Why would you build a MotoGP track in the middle of the desert?
MotoGP
Two decades after Qatar’s first MotoGP round the story of the Losail circuit can finally be told – it all started with a gang of local road riders who wanted to get their knees down
The late, great Nicky Hayden during a promo shoot for an early MotoGP event at Losail
In October 2004 we arrived at Doha airport for the first Qatar MotoGP round, the Middle East’s first motorcycle grand prix.
We landed at a dusty little airport next door to a dusty little town and wondered what we were doing there. Doha’s tallest building was the 16-story Sheraton hotel and the brand-new new Losail circuit was a 30-minute drive out into the desert, past camel trains (yes, really), with the Arabian Gulf twinkling in the distance.
We only didn’t know why we were there because we didn’t know what was about to happen to the world.
Nearby Bahrain had hosted the Middle East’s first Formula 1 GP a few months earlier, then five years later came the Abu Dhabi F1 round, at the outrageously ostentatious Yas Marina venue, then the first Qatar F1 GP at Losail in 2021 and then the first Saudi Arabian F1 GP in 2022.
The inaugural Qatar MotoGP round was unforgettable, mostly thanks to a legendary episode of pitlane skulduggery by Valentino Rossi’s crew, committed under cover of darkness on the eve of the race. Sand was – and still can be – a problem at Losail (remember Jorge Martin’s 2023 Qatar GP start?), because it gets blown onto the asphalt from the surrounding desert.
Rossi’s crew therefore had the bright idea of riding a team scooter onto the grid, then doing multiple burnouts on their rider’s grid slot to lay down rubber to create better grip for a faster launch at the start of the race.
This, of course, was the year of Rossi’s Herculean task of transforming Yamaha’s YZR-M1 from pitlane embarrassment to world-title winner. His main championship rival was Honda’s Sete Gibernau, who still had points leader Rossi in his sight with four races remaining. Unfortunately, Gibernau spied Rossi’s crew doing their little scooter dance.
The newly built circuit, with the Arabian Gulf visible at top of photo. Now the Lusail stadium, host to last year’s World Cup football final, is a five-minute drive to the south (right of photo)
iStock
When I arrived at the track on race day I spotted a scrum of team managers in heated conversation behind the pits. Something must be afoot, because you don’t usually see these people arguing in plain sight of the media.
Gibernau had made a formal complaint, so race direction had sent Rossi to the back of the grid, dealing a potentially significant blow to his championship hopes.
The punishment had Rossi in a rage, so on race day he tore through the pack like a madman, until he crashed out of third place. Gibernau won the race to put himself within striking distance of Rossi’s championship lead.
Comparisons with Valentino Rossi may be a little premature but stellar MotoGP rookie Pedro Acosta is already entertaining us on and off track, just like the nine-time world champion used to
By
Mat Oxley
After that, Rossi vowed Gibernau would never win another race. The Spaniard had scored eight MotoGP victories in the previous 19 months, so this seemed a little unlikely. But the curse worked – Gibernau never won another GP. Spooky.
Meanwhile Rossi flew home to have a hand injury fixed, then flew out to Malaysia, where he crushed Gibernau and everyone else. At the end of that race he stopped on the slowdown lap, took a broom from members of his supporters’ club and pretended to scrub the track clean. Rossi has probably never been angrier. Well, apart from 2015.
To be honest, most of us were happy to get out of Qatar in 2004. The whole thing had been a surreal experience, like a MotoGP event staged on the moon, with barely a handful of fans at the track, marooned in a sea of sand, where the pitlane thermometer swept upwards to 48C. That’s when discussions about a night race began.
What we didn’t know back in 2004 was that Losail was one of the first building blocks of a new empire, a Middle Eastern financial powerhouse.
When you land in today’s Doha, or Abu Dhabi or Dubai, you soon realise these countries are playing a different game compared to Europe, the USA, most of Asia and the rest of the world.
Rossi during the inaugural 2004 Qatar GP, during which he was penalised for a grid infraction and crashes out of the race
Getty Images
The oil and gas-rich nations of the Middle East have spent many hundreds of billions on creating a series of huge financial hubs, designed to preserve the region’s economic future once the oil and gas run out.
