First Single-seater Race Of Kuwait's New F1-level Track Starts This Weekend

Formula 1

The world championship has never visited the Dubai Autodrome, although in 2011 At the end of 2013, the track successfully tried to make itself the future home of F1’s pre-season testing. Kuwait has had its own permanent circuit since 2019. Kuwait Motor Town now has the FIA 1 rating required to host F1 races.

But this 5.6km long track can’t even be in F1’s line of sight as it has never hosted single-seaters in any capacity before.

All that changes this week when the Formula 4 region visits the Middle East and the UAE Championship for seven days. Each will run two rounds, and, unusually, the competition sessions will be held from Thursday to Saturday for the first round and from Monday to Wednesday for the second.

While there is no universally agreed upon definition of when a weekend takes place in Kuwait, all definitions include Fridays. F1 has moved the Las Vegas Grand Prix to a Saturday slot on the calendar this year, making it the first Grand Prix of the past decade to take place on a day other than Sunday, but has not made similar schedule changes in other Middle Eastern countries. Various weekend meetings in Europe.

The unusual schedule means that Formula One and Formula 4 drivers will each have six races in six days. But this is not the only strange phenomenon they encounter in the desert.

Two of those new experiences came on Wednesday, when each series held pre-event tests for drivers and teams to acclimate to the unusual track. With a lack of single-seater racing history, teams arrive with no simulator knowledge, no opportunity to watch single-seater videos online, and no opportunity to get driver feedback from previous visitors.

When the Fregional drivers took to the track for the first time, they were faced with another new challenge: a wet track surface. It rained during their opening session and limited how many runs could be completed. Not one of the 28 drivers taking part was able to set a representative time, and the track was dry at the end, giving drivers some uniformity in how fast they had to go through the corners.

While the racing line was still being formed, there wasn’t one ‘dry’ line in particular that caught on more than the others. That allowed those drivers to use their second test session to really learn the track and figure out what the fastest route was between them.

The 20-corner counter-clockwise layout is primarily filled with high-speed corners, many of which are long multi-apex sweepers that tax the drivers’ necks. That’s a challenge faced informally, and of the nine anti-clockwise tracks in the 23-event F1 calendar, only five were calendar staples before 2020 and only two are regularly used by more than one F1 feeder.

Ahead of this week’s trip to Kuwait, expect a hot, dry and dusty track among the event’s smaller teams. As you can see in the pictures taken during Wednesday’s test, they took issue with the sand in the air, but instead the temperature was cool and it really was.

Other international single-seater series and FIA eyes will be on Kuwait Motor City this week to see what kind of racing the track will produce and if the weather is predictable, they too will be visiting.

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