Al-Anabi hosts Qatari college drag racing team at Houston

Representatives of the racing club of the College of the North Atlantic-Qatar with the Al-Anabi Racing Team.

Agencies/Baytown, TexasThey are college students, but they are also professional race winners. The Al-Anabi Racing Team, the two-time NHRA Mello Yello Top Fuel World Champions owned by HE Sheikh Khalid bin Hamad al-Thani, is hosting several representatives of the racing club of the College of the North Atlantic-Qatar during this weekend’s 26th annual O’Reilly Auto Parts NHRA Springnationals near Houston, the sixth of 24 races making up the 2013 NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series season.College of the North Atlantic is one of the largest post-secondary educational and skills training centers in Atlantic Canada with 17 campus locations throughout Newfoundland and Labrador as well as one in Doha, Qatar. The Qatari campus is the premier technical college in the State of Qatar but also offers courses in business, health science, engineering, information technology and academics which includes multiple areas of study.Last September, College of North Atlantic-Qatar instructors Jimmy Mason and Permjit Soora offered a new experience to their technician preparatory programme and engineering students by creating a racing club in conjunction with the Qatar Race Club in Doha. The club was divided into a drag racing section and a street racing section. In an effort to take racing off the streets of Qatar just as NHRA did more than six decades ago, students in the street-racing section of the club focus on allowing people to race their street cars on the race track in a safe, controlled atmosphere.Those in the drag racing portion of the club work with the school’s Arabian Drag Racing League team in the 480-index dragster category. The team recruited a Qatari driver named Faisal al-Mohammed and ran the five-race ADRL schedule in January and February of this year. Modest team goals were greatly exceeded when al-Mohammed won the fifth and final race of the ADRL season.“Most of us had never been around drag racing, but it was a great experience,” Soora said. “We learned each week as things went on, and the pinnacle for us was winning the fifth and final race of the ADRL season. It was a fantastic way to finish the first season. The whole team spirit and motivation was just magic to see.”Following the ADRL season, Soora and Mason met with the school’s dean to report on the team’s success and plans for next year. The dean suggested that since the NHRA season was underway in the US, it would be worth the effort to further the experience for the students by attending a race. The Qatar Race Club, in conjunction with the Qatar Al-Anabi Racing Top Fuel Team, made plans for the students to attend this weekend’s race in Texas.“It was a crazy experience with a real big learning curve,” said Kieran, son of Soora and a member of the club that formed the race team. “I’ve never done anything like that before. I had worked on cars, but I hadn’t done anything that had to do with racing. It was a really fun experience, and I learned a lot.”