Circuit Racers in the Gulf States and the Middle East

The al-Qubaisi sisters (right) with Reema Juffali (left) and Scottish driver Logan Hannah at the 2019 Abu Dhabi GP

The motorsport scene in the Gulf States and the Middle East has only recently opened up to female drivers. In the case of Saudi Arabia, women only gained the right to hold driving licenses in 2019. Reema Juffali is the first Saudi female racer. Hamda and Amna al-Qubaisi have their own profiles.

Other countries have a more liberal policy and have a longer history of female motorsport competitors. 

Wiebke Buelow - 2019-20 season winner of the novice class of the BIC 2000cc Challenge class in Bahrain. Her car was a Honda Civic. The best result she had was a fifth place in the last round of the season. All of the races were held at the Bahrain GP circuit. She returned in the same car for the 2020-21 championship and appears to have had a best finish of seventh. She returned to the series at the end of 2021, driving a Civic. In the first two rounds, she improved her best finish to fifth. Shortly after, she scored her first overall podium. In 2023, she was second in at least one race. The BIC Challenge became the Bahrain Touring Car Challenge in 2024 and Wiebke raced her Civic. 2019 seems to have been her first season of competition. Wiebke is originally from Germany but has been resident in Bahrain since 2008.

Noor Daoud – racer and drifter from Israel/Palestine. In drifting, she competes all over the Middle East, in a BMW. She has also been active in mostly unofficial circuit racing in the West Bank since 2010, and is one of the “Speed Sisters”, a group of female racers from Palestine who have had a film made about them. In 2011, she raced a Formula Renault in the first legal Israeli race meeting, Formula Israel, in Eilat. She was third in a women’s race, and may have won another. Noor was born in the USA, and is a former international footballer for Palestine.

Farah Jaber - raced in the BIC 2000cc Challenge in Bahrain in 2020. Her car is a BMW E30 and she was competing in the Novice class. 2019-20 appears to have been her first season in the championship. She was not among the front-runners in the overall championship, with a best finish of tenth, but she held her own against the other novice drivers.

Martyna al-Qassab - Polish-born driver who races in her adopted country of Bahrain. She races in the Bahrain 2000cc Challenge and is the first female driver to do so. Her first car was a Renault Clio, which has now been replaced by an Acura DCS. She was fourth in the first round of the 2019-2020 championship. The previous year, she was a leading driver in the Novice class, winning at least one race. In 2020, she returned to the championship and finished fifth in the first race. In 2021, she raced the DC5 in the championship again. She is the founder of a Bahraini women’s motoring organisation, Yalla Banat, which has attempted to hold the biggest-ever women-only track parade at the Sakhir circuit in 2019.

Farah al-Sabah – driver from Kuwait, active in sportscar racing in the Middle East. In 2015, she competed in the NGK Racing Series in the UAE, driving a McLaren GT Sprint with Leon Price, from South Africa. So far, she has recorded two class wins, at Dubai Autodrome. She also races karts in the UAE, in the Sodi World Series.

(Image copyright UAE F4 Official Instagram)

Amna al-Qubaisi

Amna (right) on the podium in Abu Dhabi

Amna al-Qubaisi is an Emirati single-seater driver who races alongside her younger sister, Hamda.

She made her senior racing debut at the start of the 2018 season after winning the 2017 UAE Senior Rotax karting title. 

For her first season, she raced in Italian Formula 4 with Prema Powerteam, which has links to Ferrari. Her best finish was a twelfth place, fourth in the Rookie class, at Adria. She combined Formula 4 with karting. 

At the end of the year, she was invited to test a Formula E car for DS Virgin Racing, as part of the female driver bonus test organised by the Saudi motorsport authorities. At around the same time, she was named as one of the 55 longlisted drivers for the initial W Series race season. By the time the driver assessment events came around in early 2019, she had withdrawn from the selection process for unstated reasons. It could be argued that a driver with a major sponsor like Kaspersky Data Systems did not need the W Series.

Another season in Italian F4 followed in 2019. She was driving for Abu Dhabi Racing this time and her results were broadly similar to before, with a 13th place at Mugello being her best.

At the end of 2019, she became the first woman from an Arab country to win an international single-seater race. Her victory followed a pole position and came in the non-championship UAE F4 Trophy, which supported the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. Her sister Hamda, who started racing in F4 that year, was fifth. This is believed to be the first time that a female driver has won a mixed single-seater race during a GP weekend.

Amna and Hamda had previously done the last round of Italian F4 together earlier in the year. Hamda also races for the Abu Dhabi team.

