Rising in front of us, surrounded by nothing but miles of empty sand, is the Bahrain Formula 1 racetrack.
After a 30 minute drive across the desert, Regan and I climb out of the cab into the 90 degree heat. At points along the road, police in green uniforms patrol with black machine guns. Half-way to the entrance of our destination, I can already feel sweat forming in the small of my back; my blue, dotted sundress starts to stick. But we aren’t intrepid journalists on our way to some remote village. We’re on vacation.
Rising in front of us, surrounded by nothing but miles of empty sand, is the Bahrain Formula 1 racetrack. Joining us are Brazilian plastic surgeons, Italian trust funders, Saudi oil princes and Asian market traders all coming together to watch the world’s most high-performance engines suck down gallons of oil in the first Mid-East nation to strike black gold. It’s appropriate that we’d be in the country that kicked off the cosmic chain of events that led us into seemingly endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As if to punctuate the surrealism of the whole thing, as we enter the stadium I hear the strains of a familiar song. A dance troupe prances across the main stage outside the track in red and white striped old-timey swimsuits twirling hula hoops.
Their soundtrack: the 1987 Europe hit “The Final Countdown.” The hipsters know it as G.O.B. Bluth’s theme music on Arrested Development. Maybe it was the heat, or the shisha, but my big Mid-East vacation took on a bit of a dream-like haze.
I grew up in Northern Idaho and Eastern Washington. The high school mascot in the first town where I lived is a logger, complete with a flannel shirt and stocking cap. My people are, as a stereotype, rednecks. Fair characterization or not, the one thing you can consistently depend on is our love of cars. NASCAR here, as in much of the rest of the U.S., is big. I even had a childhood friend with an uncle who won the Indy 500. I don’t particularly follow the sport, but like all good Americans, were I to run into Jeff Gordon on the street, I’d be a little star-struck.
But for a country that really loves things that burn huge amounts of fuel to go very fast, it’s strange that there isn’t a strong Formula 1 following in the U.S. I’d heard of “F1 racing” as a concept, but had no idea what the cars looked like and certainly couldn’t name a single driver. That is until two years ago. After a particularly raucous St. Patrick’s Day in New York, I woke in an East Village apartment, desperate for water and coffee, to find my companions sitting around a giant flatscreen waiting for the Australian Grand Prix to start. I was the only person in the room who had no idea what that meant. They enthusiastically explained the unbelievably high performance engines that allow the vehicles to take turns at upwards of 150 miles per hour. Their excitement was catchy and, as the headache faded, I found myself getting into it. It didn’t hurt that Lewis Hamilton, a young Brit with high expectations who was making his F1 debut that day, is rather easy on the eyes.
As we sipped our coffee and talked about the nuances of the Renault engine, I noticed something. The friend I came with hailed from Korea, the owner of the flatscreen was born in India, and the other straggler was native to North Africa. I represented the white American contingent. We had assembled a veritable UN of hangovers. And the thing that brought us all together that morning were these rockets on wheels, because who doesn’t love that?
That morning stuck in my mind two years later when Regan, a roommate from graduate school, moved to Bahrain. The weather is supposed to be ideal in April, and the last weekend just happened to be the country’s grand prix, the biggest and most lucrative race in the circuit. The prospect of going to a Middle Eastern country attached by bridge to Saudi Arabia but with access to beaches and F1 was too much strangeness to turn down. So a week ago I hopped on a plane from New York and landed 16 hours later in the capital, Manama, where a very excited Regan announced to the entire airport: “I can’t believe you hauled your ass to Bahrain!”
For the most part, the Kingdom of Bahrain is a fairly traditional Islamic country with issues that ring familiar to anyone who follows politics in the region. The majority of the people living there are Shiite, but the government is controlled by Sunnis. Two weeks ago, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa released 178 political prisoners after riots threatened to cast a shadow over the F1 festivities. His decision says a lot. Specifically, the cash generated by Bahrain’s rising status as a place of international trading and banking (a sort of Dubai lite) is far more important than sectarian squabbles.
Bahrain’s grand prix is the most lucrative on the circuit. It draws the moneyed classes from all over the world to the bars, beaches and hotels. The whole spectacle generates over $500 million to the local economy, according to bahraingp.com.
The nexus of the F1 tourism crowd is Trader Vic’s, attached to the local Ritz-Carlton. The bar caters mostly to the foreigners in town for the race. They’re all part of an international jet set that travels where the party is. “Where are you planning to spend the summer?” asked a British girl in a white bikini and wide Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses. “I’d like to get to Spain,” her equally dolled up companion replied. “But definitely Ibiza.”
Still, Bahrain has its own luxury class which meant that at Trader Vic’s, Regan and I were downing champagne royales between tables with women in cleavage-heavy spaghetti strap tops and men in the long white thobes and red-checked head scarves. The crowd at the track is about the same. Pockets of women sit in the stands in abayas and head scarves—similar to a burka. Others stroll between tents in four-inch, red, patent-leather stilettos. Some wear both.
At this financial level, your God is hardly a problem and the Bahraini government understands that. Most of the religious buildings are mosques, but we drove past at least one church in town and one of our Arab drinking companions at Trader Vic’s wore a gold cross around his neck. Even the seemingly insurmountable mutual disdain between Arabs and Jews breaks down with enough cash in the bank. While the King has condemned Israel’s occupation of Gaza, he and his country have no problem welcoming with open arms the CEO of Formula 1, a man named Bernie Ecclestone who appears on adherent.net’s list of famous Jews. Ecclestone also talks about the importance of appealing to the sport’s many Jewish investors, most recently saying he’d like to bring in a black, Jewish, female driver.
The lesson here seems to be, if you have enough money, silly little things like religious disputes and international conflicts created by oil dependency fall away. Why hate each other when we can enjoy this fancy and strange car race? The British (and adorably named) Jeremy Button took the trophy at this year’s contest.
Many people living in Bahrain will never make it to the race. In this stratified place, if you’re not an oil baron, you’re a worker, helping construct the skyscrapers popping up along the coastline.
When the wealthier citizens disappear into the mosques for the morning prayers, the labor—some imported, some native—keeps toiling in the heat. But ask anyone what they think of the race and you’re likely to get a “very good mum.”
Ahmed Hassan Abdullah, a cab driver and native Bahraini was one of the few people to get candid. I asked what he thought of the whole thing on a ride to the airport. “It’s good,” he replied, and what can he say, this is one of his country’s biggest economic drivers. But after pausing for a few moments, he added that it can be a bit of a spectacle. He has to cart the revelers around back in Manama after each of the two days of practice races and the main Sunday event. They can be a little crazy. Last year the Italians caused the most problems, he said with a sigh. “This year, Brazil, take the first.”
Ahmed actually scraped together the cash and headed to the desert when the track first opened in 2004. He wasn’t impressed. The cars are ear-splittingly loud and what’s the point, he thought. “I spend 60 dinar ($160 US dollars) just for watching car come and go?” says the man who, like the F1 drivers, makes a living behind the wheel. “It’s driving without heart.”
Ironically the theme of this year’s Grand Prix is “Where the heart is.”
Ahmed is probably right, of course. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love watching those cars slingshot around the final turn into the straightaway. And that’s something, it seems, everyone can get behind, regardless of race, ethnicity, color or creed—provided of course, you’ve got enough cash to rise above such things.
