Robert F Worth/NYT

Jeddah, Mar 9: The young men start gathering around midnight, on a broad strip of highway between the desert and the sea. By 1am 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 competition that dominates weekend nights here. It ranges from garden variety drag racing to “drifting,” a dangerous practice in which drivers spin out and skid sideways at high speeds, sometimes killing themselves and spectators.

For Saudi Arabia’s generation of young people, these night battles are a kind of collective scream of frustration, a rare outlet for exuberance in an ultraconservative country where the sexes are segregated and most public entertainment is illegal. They are, almost literally, bored out of their minds.

Youngsters, asked why they risked their lives this way, said it was because of “tufush,” an Arabic word for boredom whose meaning is said to derive from the gestures made by a drowning man. Drifting has also been a nexus between homosexuality and jihadism since it emerged 30 years ago.

Homoerotic desire is a constant theme in Saudi songs and poems about drifting, and accomplished drifters are said to have their pick of the prettiest boys among the spectators. A number of drifters have also become militants, including Youssef al-Ayyeri, founder of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, who fought in Afghanistan and was killed by security forces in in 2003.

But most racers are more like young men almost anywhere: restless, thrill-seeking and madly in love with cars.

Sulayman al-Shulukhi, 29, who races every weekend night here recalls the famous case of Faisal al-Otaibi, 27, a drifter who was sentenced to death after his car crashed during a joy ride in 2005, killing three teenage boys he had taken along with him. The sentence was reduced this year to 3,000 lashes, 20 years in prison and a lifetime driving ban.