One and a half months after its non-championship trophy round in Bahrain, F4 Saudi Arabia is officially kicking off this weekend at the Kuwait Motor Town. This new F4 winter series has attracted the attention of both domestic and international drivers. Here’s your guide to the season and the drivers you can expect to see on the grid.

By Perceval Wolff and Michael McClure

Like rival series F4 UAE and most European F4 series, F4 Saudi will use the Tatuus F4-T421 chassis, the second generation of F4 car built by the Italian manufacturer.

But unlike these other series, the championship will be centrally run, with all cars prepared by Meritus.GP, the same entity that ran F4 South East Asia between 2016 and 2019. With no formal teams, drivers are simply racing against one another for the championship.

Initial projections of a 20-driver entry list proved lofty, though the series is expected to have at least 15 drivers on the grid for the opening round, with the possibility that more drivers will join for later rounds.

The calendar

The championship will feature a five-round calendar for its first season, with races in three countries across the Middle East. After its non-championship round in Bahrain in December, the series proper begins this weekend at Kuwait Motor Town, which F4 UAE and Formula Regional Middle East visited last year.

After the back-to-back rounds in Kuwait, there is then a five-week break as F1, F2 and F3 sweep through the Middle East for their first rounds. F4 Saudi resumes in their wake in mid-March at Qatar’s Losail International Circuit, which hosts junior single-seaters for the first time since 2014, before concluding its season with two more back-to-back rounds at Jeddah.

The final three rounds will notably take place during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which will be observed by the majority of the population in both Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

• Non-championship: Bahrain International Circuit (15–16 December)
• Round 1: Kuwait Motor Town (2–3 February)
• Round 2: Kuwait Motor Town (8–10 February)
• Round 3: Lusail International Circuit (14–16 March)
• Round 4: Jeddah Corniche Circuit (28–30 March)
• Round 5: Jeddah Corniche Circuit (5–6 April)

The format

All weekends are due to run from Thursday to Saturday, with three 45-minute testing sessions on Thursday and an official free practice session on Friday ahead of two qualifying sessions. Then, the first race of the weekend will simply use the order from the first qualifying, while the third race on Saturday will use the one from the second qualifying.

On the same day, race two’s starting grid will be formed by reversing race one’s result, while race four will use the reverse of race three’s result. Depending on the performance of drivers and the number of drivers participating in each round, race stewards will decide whether the top six, eight or 10 drivers, or even the full grid, gets reversed.

F4 Saudi will use FIA’s classic point system with 25 points for the winner, 18 for second, 15 for third, down to one point for the driver in 10th. Three points are awarded for pole position and one point for setting the fastest lap of each race.

Where to watch?

Qualifying and all four races will be broadcast on Meritus.GP’s Facebook page.

The drivers

Many of the drivers set to enter the full season have already taken part in the inaugural trophy round in Bahrain back in December, while a few new faces also join the grid.

Sixteen-year-old Oscar Wurz is the youngest son of former F1 driver Alexander Wurz and the younger brother of Charlie Wurz, who was announced yesterday for a seat at Jenzer in FIA F3 this year. He made his first single-seater appearances in the final two rounds of the 2023 Danish F4 season and took his maiden podium in the penultimate race. He clinched his two first race wins in Bahrain in December and will hope to continue this winning form for the rest of the season.

But the biggest title favourite is Suleiman Zanfari, who raced in Eurocup-3 last year and will do so again this year with Campos Racing. The 18-year-old from Morocco was a podium finisher in Spanish F4, finishing seventh overall in 2022. For this winter, he is stepping back to F4 and has already proved how quickly he could re-adapt to these cars with a double pole and a win at the non-championship round.

Italian-born Emirati driver Federico Rifai, 16, was one of the other race winners at the non-championship event in December. After spending his first year of car racing in F4 UAE and Spanish F4, he has switched to F4 Saudi with the stated aim of learning more there than he would in any other winter series.

Kirill Kutskov stunned many with his surprising senior karting world title at the FIA Karting World Championship in Franciacorta back in October. Kutskov made his single-seater debut two months later in Bahrain but did not take a podium. The 15-year-old from Russia will be racing with a Kyrgyz license this season.

Kuwait’s Saqer Al-Maousherji had several strong karting performances in the Rotax Max Challenge in Bahrain and in IAME Asia. Despite having limited experience ahead of the non-championship round, he managed to clinch a podium on debut and finish fourth in the last two races of the weekend.

Faisal Al Kabbani took a podium in the first of the two reverse-grid races in Bahrain in what marked an extraordinary return to single-seaters for a driver whose career dates back to 2011. Back then, Al Kabbani competed in Formula BMW machinery in the Saudi Formula Championship, finishing third behind Prince Mohammad A. F. Al Saud and Syrian driver Yazan Hamadeh.

Also set to race this weekend is Qatar Racing Club director Jabor Al Thani, a member of Qatar’s ruling Al Thani family. The 29-year-old took a best result of eighth in Bahrain, having retired from two of the races.

Of the Saudi Arabian drivers stepping up to single-seaters, Omar Aldereyaane has shown the strongest form so far, taking seventh, seventh, ninth and second in Bahrain. Aldereyaane made sporadic appearances in international karting, coming 13th of 18 drivers in the IAME Warriors Final’s Z-I class in 2022 after winning the gearbox karting class of the IAME Series UAE championship.

Saudi driver Abdulaziz Abuzenadah will also enter the championship, his first in single-seaters. He struggled in Bahrain, finishing 10th and 11th in the first and third races and retiring from the other two.

