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. 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 Her first car was a Renault Clio, which has now been replaced by an Acura DCS.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)

Ann Moore

Ann leaps over her FF2000 car on Psalm

Ann Moore was a British showjumping champion who had a brief motorsport career in 1976, promoted by John Webb of Shellsport.

Ann won a silver medal in individual showjumping at the 1972 Munich Olympics, riding her horse Psalm. This made her the most successful of Britain’s female equestrians at a time when showjumping had a sizeable TV audience. She was voted the Sports Journalists’ Association Sportswoman of the Year in 1973, having been runner-up in the two years previously.

John Webb was the director of Brands Hatch circuit at the time. He was both sharp to the promotional value of female drivers and supportive of their abilities. He had one of his biggest successes the year before with Divina Galica, a former Olympic skier who would go on to attempt to qualify for a Formula One race in the same year that Ann Moore took the wheel. Ann’s public profile was far higher than Divina’s was due to the relative popularity of her sport. There was also a strong history of successful female drivers having first competed in equestrian events. Pat Moss was a showjumper like Ann, and another of the Webb protegees was Gillian Fortescue-Thomas, a former amateur jockey. The appeal to John Webb and his publicist wife Angela was obvious. Ann was signed up for what was referred to as the Webb “Charm School”.

Ann’s first race was in 1975. She was one of the celebrity racers hired to fill out the grid for the Shellsport Escort Ladies’ series, at Brands. Previous celebrity entrants had included TV announcer Linda Cunningham and actress and porn performer Fiona Richmond. The championship used the Shellsport fleet of Ford Escorts, which was kept at the circuit. Ann was eleventh after a spin. Divina Galica was the winner.

The next phase of her career was a move into single-seaters. It was announced early in 1976 that Ann would compete in “around 30 races” that year in an Elden Formula Ford 2000 car, arranged by the Webbs and sponsored by Rolatruc. She made her debut at the start of the season with two races at Brands, then one at Mallory Park in March.

Among her events that year was a charity single-seater race in aid of a sports-related cause. Ann’s car, complete with her livery and name, is seen being used by boxer Joe Bugner for training. 

The FF2000 car was perhaps not the best choice for a novice; Formula Ford 1600 may have been more suitable, or more outings in the Escort. Spectators of the time remark that Ann was slow and often spun her car. Her much-vaunted “professional” racing career came to a halt after only six races. 

A statement made to the press explained that she had not realised how much of her time would be taken up by motor racing, and that she would only take part in occasional celebrity races in the future. It is not clear whether she did appear in any more of Shellsport’s celebrity races, which usually used Escorts, but they were held throughout the season and there would have been plenty of opportunity.

Ann had already retired from showjumping two years previously, aged 24.

(Image by Nick Rogers, copyright Shutterstock)

Chrissie Ashford

Chrissie Ashford's Vauxhall Magnum

Chrissie Ashford was Britain’s leading female rally driver in the mid to late 1970s, picking up two ladies’ championships in the later part of her career.

She rallied in the UK in the 1970s, starting as a navigator to her first husband, Paul, in around 1973. They competed together in road rallies. By 1974, she was driving a Vauxhall Magnum herself in Yorkshire club events. 

Throughout her career, she favoured Vauxhall cars, including the Magnum, Chevette and possibly a Firenza. She enjoyed the long-term support of Tyreservices garages, a business which had a major depot in her home area of North Yorkshire. At some point, she worked as a fashion model and apparently appeared in Vogue magazine, which helped her from a promotional point of view.

She entered her first RAC Rally, in 1976, driving a Magnum with Tony Gilhome. They do not appear to have finished. Her second attempt in 1977, driving the same car but with Mary Fullerton on the maps, also ended in retirement.

Chrissie also raced on the circuits occasionally. She was invited to take part in the Shellsport Ladies’ Escort Race at Brands Hatch in August 1978, by the BWRDC and promoter John Webb. Against strong opposition including former ETCC racer Susan Tucker-Peake, she was fifth overall. She also took part in sprints occasionally, including the 1977 Graham Hill Trophy at Curborough. 

In 1978 and 1979, she was the BRTDA British Ladies' Champion. The second championship came after a break while she had the first of her four daughters.

1979 was probably her most successful year of competition. She drove a 2300 Chevette around the UK in rounds of the BTRDA and British National championships. Her best overall result was 25th on the Hadrian Centurion Rally, out of 94 finishers. She was also 31st out of the 84 recorded finishers on the Esso South West Stages.

Shortly after, she left rallying for family life and business interests, although she did make a brief comeback in 1983 when she entered the Lindisfarne Rally. She was 52nd overall in a Chevette. 

After rallying, she concentrated on her business interests in the catering world, heading Danby’s Foods, a frozen-food manufacturer. She later worked with the Food Standards Agency. Her marriage to Paul Ashford did not last and she remarried; in the business world, she was known as Christine Dunn.

She died in 2009, aged 60.

(Image copyright Neil Robins)

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 is due to contest the Saudi championship in 2024.

(Image copyright Victor Besa/The National)