Our story

Objective

The foundation exists to raise the standard of defensive and anticipative driving among trainees of every background, with particular emphasis on teenage and young drivers in Lebanon and the region. Human error is by a wide margin the leading cause of road crashes. Our courses are designed to reduce those errors progressively, through classroom education and practical training.

Crashes will never be eliminated. But the right defensive skills, learned early, are the difference between an incident and a fatality.

Adel Metni

Adel Georges Metni was born on 3 December 1961. His father noticed his interest in cars at seven, when he asked the boy to move the family Oldsmobile. At twenty-one he was general manager of Winners, the first well-known fast food chain in Lebanon, where he ran everything on three rules: quality, service, hygiene.

He was Lebanese Hill Climb champion in Group N for two consecutive years, 1994 and 1995, driving an M3. In 1993 he established Metni Racing Team, the first professional racing team in the country, helping drivers and co-drivers enter rallying properly – through education, assistance and prepared cars rather than trial and error.

He taught hundreds of students the basics of safe speed, in sessions across Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Dubai.

From 1996 he worked with the Youth Association for Social Awareness on road safety promotion, and became nationally and regionally known for it. He died in 2008, aged forty-six.

The foundation

Adel Metni Foundation was established and registered in Lebanon in 2015 as a non-profit organisation working on road safety education and awareness. Its history reaches back to 1993 and the racing team, and to the awareness sessions Adel ran alongside specialised NGOs.

Combining racing skill with defensive behaviour is what makes the lesson stick – especially in a region where road fatalities have risen sharply over the past two decades. That combination is still the method.