The young men start gathering around midnight, on a broad strip of highway between the desert and the sea. By 1 a.m. there are hundreds of them, standing in clusters alongside their cars, glancing around uneasily for the police.
Then, with a scream of revving engines, it begins: a yellow Corvette and a red Mitsubishi go head to head, racing down the road at terrifying speeds, just inches apart. Shouts go up from the sidelines, and another pair of racers shoot down the road, and another.
This may be the most popular sport of Saudi youth, an obsessive, semilegal competition that dominates weekend nights here. It ranges from garden variety drag racing to “drifting,” an extremely dangerous practice in which drivers deliberately spin out and skid sideways at high speeds, sometimes killing themselves and spectators.
“Why do they do it?” said Suhail Janoudi, a 27-year-old sales clerk who was watching the races from the roadside with a faint smile around 1:30 a.m. “Because they have nothing else to do. Because they are empty.”
“The idea behind drifting is, the economy and society don’t need you,” said Pascal Ménoret, an anthropologist who did four years of field work in Riyadh, the capital, and is now teaching at Princeton and writing a book on Saudi youth culture. “They are mostly young Bedouins who recently moved to the city, and whose lives are marked by suffering and self-destructive behavior.”
But most racers are more like young men almost anywhere: restless, thrill-seeking and madly in love with cars.
“It’s implanted in you when you’re a kid, and it stays with you,” said Sulayman al-Shulukhi, 29, who races every weekend night here and has adopted a 1950s greaser look: slicked-back hair, polo shirt with the collar up, jeans and white shoes.
He proudly showed off the modifications he had made to his Subaru Impreza: a carbon fiber spoiler, an intake valve, a special ventilation system, a turbocharger. He then jumped in the car for a ride along one of the racing strips near King Road, not far from Jidda’s Red Sea coast.
Just after 1:30, a group of police cars show up, lights flashing, sending the racers scattering. The officers do not arrest anyone. They just step out of their cars and begin talking to the young men in a paternal manner, urging them to go home.
“We have another place we go when this happens,” Mr. Shulukhi said confidently, getting into his Impreza and driving a few blocks to a shopping center parking lot. There, scores of other young men are waiting by their cars, some examining their engines. At 2:30, the police show up again, the next step in a game of cat and mouse that lasts much of the night.
This time Mr. Shulukhi and his friends drive north, stopping for coffee at a drive-through called French Roast, until they reach their ace in the hole: a dark strip of highway just outside the city with a construction site on one side and desert on the other. They drag-race their Subarus along a quarter-mile strip for another hour or so.
About 5 a.m., the road begins to fill up with delivery trucks driven by Pakistani immigrants, doing the kind of low-wage job most Saudi men refuse to take. The racers decide to call it a night, and drive reluctantly home.
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