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The first Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, one of the richest and most eagerly-awaited sporting spectacles in the Middle East, will be marshalled for free next weekend by 350 volunteers from Britain.

More than 125 experienced race marshals are already at the glittering Yas Marina circuit — part of a $40 billion (about £24.5 billion) development — and they will be joined tomorrow by another 225, who are flying in to take control of the 3.4-mile long circuit as fire and rescue crews and manning trackside posts. Race control next weekend will also be run by a British contingent.

Although the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix will take place in one of the wealthiest nations on earth, the volunteer marshals are not being paid. Only their expenses are being covered by the Abu Dhabi authorities, who are thought to have handed over as much as $30 million to Bernie Ecclestone, Formula One’s commercial rights-holder, for the rights to stage the grand prix. The irony that Abu Dhabi, the newest grand prix in Formula One, has had to turn to experts who have honed their skills manning the oldest fixture on the grand-prix calendar could not be deeper or sadder.

While Ecclestone will next week shake hands with the ruling families of the United Arab Emirates in the extraordinary Sun Tower, reserved for VVIPs only, he could be about to axe the British Grand Prix, the first Formula One race of the modern world championship and a grand prix that many of Abu Dhabi’s volunteer marshals were helping at in July.

Yas Marina is the latest jewel of a track in Formula One’s crown, a steel, glass and concrete palace that rises from one of Abu Dhabi’s many islands. What was once sand surrounded by an aquamarine sea is now a gigantic construction site, with the circuit at its heart, surrounded by hotels and new roads and even a Monaco-style marina. As Europe’s traditional circuits fade away in a cloud of flaking paint and gathering debts, the Middle and Far East leap into their place, egged on by an eager Ecclestone, who loves the rustle of a dollar bill above the sound of a V8 engine.

From Britain — which boasts successive Formula One world champions, three historic race circuits at Silverstone, Donington and Brands Hatch and yet has no grand prix at this moment after 59 years — to the Middle East, which now has two grands prix after Bahrain and now Abu Dhabi have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into creating purpose-built tracks.

Government-provided oil dollars are funding the massive development at Yas Marina of which Silverstone — and now Donington, which failed to raise £135 million to stage the British Grand Prix — could not even dream. Everything at Yas Marina has been built to the highest standards and for the “wow” factor that traditional circuits cannot hope to compete with, such as the 500-bedroom, five-star Yas Hotel that straddles the track. Not only will Jenson Button, Britain’s new world champion, and his rivals emerge from a tunnel under the hotel onto the track but they will blast between its two buildings, under a footbridge, where guests will see the action.

For all that, the 21-turn circuit is a bewilderingly sanitised stadium, unlike the cauldron of a Monza or Silverstone, where 120,000 people trekked across Northamptonshire to indulge in Britain’s annual homage to fast cars on race day this year. Yas Marina is high-class construction, like a modern skyscraper, with the building work carried out by thousands of immigrant workers, who are still preening and cleaning the glass-fronted corporate boxes and the seats that will house as many as 50,000 spectators.

Precious few of those construction workers are likely to be in the stands, though, because Abu Dhabi represents the bespoke world of Formula One for the 21st century. If Silverstone this year was for the enthusiastic masses steeped in six decades of tradition, Abu Dhabi will be a race for the relatively few, who will sit in comfortable tiers with an outstanding view from almost anywhere on the circuit.

But the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix is aimed at putting the Emirates on the modern sporting map and creating a tradition in a nation that has no motor-racing history and the only way they can do that is to buy it, like choosing a diamond from sport’s jewellery cabinet. Whoever wins the inaugural Abu Dhabi Grand Prix on Sunday will be fêted in a nation that can afford to buy its heroes — but the victorious driver might feel his name is not written in history, but in the sand.