Amna is the first Emirati woman to race at this level, aside from being the first to win. She is a citizen of Abu Dhabi although she was born in the USA and is currently a student in France. Before taking up karting at fourteen, she competed in gymnastics.

She concentrated on her education in 2020, but returned to the tracks at the start of 2021, racing in the F3 Asian Series. Her best finishes were two 15th places at Yas Marina and she was 19th in the championship.

Her father is Khaled al-Qubaisi, who previously raced sportscars and won the Dubai 24 Hours twice. They competed against one another in the 2022 Formula Regional Asia championship, with Hamda, as part of an Abu Dhabi-Prema team. Amna was the best of the three, earning one tenth place at Yas Marina early in the season.

Amna took over from Hamda in the European Formula Regional championship for the last two meetings of the season. Sadly, she only finished once, in 31st place, at Catalunya.

She tried her hand at sportscar racing just before, at Hockenheim. The WS team invited her to join their Girls Only team for a round of the Spezial Tourenwagen Trophy (STT), driving a Norma LMP3 car. On a very wet track in tricky weather conditions, she was fourth in Race 1. The second race was effectively neutralised, becoming a few laps behind a safety car, due to bad weather.

It was back to F4 for 2023. It began with two disastrous guest appearances in the Spanish-based Formula Winter Series. Her first race at Catalunya ended in a DNF, then she was disqualified from Race 2.

Amna, alongside her sister, signed up for the F1 Academy women's racing series, both driving for MP Motorsport. Amna was not quite as successful as Hamda, but she did manage two wins, at Red Bull Ring and Catalunya, and two more third places. She was sixth in the championship. Later in the season, both sisters raced in the non-championship inaugural Saudi F4 race. Amna was third and seventh. She contested most of the Saudi championship in early 2024, finishing second once at Losail and coming tenth in the championship after an inconsistent season.

Her second and final year in F1 Academy did not go as well. She stayed with MP Motorsport alongside her sister, but was off the pace this time. She was eighth four times, at Jeddah, Miami and Abu Dhabi, but these were her best results. She was 15th in the championship.

(Image copyright Victor Besa/The National)

Women in Formula E

Thanks to the 2018 in-season test day that featured nine female drivers, Formula E has become somewhat associated with women racers. Carmen Jorda’s continuing association with the series, particularly the Nissan team, has helped this perception, even if her comments that Formula E cars are easier to drive for women than other single-seaters annoyed many.

The sad fact is that no female driver has competed in a Formula E race itself since 2016, when Simona de Silvestro picked up a few points for the Andretti team. This looked set to change at one point, with Tatiana Calderon impressing in the in-season rookie tests and Jamie Chadwick building up a strong relationship with the NIO team, but no new female drivers got on-track.

Another all-female test was held in 2024, moved to Jarama after flooding in Valencia. Abbi Pulling was the quickest, driving a Nissan.

2014-15 season

Simona de Silvestro (Andretti Autosport) - 27th (2 races)

Michela Cerruti (Trulli) - 29th (4 races)

Katherine Legge (Amlin Aguri) - 34th (2 races)

2015-16 season

Simona de Silvestro (Andretti Autosport) - 18th (10 races)

Test drivers:

Simona de Silvestro (Venturi 2018-19, official test driver)

Tatiana Calderon (completed 2019 rookie tests for Techeetah)

Jamie Chadwick (completed 2019 rookie tests for NIO)
Simona de Silvestro (Porsche 2019-20, official test driver)

Alice Powell (Envision Racing 2021-, official test driver)

2018 Ad-Diriyah “female drivers” test:

Simona de Silvestro (Venturi)

Tatiana Calderon (Techeetah)

Jamie Chadwick (NIO)

Carmen Jorda (Nissan eDAMS)

Carrie Schreiner (HWA)

Amna al-Qubaisi (Virgin)

Pippa Mann (Dragon)

Beitske Visser (BMW)

Katherine Legge (Mahindra)

2024 Women's Test, Jarama

Abbi Pulling (Nissan)

Jamie Chadwick (Jaguar TCS Racing)

Bianca Bustamante (McLaren)

Miki Koyama (Lola)

Lena Buhler (Mahindra)

Beitske Visser (DS Penske)

Ella Lloyd (McLaren)

Marta Garcia (Porsche)

Carrie Schreiner (Maserati)

Tatiana Calderon (Maserati)

Jessica Edgar (DS Penske)

Alice Powell (Envision)

Nerea Marti (Andretti)

Gabriela Jilkova (Porsche)

Chloe Chambers (Andretti)

Alisha Palmowski (Envision)

Simona de Silvestro (Kiro)

Lilou Wadoux (Jaguar TCS Racing)

(Image copyright Envision)