Erbil Speed Center sits on a huge swath of land next to the biggest development in town—a walled upscale subdivision called Dream City. Hughes, 53, is a short guy with neatly combed brown hair who laughs easily and used to race go-karts for Jordan’s national team. He is a director of the company that built the track—and is erecting a 23-story skyscraper that is about to become the tallest building in town. In Kurdistan, he tells me, the government will let you have land for free if you come up with a proposal and complete 25 percent of it. His parcel stretches out for acres, an enormous rectangle of reddish dirt. He had so much land, he says, that he just took the computer sketch of his go-kart track and expanded it to cover more real estate. What he ended up with is a track as wide as an actual roadway. Inside the glass building overlooking the layout is a restaurant with a pizza oven and a full bar tended by a bored-looking Ethiopian girl. “I’d be out of business in the U.S. already!” Hughes says. “But here it’s okay.”
Source: www.men.style.com.