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@Panda82 appreciate the kind words. It was good to have such fast learning Newbies on the drive. Regarding dragon mart the basic items are available in the following location for the flag there is one shop in EB section of dragon Mart near the exit which is a dune buggy shop. That's the only one that has the flag. It costs AED 10 for the 1.5 m and AED 15 for the 2.5m Opposite that shop is a hardware shop where you can buy the yellow suction clamp to fix the flag on to your rear side window. Regarding the radio you would find plenty of shops in the B section of dragon Mart. Preferably buy the Motorola unit. Costs about AED 160  You can get a deflator and Tyre gauge in the main aile of dragon Mart hardware section. Preferably buy the simple spring type pressure gauge and not the dial gauge type. Should cost you AED 5 each.  For a shovel, the best we have found is in Sharjah Industrial Area (Chor Bazar) where you get metal shovels with a steel grip handle and pointed 'V' shape shovel for AED 10-15. Location is in the below link https://goo.gl/maps/xnECJgp7XoJ2 

We’ve had an absolute awesome time yesterday. Many thanks to @Rahimdad, @Atif and @skumar83 for their patience, leadership, driving and teaching skills! We were very sorry to have to leave before the bbq, but we will definitively be back for some more sweet offroading. First things first though: time to find a dragon market somewhere today !

Another Absolute Newbie Drive and another opportunity to meet so many wonderful people. It was sad that @Gaurav, @Jeh, @Emil and @Jocreative were unable to make it to the drive. My big thanks to @Atif and @skumar83 to support this drive. My respect to @jibransayed, @Faizan khan, @Rana, @Faiz khan, @BIG T and @Panda82 for showing up with their full patience and enthusiasm. We started on time and after a detailed description and lecture for the newbies we headed to the farms for deflation. After a quick deflation and distribution of radios thanks to @Gaurav bhai for handing them over as he was unable to make it for the drive. Once all radios were set we numbered the convoy and I'm glad to see that all kept a good convoy discipline which meant everybody understood their roles in this drive. My second lead was @Atif bhai and @skumar83 was our very capable sweep who kept the convoy moving at good pace. We started with a stop at the Camel farm, the children specially enjoyed this stop loads. From here we started our journey towards Pink Rocks. To my surprise everyone managed well with hardly couple of refusals and zero stucks. Well done all. This meant we reached the Pink Rocks much quicker than anticipated.upon reaching the Pink Rocks base I saw the arrangement made by Sharjah Police to curb the stupidity of show offs with heavily modified vehicles. It was strange to see a few cars standing around wondering what they should do next as the area was dug up to avoid usage of that area. At this point after a short briefing we all managed to cross the top of Pink Rocks and on to the other side in search for a place to lay our spread. We found a nice little spot where we settled and @Atif bhai was requested once again to open his Prado Cafeteria. At this point I went to drop @Panda82 and his family as with their cute little girls they needed to head back to Abu Dhabi. After dropping them to the 2nd December Cafeteria I headed back to the rest. At this point @Faizan khan and @Faiz khan had to leave and I missed out on saying good bye to them. Heading back the smart crowd had already found a way to avoid the ditch and continue playing on our once playground. We enjoyed some nice snacks and @Atif bhai tea with some amazing people. As we rounded up and headed out, some sweet good byes with a gleem in everyone's eyes to meet again. We inflated and headed back looking forward to meeting again soon. I have updated the Gallery with my pics and videos, hope to see all the clicks from all the cameras I saw out there. Till next time, stay safe till we meet again. https://carnity.com/gallery/category/98-newbie-offroad-drive-bbq-pink-rock-30-nov-2018

That's exactly it, for what it is or use to be. A mini proper 4x4 ladder frame chassis with a transfer case and decently capable off roader on a budget. Or as the English say. Cheap and cheerful. It's no longer cheap and not worth that kind of money anymore. The sticker shock is too much handle. Having said that I would still like to own a Zuk Samurai im good shape someday

Great drive, thanks SKumar Rahimdad,Gaurav & Atif bhai for organising it. Looking forward for the next drive.

what an amazing day it was cant wait for more. huge thanks to @Rahimdad @skumar83 @Atif you are awsome guys we'll see soon again inshalla

Anyone enjoy reading? Maybe many of you won’t be into this but I love books by Irish authors, particularly non fiction and history, not really into fiction stuff at all. Have quite a few lying around. Anything non fiction and history at all, I love learning about how the world was. I love biographies and autobiographies too. I was always told when you finish a book, get another but the price of books here are insane. Would anyone be up for book swapping? I’ve finished this many times. I’ll make the first offer with this for exchange with another biography.

