Saudis want F1 teams to move to them

The authorities of Saudi Arabia are going to create such attractive conditions for the motorsport industry that in the future British teams will move to this country in the Middle East.

Currently, the Midlands and Oxfordshire regions of the United Kingdom are home to seven of the ten Formula One teams, as well as around 4,300 different companies producing a wide range of motorsport products.

Prince Khalid Bin Sultan Al Faisal, president of the Saudi Arabian Automobile and Motorcycle Federation (SAMF), told MotorSport Magazine about the industry’s far-reaching plans: “We want to create a kind of hub. We have big companies that can contribute to the development of motorsport in the future.

We hope that some F1 teams move to Saudi Arabia and we are working in this direction. I hope we can bring some of the big car manufacturers to us, given all our investments in the car industry – including a private investment fund that has acquired stakes in McLaren and Aston Martin.

I hope that the headquarters of car companies will be opened in Saudi Arabia, or we will invite specialists to help us open our car production, so that our country can create its own car brands.”

The development of motorsports is one of the key areas in which Saudi Arabia is committed to reducing dependence on oil industry revenues. The contract to host the Formula 1 race in Jeddah is long-term, the country also hosts the Formula E and Extreme E off-road electric series, and for the fourth year the Dakar rally route runs through the territory of Saudi Arabia. In the near future there will be MotoGP stages and the World Rally Championship.

But competing at the highest level is just the beginning.

“We have a 20-year development program that will start in late 2023 or early 2024,” continued the SAMF president. – Our goal is not only to organize international competitions, we want to participate more actively in everything. We want to have engineers, mechanics, we want to make cars, we want to be creative.

I really want us to have our own champion, a driver who could compete in Formula 1, in MotoGP. Saudi Arabia invests heavily in infrastructure, in the construction of highways. We dream of creating our own teams, made up of riders from Saudi Arabia or other countries. This is all in the long term, but we hope we can meet our targets in 2030, 2035 or 2040.”

The big question is, of course, whether Formula 1 teams would want to move to Saudi Arabia. The SAMF chairman mentioned McLaren and Aston Martin: the shares in these companies are indeed owned by Saudi investors, but the McLaren Group has a 20-year contract to lease a base in Woking, and a new modern base is being completed in Silverstone, where Aston Martin F1 will move this year.