Two of the biggest names set to enter the series are not only sisters but also F4 winners in their own right, and they are expected to race in F1 Academy this year with Red Bull backing. Amna Al Qubaisi, 23, spent two years in Italian F4 and two years in Formula Regional Asia before her F1 Academy campaign in 2023 with MP Motorsport, in which she took two reverse-grid victories en route to sixth overall.

Her younger sister and 2023 teammate, 21-year-old Hamda Al Qubaisi, has had a far more successful racing career results-wise, becoming Italian F4’s first and only female driver to take an outright podium in 2021. She also finished fourth in the F4 UAE standings in 2020 and 2021, taking six wins across those campaigns, but had a more difficult time of it in Formula Regional machinery in 2022 and failed to score in both the Asian and European championships. Having now stepped back down to F4 cars, she finished third in F1 Academy in 2023 with MP Motorsport.

While Amna and Hamda have previously competed against each other in Formula Regional Asia, F4 UAE and F1 Academy, there will be a twist for this series as their brother Abdulla Al Qubaisi also joins the championship. The youngest of the three siblings, who has experience in KZ2 karting, also tested in Bahrain but did not race.

Also stepping up to cars for the first time this weekend is Andrej Petrović, a 17-year-old from Serbia who also won a karting world title in the Senior Max category of the Rotax Max Challenge Grand Finals in Bahrain. He didn’t race in the following weekend’s F4 round and will instead make his car racing debut this weekend at Kuwait Motor Town.

26-year-old Swiss-French driver Laura Villars was fifth in the F3R class of the amateur Ultimate Cup Series last year and made her maiden appearance in an FIA–certified single-seater series at F4 UAE’s Trophy round. She revealed to Feeder Series that after her F4 Saudi campaign, she would be racing in Ferrari Challenge for the rest of the year.

Juancho Brobio is another new addition to the grid. The Filipino driver is relatively new to racing but competed in Formula V1 and the Radical Challenge Philippines in 2023, winning in the Am class in the latter and taking a podium finish on debut in the latter.

Two drivers from the Bahrain non-championship round are not set to race this weekend in Kuwait. One is Abdulaziz “Zizo” Altayar, who had planned to enter but was ultimately unable to do so after hitting budget issues. His car is present in the paddock this weekend, and he told Feeder Series that he hoped to return for subsequent rounds.

Soon-to-be French F4 driver and ADAC Junior Team member Montego Maassen is also not expected to return for the full series.

What can testing tell us?

The championship had three days of pre-season testing in Kuwait this week, with two two-hour sessions on each of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Zanfari dominated proceedings, setting the fastest time in each of the six sessions. His best lap of a 2:02.142 came in the Wednesday afternoon session. That time remains a far cry from the fastest F4 lap of a 1:53.594 set last year by James Wharton on F4 UAE’s first visit to the track, but the difference is largely due to the fact that F4 Saudi is using a longer configuration of the circuit with two extra turns after turn 1 and before the back straight.

Encouragingly, Zanfari’s gap to the rest of the field remained at just a few tenths, and no one driver established themselves as his closest challenger. The first day’s two sessions saw only half the drivers set times, with Al-Maousherji and Petrović respectively the drivers immediately behind Zanfari.

More entrants came on day two, with Rifai taking second in the morning and Abuzenadah fourth to establish himself as the fastest Saudi driver early on. Times improved by more than a second in the afternoon, and behind Zanfari’s benchmark time were Wurz on a 2:02.362, Al-Maousherji on a 2:02.652 and Rifai on a 2:02.664.

Al-Maousherji, who set the most laps across the three days of testing with 172, was Zanfari’s closest challenger on day three, setting a 2:02.573 to the Moroccan’s 2:02.358 in the morning session. Kutskov trailed Zanfari in the final session Thursday afternoon, with Hamda Al Qubaisi – the only driver on the grid with prior experience of the circuit in single-seater competition – finishing third, just over half a second behind Zanfari on her only day in the car.

One driver who appeared in testing but will not race is Kuwait’s Jaber Al Sabah, who got his first taste of single-seaters in the opening two days of testing but will not race this year as he does not turn the minimum age of 15 until May. Kuwait Motor Town general manager Mohammad Al-AbdalRazzaq also appeared among the testing entries on Tuesday but did not set a time.

The overall classification of the Kuwait pre-season test can be found below.

Driver	Time	Session	Total laps
Suleiman Zanfari	2:02.142	4	134
Oscar Wurz	2:02.362	4	155
Saqer Al-Maousherji	2:02.573	5	172
Federico Rifai	2:02.664	4	97
Kirill Kutskov	2:02.779	6	145
Hamda Al Qubaisi	2:02.915	6	54
Abdulaziz Abuzenadah	2:03.308	4	94
Andrej Petrović	2:03.420	4	160
Omar Aldereyaane	2:03.454	4	96
Jabor Al Thani	2:03.822	2	26
Amna Al Qubaisi	2:04.200	6	47
Faisal Al Kabbani	2:04.463	6	52
Juancho Brobio	2:05.128	5	163
Jaber Al Sabah	2:05.446	4	102
Laura Villars	2:05.657	6	113
Abdulla Al Qubaisi	2:10.982	6	119

Editor’s note, 3 February 2024, 8:20 a.m. CET: This article was updated to note that F4 Saudi is using a different configuration of the Kuwait Motor Town circuit to what F4 UAE used last year.

Header photo credit: Altawkilat Meritus.GP