Doha is no longer a dusty little down, but a city with a Manhattan skyline, with dozens of gawdy skyscrapers, lit up like disco balls at night, all vying for your attention, plus some truly awe-inspiring works of modern architecture.
At the same time several Middle Eastern countries are hugely involved in sports, from Formula 1 to football, from tennis to golf and everything else that makes global headlines to further their global agenda. They rightly get accused of sportswashing to distract us from human-rights abuses and so on.
A winter of a thousand questions, many of which will finally be answered in Qatar this weekend, including which rider will make the most of Michelin’s all-new compounds?
By
Mat Oxley
But sportswashing is nothing new – it’s been going on for millennia. Roman emperors pacified their subjects with bread, circuses and gladiators, the Nazis funded Auto Union and BMW to dominate car and motorcycle racing in the 1930s, the tobacco industry kept motor sport grids thriving for decades, as do the petroleum industry, petrochemical companies, megabanks, crypto businesses, Ponzi schemes, tax dodgers and purveyors of fast food and fizzy drinks nowadays.
The simple fact is this: money, sports and politics have always been inseparable.
Indeed the sport of motorcycle racing might never have happened if it hadn’t been for the Belgian empire, which included Congo, where the rare Landolphia rubber vine produced the sap needed to manufacture tyres in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Belgium’s King Leopold II employed mercenaries that forced locals to collect the valuable sap. Between five and 15 million died as a result. (Joseph Conrad’s book Heart of Darkness was inspired by these events.)
Qatar and its super-rich neighbours don’t need to invade countries. Qatar already owns £40 billion of UK assets and holds major stakes in multinational corporations like VW, which means it owns a bit of Ducati.
Skyscrapers emerging near the Losail circuit – just a few years ago this was empty desert
Red Bull
Anyway, back to the main point of this blog…
The story of Losail circuit isn’t what you think. The original plan wasn’t to build a racetrack that would attract global motor sports like MotoGP and F1 to Qatar.
The first layouts were drawn by a group of keen local motorcycle riders who wanted somewhere they could ride fast, while also giving younger riders somewhere to let loose, instead of having head-ons with cars. This group of riders had already built a drag strip outside Doha, but they got bored of only riding in a straight line.
From there the idea grew into something much bigger, an early stage in Qatar’s multi-billion explosion of infrastructure construction. The final layout had each corner shaped to reflect a portion of the Qatari coastline – like Doha’s Corniche – or a favourite road. The long start/finish was inspired by the country’s major north-south highway, where many bikers used to get their speed thrills before speed limits spoiled their fun.
One of the original Losail gang was Dr Khalid M Al-Ali, who rode around Doha on a Yamaha R1 and was a keen track-day rider in the USA. While in the States he was awarded degrees in mechanical engineering and aerospace engineering and worked at NASA and in Silicon Valley.
The reason Losail circuit was built in the middle of the desert was because it wouldn’t be in the middle of the desert for long. More than two decades ago plans were already underway to build Losail City, Qatar’s financial centre, just to the north of Doha.
Losail had a rumoured half-billion-dollar upgrade when F1 arrived last year. The previous paddock area was very basic
Oxley
So now Losail circuit is a five-minute drive from the Losail stadium, where Argentina beat France in last year’s World Cup final.
Today’s Losail circuit infrastructure could hardly be more different to what it was in 2004. From a decent garage complex adjoined to a small Portakabin town – a bit like a motorway construction site, where teams and riders hid from the sun – it’s morphed into a fantasy five-star creation, thanks to a rumoured half billion-pound investment to welcome the F1 glitterati last year.
The comparison to most European circuits (apart from Red Bull Ring, upgraded with fizzy-drink money) is stark – it tells you that the Middle East is now the centre of the world, financially at least.
Budget issues are unheard of. Some years ago, an FIM official told me he had attended a meeting between the circuit owners, local promoters and Dorna management to discuss improvements to Losail’s night-time MotoGP races, inaugurated in 2008.
The dew point – when the sun goes down and the temperature drops – was the subject under discussion. The problem is the moisture that gathers on the cooling asphalt, reducing grip and causing crashes. One local suggested they could dig up the circuit and add underfloor heating to maintain track temperature at the desired temperature.
Definitely playing a different game to the rest of us.
