The scene is Yas Marina Circuit in the spring. Abu Dhabi's Formula One track is deserted save for a small corner of the Pit Support grandstand where, having been sprung from the office for a few hours, a group of boisterous colleagues are hard at work on a team-building exercise that involves assembling single-seater race cars from pre-cut cardboard kits. Meanwhile, in a next-door garage, Humaid al Masaood, Team HMR principal and its No 1 driver, is doing something similar - he's building a racing team from scratch.
Masaood formed the team that bears his initials only late last year, but has big plans to take it all the way to the forefront of motorsport - and to a place on the starting grid at Le Mans - as quickly as possible. Where better to start that journey than at Yas, a venue that itself rose magically from the dust in next to no time at all?
Today is a day for testing. Masaood has booked the circuit for a few precious hours. By the end of the day, both he and his co-driver, Steven Kane, who was once a winner of the prestigious McLaren Motorsport Award (other previous recipients include David Coulthard, Jenson Button and Dario Franchitti), will have driven countless laps around Yas in one of the team's Aston Martin GT4 sports cars.
By the end of the day, too, Masaood will have laid out his plans to take HMR to 24 Heures du Mans - the most famous endurance race of them all - and to achieve that notable feat in a car bearing the flag of the UAE.
"We want to take HMR to another level," he tells me in the cool surroundings of the team's truck a few minutes after finishing one of several sessions in the Aston, "and this is the right time to do it."
The right time, for a number of reasons.
Weeks before, the team had claimed a second-place finish in the SP3 class of the 24 Hours of Dubai race. HMR might even have won its class had luck and refuelling issues been with them. Masaood says today that the team will bid for glory in two more round-the-clock endurance races in the GT4 this year - the first at Belgium's Spa circuit, the second at Silverstone in the UK.
The right time, too, because the team has secured a spot in this season's Speed Euro Series, a classification of racing that is seen as a natural first rung on the ladder that leads all the way to Le Mans. The series, which features FIA "Sports Prototype" open-cockpit race cars, will take the team across Europe this summer, from Paul Ricard in France to Estoril in Portugal.
"This programme will allow us to get involved in the right environment," he explains. "The racing should be very competitive."
Then, provided the team shows well in Speed Euro, Masaood says HMR will test an LMP1 car (the abbreviaion stands for Le Mans Prototype) this winter. This would be another step up again, to the same type of hyper-quick, closed-wheel race cars that Audi and Peugeot compete in - the two most prominent teams in the recent history of Le Mans.
This would be with a view to moving onwards and upwards to the United States next year to race selected events in the American Le Mans Series, which runs a nine-race schedule, opening with the famous 12 Hours of Sebring in March and closing with Petit Le Mans in October. In between, the series breaks for long enough in early summer for teams to decamp to Europe to race at Le Mans.
But that, says Masaood, will have to wait until 2013 at the earliest, when the team would most likely commit to a full season in the United States and, of course, Le Mans itself. "It is," he says, "a step too far for us at the moment."
A step too far because the hardest race of them all does not offer up its places easily.
Teams first have to demonstrate both their commitment and their capability to the Automobile Club de l'Ouest (ACO), the race organising committee, before being rewarded with a spot on the starting grid at Le Mans. In this arena, racing pedigree matters most.
Masaood says he and the team will have to "get some recognition, have some good results [in the US] and then be invited to Le Mans".
But first, he says "we want to go to Le Mans Series racing and be one of the best teams around and we want to show people there is [plenty of] serious racing right here in Abu Dhabi".
Matters have moved on apace since that spring day at Yas Marina Circuit.
HMR scored one decent result in the opening race of the Speed Euro Series in France in April, when Masaood and Kane drove the car home in fifth place. The team was then due to take the fight to Spa the next month, but did not compete. Why?
Of greater concern is a posting on the Speed Euro Series official website, which reveals HMR's Ligier JS-49 race car is now up for sale. Yours, should you want it, for a cool £50,000 (Dh301,000).
Look a little harder elsewhere online and you'll find one of HMR's Aston Martin GT4s being offered to potential buyers for Dh386,000, as is Masaood's 2003 Gulf Radical SR3.
The latter, billed as "an ideal starter car for someone looking to get involved in racing", is available for Dh100,000.
So what is this? Is the dream at an end already? Nothing, it transpires, could be further from the truth. Instead, this disposal of assets points to a sharper and more focused resolve within HMR. One that should lead to Le Mans sooner than had previously been anticipated.
In fact, HMR's respectable Speed Euro debut proved sufficiently motivating for Advanced Engine Research (AER), the team's engine partners, to contact Dyson Racing in the United States to tell them about Masaood and Kane.
Dyson races in the American Le Mans Series in Lola LMP1 cars equipped with AER-prepared Mazda engines. Introductions were made before Paul Dyson invited Masaood and the team to the US for a two-day test last month. The two parties found they had much in common.
For his part, Dyson said Masaood "mastered the car quickly", while HMR's owner described the experience as "sensational".
Indeed, by the end of a demanding test, both had agreed that HMR would race a Dyson-supported Mazda Lola Coupé in the remaining seven rounds of this year's American Le Mans Series, beginning next month at Connecticut's Lime Rock Circuit.
And, in a nod to the team's roots, the HMR car will take to the track under the name of Oryx, the species of antelope that was once close to extinction but is now flourishing once again in this region.
The partnership with Dyson also opens up the possibility of a tilt at next year's Le Mans, although Masaood is quick to apply the brakes, albeit gently, to such freewheeling speculation.
"We need to focus on the rest of the season first," he says. "Of course, we will look at Le Mans and it is definitely a goal for next year ... but it is not yet 100 per cent. We will look at it very seriously, but first we need to have a strong showing this season."
Nevertheless, Le Mans now appears closer than ever.
