ‘jolly boys’ outing. They started cutting corners, driving across the sand, hitting each other deliberately and so on.
The organizers and Arab sponsors were not pleased with the outcome. They had spent a huge amount of money on the track and getting the famous names from motorsport to come over and race.
Pretty much trashed in the race, the maintenance crews worked on fixing the CXs to race again for another 10 laps at the end of the event, but this time driven by local officials and military personnel. After that all 16 CXs likely went straight to the junk yard.