F1 SINGAPORE GRAND PRIX
The PC game of the '90s and the world's first F1 night race needs one thing in common: diligent player
Was it really a night race la?
It was race day approaching 8pm start time when a white butterfly flew from the middle of Turn One grandstand all the way down onto the track. We could have mistaken it for a piece of candy wrapper blown around by the windy conditions.
But no, the same butterfly reappeared several times that night with its closest encounter with a race car - Felipe Massa's Ferrari - being from a distance of some five metres, but it didn't get knocked out by the cars and survived the race.
We couldn't feel but sorry for the poor creature, perhaps it had mistaken the bright lights the circuit basked in for daylight.
The 8pm (Singapore time) start for the inaugural F1 Grand Prix in the island-nation last Sunday even had spectators, who had arrived at the scene before us, wondering whether it was day or night, if they not looked up the sky for confirmation, or the bay.
The previous day, walking along the waterside about the same time - during a break after practice three and qualifying - behind the pit grandstand, we spotted pairs of diesel electricity generators silently powering their share of the 1,500 two-thousand-watt lamps that light the 5km circuit.
The track was easily twice as bright as Rajmangala Stadium in Bangkok on football nights.
For the race drivers and their entourage, their biological clocks were maintained to continental European time of 2pm for the 8pm (Singapore) start.
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| Human error the cause of Ferrari’s disastrous pit stop. |
Dangerous Turn 10 curbs were fixed before practice. |
Why? It is not possible to operate at your natural best when your body approaches sleep. Retaining the European time schedule was the logical way to adjust to the night race.
Breakfast at 2pm, lunch at 8pm and dinner at 2am were the norm, roughly.
One team went as far in simulating daytime at night by replacing all bulbs in the drivers' hotel rooms with daylight bulbs.
But let's not forget that Singapore's climate is not that different from Thailand, so the 29 degrees Celsius and 66% relative humidity at race time was still not all that pleasant.
So, for us from Thailand it was night, for the teams it was afternoon and the poor butterfly was just very confused.
Was the track as bad as some drivers complained la?
You would have to ask that the drivers themselves, but from what we observed all the major complaints made by the drivers during track walk and Friday's practices were sorted out by Saturday morning.
The dangerously high curbs at Turn 10 were fixed by poring tarmac around them to lessen the curbs' height and thus turning them into small mounds instead.
However, the bumpiness of the track in general - possibly worse than in Melbourne - was something the drivers had to deal with at least for this first year.
The F1 race had no less than three episodes of safety car periods and none of them seemed overly delayed by the marshals' recovery and clean up works, despite their lack of F1 handling experience.
However, the marshals did have some hands-on experiences during the practice sessions and qualifying, plus all the three support races had their share of accidents.
But you can also say the organisers were lucky because no rain fell during the race.
Was the event really that well ran la?
You must have read countless news stories of big shots and drivers praising Singapore for being the "highlight of the season", "fantastic", "big step in history of Grand Prix racing" and "new jewel in the Formula One crown".
For us, apart from way too few toilets, rubbish bins, food and drink vendors and silly 15-minutes-long queue you had to join for a bottle of water or hotdog, there's nothing much to complain.
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| Pit exit onto the track overlapped with racing line, but there’re no accidents. |
Overtaking was difficult but Rosberg and Trulli traded places several times. |
Traffic jam around the city was bad Sunday night but nowhere as bad as in any F1 cities anywhere - it took us only 45 minutes from the end of race to reach our hotel via a chartered bus.
Oh, okay, there was pedestrian bottleneck outside the circuit on Saturday night but by Sunday it had improved.
Some commented that Singaporean "pretties" didn't look half as good as their Thai counterparts.
Really, apart from all the above quibbles everything in the eyes of us spectators (we didn't get media pass this time) went very smoothly.
Every staff spoke English - even their Singlish was better to understand in general than the kind of English spoken by, say, the Japanese and Chinese.
One policeman even spoke Thai to us and we guess many others were likely to know some Thai too.
Everybody was helpful and courteous.
After the race was over, all the staff at the exits lined up to bid spectators farewell, much like those receptionists at Japanese department stores.
Last we checked Singapore is not a communist or totalitarian state, so their clockwork and efficient efforts are genuinely commendable.
Well done la!
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