I’ve had a look through YouTube and I couldn’t see anything I’d recommend. You just need to experience it and gain confidence. The best advice I can give is don’t brake, it will upset the handling even more. Plant the accelerator and steer into the slide. It will feel counterintuitive but that’s what you need to do. Implement techniques that you have learned in sand too such as rocking the car on the clutch to get unstuck. I found a lot of stuff I learned in snow can be applied to sand so you can reverse engineer it. You might laugh at this, but get on the Xbox and play some driving sims like PGR or Forza. It will give you an idea of how a car reacts to different inputs. But if you can drift a GT40 at 140 MPH on the TV, don’t assume you can do it in real life. Watch some in car rally videos on YouTube too, see how the drivers react when the car slides around corners. You’ll be doing this in no time

In Turkey we are keeping 2 different set of tire. The one you going to keep for winter,you may take the smaller size. For the summer one you will have original size to have maximum handling. Best thing to do check the local agent for your car. Which size they are offering for your car.

Nice to hear from you @waqaszohair after a long time. Hope you are enjoying in Canada For the minus sizing, I honestly have no clue for ice terrain as I never lived in one. Last year I drove for a week in London a rented BMW and my brother's Discovery and realize that tires for snow and ice terrain have some great relevance as BMW probably has all weather tires and mostly skidding on corners a lot, as compared to Discovery that has winter tires.

Looks like an awesome drive you guys had. Too bad I have to miss due to an unexpected family commitment. Looking forward to seeing you all in the next drive.

Old Jeep days

Please share your pics and videos in gallery: https://carnity.com/gallery/category/98-newbie-offroad-drive-bbq-pink-rock-30-nov-2018 All absolute newbies, please share your feedback here:

Honda S2000 is hooligan type of car. Things you can do with it is totally different than Ferrari or any other big engine cars. It is not meant for UAE. If i drive one here i will got jail.

I am with @desertdudeon this issue. I have built all sorts of engines in my time- from screaming chainsaw engines that needed massive turbos to get up to speed, to my favorites, the LS series engines that effortlessly deliver massive amounts of power at barely above idle RPM's. In my opinion and experience, there is nothing to beat the effortless power of a well-built and tuned V8, and in fact, some of the screaming chainsaws I've built used considerably more fuel at high engine speeds than almost any LS I've built running at any engine speed. In practice, there are only two ways for any small-displacement engine to make more power- one is to add more fuel, and the other is to make hugely expensive modifications and then to add even more fuel to make the mods work. Both scenarios affect reliability in the worst possible way. By way of contrast, no modern V8 engine needs major modifications to bring about significant power increases. While most LS engines can be heavily modified, these sorts of mods are almost always done for serious competition applications, which mere mortals like us can't afford to engage in anyway. Therefore, a few simple programming tweaks and maybe an exhaust mod are usually enough to make a modern V8 outperform almost any screaming chainsaw engine in almost any vulgar street racer, while using less fuel than the smaller engine, to boot. And yes, I still hate cars, and not everything is about speed.

Another one of those eye roll moments. Not everyone just wants to go fast. Trying to compare the character, opulence, luxury, comfort, street cred, styling of a Jag XJ with that of a Ford bucket. It's not even in the apple and oranges ballpark range. Maybe if everything was measured in just one category, speed.

You see you just don't get it. Just being fast isnt a priority to me at all. It's how you get to 100 or 200 and how you stay there is more important for me. With a silky smooth motor you are gently taken there and then when you reach there you waft along on a nice quite comfortable magic carpet-esque cushion of air. In the euroweenies and jap rice cakes with soda bottle sized engines with a dozen turbos strapped on screaming like stuck pigs and rattling so hard you feel its going to shake itself to pieces. That is the difference. Just raw stupid speed is no quality at all. That you can get by strapping a a 3cyl to a wheeled office chair and it would be fast too. So whenever you make any reference why would anyone want something like so and so when a smaller tin car with a chainsaw motor go more fast at 1/10th of a price just wants to make me roll my eyes! Search my posts I've already posted videos of my safari days colleague Marshall taking the Bentayga through its paces in the desert here.

P.S : Im really starting to fancy the Merc W220 V12 nowadays. So you never know. Yup that's me, I like big cars with big motors And that will also be the last day he has his License here.

You see, I don't care for any of that. So its a V8 for me all day long even if it is producing 120hp. Than a tiny jap rice cake or eurowenier with a lawn mower motor making a zillion hp.

I’m the only person I know who has passed 5 driving tests due to licence confiscations. Maybe you’re daring the wrong person? Thats all over now. Maybe. Not saying I’m averse to doing 300kph on a quiet road or drifting a quiet corner. I’ll take you up on your challenge if you pay the fines.

It might be a V12, I have a car with a W16 in the shop at the minute. Numbers don’t impress me. It’s not the number of cylinders or engine capacity, it’s what you do with it that counts. It can easily turn into a willy waving contest, mine is bigger than yours etc, but if you’re not going to pull the handbrake and drift it round the world trade centre like a boss, what’s the point? The smaller cars with better power to weight ratio deserve more respect. What’s the point in having a million horsepower unless you can use it on track?

Looking fwd to seeing you soon, same we were discussing last night