The racing season opens next week when Formula One, the pinnacle of motor sports, comes to town with the annual Grand Prix expected to draw some 120 000 spectators, one third of them from overseas.

To realise the potential of motor sports to spur tourism, the government last month allocated $1.4-million to establish a commission to regulate all motorsports in the country.

"The objective is to make Malaysia a hub for motorsports as there is a big following in the country and globally, especially for the F1 Grand Prix and the A1 Grand Prix," deputy prime minister Najib Razak said at the time.

The centrepiece of Malaysia's sporting ambitions is the ultra-modern Sepang circuit, situated on a former palm oil plantation near Kuala Lumpur's airport and opened in 1998 at a cost of $120-million.

Sepang has a 130 000-seat capacity and is now the home of five major events, but organisers say they plan to introduce even more to squeeze the maximum usage out of the venue ? one of the few Formula One circuits in Asia.

"Right now, the circuit is used for 200 days in a year. We will increase the number of programmes to promote a motorsports culture," said Sepang's general manager Ahmad Mustafa.

The new events will include an endurance race, and a 4x4 championship rally, said Ahmad, who has an annual budget of 170 million ringgit ($46-million) yearly to woo tourists worldwide to the Malaysian track.

A1, MotoGP pull crowds

"We are doing the planning now. There is a lot of interest, especially from participants from Australia and Japan, to compete here as the costs are much lower," he told AFP.

Another highlight of the sporting calendar is the MotoGP, where fans are drawn by the likes of Italian champion Valentino Rossi negotiating the 5.54-kilometre track on his Yamaha.

Among the newer events is the A1 Grand Prix, known as the World Cup of Motorsport, in which drivers compete for their nation instead of a private team or carmaker.

In the Super GT, formerly known as Japan GT, top drivers participate in a three-day race which is the biggest GT contest in Asia. Other rounds are held in Japan and the United States.

The Merdeka Millennium, held in conjunction with national day celebrations in August, is based on the popular 24-hour Le Mans endurance race in France. In the Malaysian version, dozens of saloon cars each with three allocated drivers race round the track at night over 12 hours.

For the younger audience, there is the Saturday night drag racing, where two cars with modified engines accelerate in a straight line over a 400 metre track.

Petrolheads spin out of of control

The newest auto event is drift racing, a bizarre sport staged in Kuala Lumpur this weekend for the first time at a go-kart track on the outskirts of the capital.

Drift racing originated in Japan and pits competitors in high-performance cars who skid sideways around the circuit for as along as possible by "linking slides and turns into one controlled movement", according to the organisers.

Tourism is Malaysia's second-largest foreign exchange earner and the government hopes that motor racing fans, mostly high-earning professionals, will help it realise its ambition of reaching record arrival numbers next year.

"We are looking at different products to woo tourism, and sports is another segment we have to promote," Tourism Minister Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor told AFP.