SimplyAbuDhabi XLI

L ong-time readers of Simply Abu Dhabi will remember him and Dragon Racing, having featured heavily in previous editions, but it’s been a while – too long, in fact – since we caught up with him and analysed how his remarkable company has grown over the years. At age 72, the racing bug is clearly still biting harder than ever. He celebrated his 72nd birthday by racing with his son Joshua in 2 x 50-minute endurance races achieving a podium in both races, so this man lives and breathes motorsport, and the operation he started nearly a decade ago has since grown beyond all recognition. Born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, in what he describes as a “well-to-do, middle- class family”, Price was exposed to racing from a very early age, only a very different kind. His father and grandfather were both bookmakers and the family home was located close to the Kenilworth horseracing venue, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that speed and sport are in his blood. Price made his fortune in the steel business, having joined South Africa’s Macsteel Group in 1978 and relocating to Hong Kong in 1980, where he lived and grew the company’s interests over many years. At its peak, Macsteel was the largest private company on the African continent, employing more than 10,000 people in 36 countries with a turnover in excess of US $ 12 billion, and Price rapidly rose through the ranks to the very top. The time he spent in the Far East evidently had a huge impact on him, both in business and cultural appreciation, and anyone who knows him is unsurprised that his motorsport company ended up being called Dragon Racing. Far Eastern mysticism courses through the veins of this business, with its superstitions and symbols of good fortune, but the work ethic is there, too. “We do things properly, or not at all,” Price quips, “and in motorsport that can make all the difference in the world. Entering 2023 will be our tenth year of operating Dragon Racing, which I set up following my less-than-ideal experiences with other regional teams, in which there was a palpable absence of quality. We’ve always been different, which, as in so many businesses, has been the best possible recipe for success and growth.” He says that having raced with – and against – most of the top teams in Europe, he had a pretty good idea about what was needed when setting up on his own in the UAE. “My main initial goal was to ingrain an ethos of quality into Dragon Racing and my colleagues, which was a difficult journey because quality has its ‘price points’. Back then, this region’s operators and teams were used to making deals on everything and were generally so underfunded that they would take business at unprofitable levels just to generate cash flow.” Motorsport can rarely be ‘done on the cheap’ and even ‘Banger Racing’ and ‘Demolition Derby’ events can require enormous funding. Price’s pockets are obviously deep but Dragon Racing had to stand on its own two clawed feet, and the incredible array of business services and the facilities they occupy on the periphery of Dubai’s famed Autodrome, are testament to the laser-like focus of him and his close-knit team in doing things “properly or not at all”. He says he’s always been fanatical about cars and has owned “50 or 60” of what are nowmostly revered as hugely desirable and collectable classics. However, the seeds of his passion for racing were sown back in Europe, when Price took part in a Ferrari UK corporate track event at Monza in Italy, and it was entirely obvious to the organisers that he had a natural ability behind the wheel, having set some extraordinary lap times. Over the next few years, he fully immersed himself in racing and, when he eventually relocated to the UAE in 2010, he seized upon the opportunity to form his own team and Dragon Racing was born in 2013. With two world-class motor racing circuits barely an hour’s drive from each other (the aforementioned Autodrome and Abu Dhabi’s Yas Marina), he says the UAE was a natural fit for a business such as Dragon Racing. “There isn’t anywhere else in the world to rival the UAE when it Simply Abu Dhabi | 193