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)

Yasmin Alhilli

Many of the fast women on this site have come from unlikely backgrounds, none more so than Bahrain's Yasmin Alhilli. In a region known for its conservative attitude towards women, it is surprising to know that there are several female drivers who compete in the Middle East Rally Championship. Yasmin is probably the best known, and considering that she has taken part in relatively few rallies, one of the most newsworthy drivers in the Gulf states.

Yasmin's background is very cosmopolitan. She was at university in New Zealand when she discovered rallying in 1998. Her early involvement was through marshalling on a number of events, like many future drivers. She took her marshalling very seriously and was soon helping to run international rallies, alongside her degree in business and marketing.

It was not until she had finished her undergraduate studies in 2001 that she got inside a rally car. Back home in her adopted state of Dubai, she co-drove Hassan al Sadadi to sixth place overall in the Dubai Rally, her first competitive start. However, despite her excellent result, she was not content with navigating and wanted to drive for herself.

Having secured sponsorship from Batelco, Yasmin drove in three Middle East Championship rallies in 2002. Her first event was the Bahrain Rally. She started promisingly enough, moving rapidly up the leaderboard for the first few stages, but her car gave up on her before the end of the first leg. She took her setback with good grace and went on to score her first finish in the Dubai Rally. Her best finish of the year was on the Jordan Rally, where she was fifteenth overall and won the Ladies' Cup, in her Mitsubishi Lancer Evo V. The opposition was strong, from the likes of world rally veteran Abdullah Bakashab, and the female contingent was no pushover either. She also tried her hand at rally raids, and was 24th in the UAE Desert Challenge, winning the Ladies’ award. Her car was a Mitsubishi Pajero.

Her modest success in Jordan was big news, especially given that Yasmin was a woman and only twenty-two years old. As a result she received offers to compete in other areas of motorsport, which she accepted. As a guest of the Kuwaiti royal family, driving for their team, she came third in the Superstock class in drag races in Kuwait. She also took part in several endurance karting challenges, both as driver and team manager, with varying results. She was even invited back to New Zealand, where it all began, to do some karting there.

Unfortunately, sufficient sponsorship could not be found to back up Yasmin's high profile the following season. Rather than struggle with inferior equipment, she sat the season out and worked as a coach for the Bahrain national junior basketball team. At some point, she was injured in a road traffic accident and had to shelve her motorsport ambitions, due to back problems. It was then that she made the unlikely move into professional sports management, with the Riffa football club. Later, she worked for the Muharraq team, on their football and basketball sides. Under her general management, the club was successful on all fronts and won many trophies. She is now working as a professional football agent, the only FIFA-licensed woman to do so.

(Image from www.godubai.com)