I was born March 27, 1980 in Beirut, Lebanon. Due to the civil conflict in Lebanon I spent most of my childhood in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. For as long as I can remember I have loved cars, a love which found companionship in the similar passion of Nadim (my elder brother) and Farah (my younger brother). Since I was tall enough to reach the pedals I began driving the family road-cars!
It was in Lebanon at the age of 14 that I had my first real race-driving experience. At the "Circuit des Champions" go-karting center in the Mansouriyeh area off of the road to Broumanna, I fell in love with pushing their 5 and 9 horsepower karts to the limit. Every holiday that we'd go back to Lebanon I would go to the circuit, learning more and more, eventually working my way up to driving their fastest 16-hp, 100 cc, 2-stroke karts.
In 1997 I graduated from my high school in Abu Dhabi and moved to the University of California at Berkeley where I began working towards a Bachelor of Astrophysics and a Minor in Civil Engineering. By my second year at Berkeley, it became clear to me that I had to have motorsport in my life. There was a burning desire in me to become a professional single-seater driver, so in the footsteps of all the great F1 drivers I began racing go-karts. I bought an HPV Pro kart (23 bhp) from the US manufacturer "Trackmagic Karts" and began racing in the Northern California region alongside my studies.
The learning curve was very intense. Even though I won the first race I ever contested in the novice category in 1999, when I entered the Pro categories for the 2000 season it took me two years to win again. Those first two years I was racing on a small allowance and had such a strong belief in my talent that I decided to do everything on my own. I was racing without any mechanic or engineer to help work on and adjust the kart for each circuit. In 2001 when I graduated to racing in 80 cc Shifter Pro (32 bhp), I was not running near the front competing against staffed and fully-funded karting teams. This naturally was not accpetable, so I knew I had to upgrade my methods.
For 2002 I joined forces with Jonathan Bomarito Racing (JBR), and had the talented and experienced kart racer Jonathan Bomarito as my engineer and mechanic. Together we worked not only on adjusting the kart to maximize its speed, but also on honing my natural talent into race-winning skill. Competing against other talented, up-coming racers of the US karting scene, our presence on the podium became a frequent occurrence. By the end of the season we were winning 80 cc Pro races in the dry and the rain.
For the 2003 season I graduated to the top level of American kart racing, Formula ICC (45 bhp). With a potential top speed of 200 km/h, Formula ICC is America's last step before graduating to formula cars. We continued winning and were leading the International Kart Federation (IKF) Region 11 Formula ICC Championship. Even though I had to come back to the Middle East mid-championship, ending our chances of securing the title, I had made my mark and proven my skills.
Word of my talent reached the California-based Formula Renault team "CT Motorsport" and it was with them that I made my first steps into the world of formula cars...
CT Motorsport offered me a test-drive in October 2003 in a Formula Renault 1600 (120-bhp, 1600 cc) racing car. This was my first-ever drive in a formula car, a day I will always remember. My rapid adaption and speed in their FRenault 1600 impressed them and earned me a test in their FRenault 2000 (182-bhp, 2000 cc) racing car. Again I adapted immediately, inspiring the offer that I compete with them in the 2004 USA Formula Renault 2000 Winter Championship, held in Florida January and February 2004.
With three days testing before-hand, the USA Formula Renault 2000 Winter Championship was a very challenging experience. Though we had our fair-share of problems, it really was a character-building way to be thrown right into the thick of the top American and Canadian Formula Renault drivers and teams and go through such a wide range of events for my first experiences. Amazing how this type of challenge was to characterize my career for the next three years!
For the summer of 2004, I moved over to the United Kingdom to further develop my career for a 6-week period. These 6 weeks were to be spent racing Formula Ford, the same category with which the late F1 Champion Ayrton Senna, and the great Michael Schumacher began their formula careers, as well as many of today's top racing drivers. The hope was that my performance in the UK, hosting the world's most competitive Formula Ford series, would convince Arab sponsors to back me.
I competed with ex-F1 driver Martin Donnelly's team, Martin Donnelly Racing (MDR), in 2 rounds of the regional AVON Clubmans Formula Ford Championship and one round in the national UK Formula Ford Championship. The round in the national series was marred by bad luck in qualifying and consequent bad luck in the races. But the two rounds in the regional series netted me a top-five finish on my debut, and a historic victory in the second round! The British motorsport journalists told me I was the first Lebanese and Arab driver in history to win a Formula Ford race in Europe, which was really a great honor for me.
Even though this was a great result that gave a lot of promise for my future, finding sponsorship from the undeveloped Midde Eastern sports-sponsorship market did not get any easier. Try as I might, no-one seemed bold enough to join me in my mission to become the first Arab in Formula One.
In-line with my personality and straight-forward nature, this is an honest personal account of my experiences with A1 Team Lebanon. In early autumn of 2004, the news was released that the Auchi family had boldly secured a place for Lebanon in the new A1 Grand Prix "World Cup of Motorsport." This was fantastic news, not just for the sporting history of Lebanon and the Arab world, but also for my career prospects. Immediately I set out to contact Team Lebanon and inform them of my existence, and of my desire to race for my country in A1GP.
Tameem Auchi had appointed a management to oversee the team, and they saw I was a good candidate to be one of A1 Team Lebanon's two drivers; I was one of only three young Lebanese drivers with formula experience at that time! So the team arranged for evaluation tests for us three candidates, which included a fitness test as well as an on-circuit test in an F3 car in the UK. These evaluations would provide them with the basis for choosing which two drivers had the most potential to bring success for Lebanon.
