A night out at Dubai’s first drive-in superclub
▶ Adam Workman got behind the wheel of his (borrowed) Lamborghini for a high-octane night out
I’ve seen some sights during my seven years in the UAE, not least when it comes to nightlife. A brawl that resulted in the perpetrators being chased, Benny Hill-style, round (and round and round) a circular bar; another dustup at a UK garage night that involved so many people, the WWE could have slapped on a pay-per-view price and called it a Royal Rumble; in less-violent scenes, rappers Wyclef Jean, Example and J Cole turned a bar-top inches from my face into an ad hoc stage while performing riotous Formula One sets. Until the other day, however, I had never driven a supercar into a nightclub. Normally, that’s the sort of thing that would lead to a significant custodial sentence.
But here I am, outside Dubai’s Five Palm Jumeirah hotel, hastily donning the top half of a slightly crumpled suit, accidentally evoking Jeremy Clarkson’s jacket-and-jeans approach, but hopefully without as much xenophobia and male-pattern baldness.
Dubai’s nightlife has become synonymous with glitz and glamour, which makes Secret Room, the venue into which you can indeed drive your supercar, something of a logical conclusion for ostentatious displays of wealth.
Why is my suit crumpled, I hear you ask? Well, there isn’t a whole lot of luggage space in a Lamborghini Huracan Performante, possibly the finest model from the Italian carmaker currently on sale and the car I have chosen for this mission. If your detritus doesn’t fit in the poky “front boot”, minuscule glovebox or keyfob-sized central-console tray, you need to stash it behind the seats.
The Performante is a remarkable car by any measure, with 640hp, 600Nm of torque, 0-to-100kph in 2.9 seconds and a top speed of 325kph. All of which matters for approximately zero today, because I’m squeezing the supercar through Secret Room’s graffiti-splashed car-entry doors, with only centimetres to spare each side, at crawling pace – thankfully, minus the Dh10,000 fee that it would normally cost to park your car here in a display of automotive insanity.
What does carry more significance, in such a flashy scenario, is how the Performante looks. Matte orange, with a flash of the Italian tricolour up its flanks, might not have been my first colour-scheme choice if selecting from the showroom swatches, but in the October sunshine, it looks a million dirhams. Conveniently, because that is what it will set you back to buy one. The carbon-fibre spoiler is so elevated that you have to duck down from inside the cockpit to see its
crest. There is perhaps a little mischief in my choice of car, too – the Five Palm Jumeirah was, after all, where British tourist Farah Hashi holed up after accumulating Dh170,000 in speeding fines in a rented Huracan in August.
Access to Secret Room is via the hotel’s basement parking, after waiting for traffic to clear – “traffic” in these rarefied surrounds being an Aston Martin and a Rolls-Royce. Although, as we crawl down the concrete entry slope, a helpfully clueless staffer in a hi-vis jacket tells us that we can’t reach the club from here. We ignore him and, well, guess what? He’s wrong.
Once inside the one-car space at one end of the club, the doors can’t be shut – space really is that tight – although access is for 15 minutes only to regular patrons shelling out their hard-earned cash for this Instagramming opportunity of a lifetime.
I can’t remember the last time I was in a club at 10am, but it’s a somewhat bizarre experience, even without clambering out of a bright-orange supercar straight into its hip-hop and R&B-filled space.
The whole idea appears a bit half-thought-through, but expect the gimmicky innovation to be a hit in a country where supercar ownership is at such a high level, you rarely get more than passing glances driving a Lamborghini in many areas of Dubai.
Indeed, we find another orange Huracan parked mere metres from Secret Room’s entrance when we visited. Ten a penny, it seems.
Even in the wildest lyrical dreams of cultural visionary Kanye West, driving your motor into a nightspot seems a fantastical prospect. When, in 2013, he rapped, “She say ‘Can you get my friends in the club?’ / I say ‘Can you get my Benz in the club?’” as a diss to hangers-on, he probably never imagined that he could do exactly that in Dubai five years later. Come on down to Secret Room with your Mercedes, Kanye – Dh10,000 is surely pocket change for you to realise a lyrical dream.
Access is for 15 minutes only to regular patrons shelling out their hard-earned cash for this Instagramming opportunity of a lifetime