So across 4 days towards the end of December 2004, the team put me and Khalil Beschir, one of the other two candidates, through the paces together. The three in-car days on the Pembrey circuit in south Wales were fantastic. It was only the second time I had ever driven an F3 car, and I was pushing hard in both dry and wet conditions to prove to the team that I was the best Lebanon had to offer.
On January 7th the team informed me that I was selected as one of Team Lebanon's drivers and that they would be training us intensively to become top-level formula pilots. That was one of the happiest days of my life till then, and was a life-line for my career. In March 2005 the team began a driving and fitness development program for me and Khalil Beschir, my new teammate. UK-based Carlin Motorsport were contracted to train and race us that summer and in A1GP as they did throughout my tenure with Team Lebanon. Naturally I moved to the UK to be close to the team and I've been living in Oxford since.
We worked hard in the summer of 2005. We did some tests in a 2004-spec F3 car, raced one round in the Italian F3 championship, and straight-away moved up to F3000 cars, doing testing and racing in 4 rounds of the F3000 Pro Series. This was a highly-accelerated program, drivers normally spend 1-2 full seasons in a junior formula, then 1-2 full seasons in F3 before moving to the F3000/GP2 level; we were trying to fit 4-5 years of development into 6 months! In any case, by the end of it we were much more developed as drivers, and without a doubt the quickest-ever Lebanese formula drivers.
We also trained our fitness intensively to ensure we would be fully prepared for the physical tests of the A1GP races. In the inaugural season, A1GP race-day Sundays consisted of a 30-minute Sprint Race, followed by a 60-minute break, culminating with the 60-minute Feature Race. Especially considering some of the climates A1GP visited, endurance and heat-resistance were critical to maximize a driver's performance. Our team's trainer Barry Grinham, who has become a good friend of mine, was Jordan F1's Team Trainer for fourteen years and we worked very hard with him.
We naturally had high hopes for the 2005-2006 season, ambitious as we are! In retrospect the inexperience of the whole team, in terms of us drivers and the management, as well in terms of Carlin Motorsport never having run F3000 cars before (which A1GP cars are a development of), meant we had a very steep slope to climb which we weren't expecting. Making it more challenging was the high-level experience of the drivers and the teams we were up against, and that we were one of the only teams to share drives between drivers. Even though we showed improvement through the season (for example I got us into the top-ten in a rainy official practice session in South Africa, mid-way in the first season), the team management began to lose their patience in scoring those elusive points-positions.
Mid-season, a steadfast and wise team management would have 1) selected the better driver up to that point, 2) added an increment to the mammoth A1GP investment and invested in developing and coaching him between A1GP rounds in an F3000 car, and 3) made him the permanent driver of the A1GP car. This would've been ruthless relative to the other driver, but it would have given Team Lebanon the best results from an actually-Lebanese driver. Instead the management side-lined both Lebanese drivers, and imported USA's Graham Rahal, who is of Lebanese descent. With a significantly broader experience and grooming, Graham was only able to equal my best result for Team Lebanon, 11th place, which still stands as the best-ever Team Lebanon finish after almost three full seasons and six different drivers. To put things into perspective, Graham went on to reach the podium in America's top-flight ChampCar Series in his 2007 rookie season.
For the summer of 2006, between A1GP seasons, the management chose not to race-train its Lebanese drivers at all, while our already more-advanced competition were doing full seasons in Formula Renault 2.0, F3, World Series by Renault or GP2. The team was relying on Graham to bring Team Lebanon the glory in the second season, and he was already funded and racing in the 2006 Formula Atlantic championship in the USA. I knew this could be detrimental to my continued development so I worked hard and brought together enough funding for my own 2-round assault on the British F3 National Class, where I netted two top-5 finishes. Clearly this was quite short of being a "summer race-development program" but any racing kilometers are better than sitting on a sofa.
I inaugurated the start of the second A1GP season for Team Lebanon at Zandvoort as Graham was unavailable to race. Zandvoort is a wonderful and technical circuit, and with all the technical problems we had in the weekend I still loved the experience. Graham then joined the team for the second round at Brno, finished 12th, and left the team after that! It was a classic case of all the eggs in one basket, and the team now had remaining its two motivated Lebanese drivers/bench-warmers who'd done practically nothing all summer and Alex Khateeb, a new rookie of Arab descent who had just joined the team.
I was gifted with two more A1GP weekends, where I showed my competitiveness in Beijing, a very rough street circuit where I was pushed into the wall and out of a points-finish by a competitor. In my last A1GP race of the season at Indonesia the car suffered an unexplained suspension failure. It was an almost comedic way to end what had become a circus-like relationship!
Since late in the first season I began reading between the lines that the team management was not going to give us a real chance to prove our potential and represent our country and the Arab world like we thought we'd been promised. That convinced me that to protect my potential and the future of my career as an Arab talent, I would have to revitalize my long-term ambitions on my own, so I created SHAABAN2F1...
In October of 2006 I launched SHAABAN2F1 across the Arab world from Dubai, UAE. Sitting next to me at the launch was the "Godfather of Arab Motorsport", 14-time FIA Middle East Rally Champion Mohammed Ben Sulayem, who honored me with his support of my career. With the experience I have gained through the past years in motorsport, and the knowledge I have gleaned about the most successful development routes towards F1, I structured SHAABAN2F1 to provide me with the most comprehensive development program possible. SHAABAN2F1 is the first program of its kind, and also gives my sponsor partners a unique opportunity to participate in an ambitious and transparent mission to take an Arab to F1.
On April 17, 2007 Shell and I signed a Premier Sponsor Partnership for SHAABAN2F1. The opportunity to show what I can truly be capable of on the F1 Ladder had finally arrived...
