Inside and Outside the Singapore Grand Prix

A Formula One venue unlike any other.

The Formula One Singapore Grand Prix (SGP) is a truly impressive sight to behold from its made-for-TV nighttime aerial perspective. The continuously lit, five-kilometer circuit is the central organizing feature, with 23 turns spread around a roughly Z-shaped loop. Even more photogenic than the glowing asphalt squiggle are the various features inside of and next to it. Half of the circuit is directly adjacent to Marina Bay, a large expanse of water entirely shaped by three enormous pieces of artificially reclaimed land; each of which has a name that starts with “Marina” and proudly foregrounds various architectural experiments in luxury real estate. Nearby is the downtown central business district, its tall towers and other nearby attractions like the Singapore Flyer Ferris wheel all lit to the nines for this early October three-day weekend of motorsport racing. It’s one of only a few F1 races that run on city streets — most are on purpose built tracks with dedicated stadia away from city centers — and certainly the only one in a tropical, high-density urban setting. This year, a record-setting 302,000 fans will attend the SGP in person, while countless more will watch on TV or online. Since its inception in 2008, it’s by far the most costly ($150 million) and most attended annual event in the cosmopolitan city-state’s calendar, a modern-day urban circus of sorts spread out over 76-hectares (188-acres) in a prime location. I have a ticket in my hand and I’d very much like to see what this golf-course sized extravaganza is like. 

The circuit itself, corresponding seating, eating, drinking and event spaces, paddock (team garages), scattered grandstands and viewing decks, is, as a whole, a pretty complex piece of territory. Ticket holders enter through one of ten gates, and inside is a caricature of a city that’s accommodating an astronomical population density and has the clunky portable toilets and $16 Heinekens to show for it. The grounds of the SGP have got the potential for limitless intrigue and scrutiny from the architectural journalist types, yet little has been written about it from this perspective. And that’s a massive bummer, because there’s a lot to chew on here, urbanistically speaking and whatnot. Population 302k, this is a temporal three-day city inside a city-state, and there is nothing quite like it. For this reason I ultimately feel moved to celebrate the whole affair, in hopes of contributing to the elusive overlap between long form essay and Formula One.

By way of disclaimer, I am not going to discuss much of any of the race itself. I’m not a sports writer, after all, and I’m trying to stay in my lane. :-). Watch the highlights on YouTube if you like before carrying on, if you really want to get in the zone.

Watch the race highlights of the 2022 Singapore Grand Prix

First, some background. The contemporary rendition of the SGP — a previous incarnation was ran at a further-inland location from 1966 to 1973 — was first announced in 2007 following a tensely negotiated agreement between Singaporean hotelier and billionaire Ong Beng Seng (“OBS”), English billionaire Bernie Eccelstone (the “F1 supremo”), and the Singaporean government. Quite a triad. In a May press conference, they made it public: Formula One was coming to Singapore the following year. It would be a night race, a first for F1, this making for better alignment with European-viewer time zones with the added benefit of sparing the suited-and-helmeted drivers from oppressive daytime temperatures. The nighttime mystique would be an exciting differentiator for Singapore in a transformational decade for F1 that saw inaugural races in an unprecedented host of new countries in Asia and the Middle East.

Some peculiar revelations were made during the press conference. Calling in by phone, F1 supremo Bernie made a few dry complaints about his experience working with local authorities, this leading Singaporean Minister of Trade and Industry S. Iswaren to exclaim at one point: “Be kind Bernie!” OBS explains that there were financial concerns about the potential of “leakers,” a jargony term which refers to opportunistic visitors who would book a hotel room with a view of the circuit without buying a ticket to the event itself. Iswaren goes on to say that they arrived at an innovative financing model with hotels paying a race-week tax of up to 30% to offset event costs, of which the government is funding 60%. 

The race course itself is officially called the Marina Bay Street Circuit. Its design was conceived by German F1 track designer Hermann Tilke, a man who curiously seems to have held a monopoly on Formula track designs since the 90’s. I don’t know if he knows it, but this one is laid out in such a way that a cursory history of Singapore is apparent in the various urban elements adjacent to the circuit. Start, for example, at Turn 7 (T7), which makes a hard 90-degree left in front of the Memorial to Civilian Victims of Japanese Occupation in WWII. Then there’s a straightaway after T9 that flanks the 1820’s Padang (Malay for “field”), the first grand public space in Singapore designated by the colonial British government. T11 and T12 fly past the 1862 Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall and the Asian Civilizations Museum, after which the course crosses over the mouth of the Singapore River on the iron girdered Anderson Bridge built in 1910. T13 is meters from the Merlion, a water-spouting half-lion half-fish statue that pertains to a legend about a creature supposedly seen on the shores of Singapore in the 13th century by a Sumatran prince on a hunting trip. T14 to T22 wrap their way around several contemporary architectural icons like the durian-esque Esplanade theaters (2002), the floating stadium (2007), and three 1980’s luxury hotel towers designed by American atrium-hotel pioneer John Portman. (Incidentally, this Substack previously featured a write-up of one of them.) 

Circuit Park Map from event website

In 2026, this list will also include NS Square, a high profile project that will combine a permanent stadium structure with community oriented functions and exhibition space dedicated to the National Service, Singapore’s mandatory military enlistment requirement for adult males. From a top view, NS Square is actually more of a circle, and the Singapore Tourism Board is planning to emblaze the humongous, consultant designed “SG” logo in the middle of the round-shaped field that will extend over Marina Bay. Created in 2017 as part of a national branding campaign, the logo consists of the red capital letters surrounded by a thick red circle. It’s a simple graphic that does an extraordinary thing, managing to collapse nation and city and brand all together into an icon that’s legible at emoji-size resolution. At this years SGP, the logo and corresponding inspirational phrase “Passion Made Possible” regularly feature across banners and screens. When finished, the gigantic SG circle at NS Square will definitely be the one SG to rule them all; it and the infinity pool at Marina Bay Sands will compete for eyeballs in future SGP helicopter footage.  

So the Marina Bay Street Circuit has got it all, from 13th century myths to 21st century branding: a full-scale diorama of national-narrative forming exhibits linked together by a closed-loop of pavement upon which 20-million dollar cars will surpass 280 km/hr (174 mi/hr). During the Saturday qualifying session that determines where drivers sit in the starting grid for the all-important final two-hour race on Sunday, the difference between the top three finishers is a mere 0.054 seconds. From centuries to centiseconds, you can feast on your favorite timescale of choice, here at the SGP.

I enter the gated festivities on Saturday from below, arriving via MRT subway. City Hall station is swarming with F1 fans instantly identifiable by their color-washed t-shirts which neatly correspond to one of the ten car-constructor teams. It’s orange for McLaren, white for Mercedes, red for Ferrari, black for Red Bull, green for Aston Martin, and so on. There’s a definite buzz in the air, a buzz soon rendered tangible by the real noise of roaring engines that thunders through the exit corridor we’re all eagerly shuffling up. There’s a modest cheer from some of the escalator passengers simply upon hearing this extraordinary sound, and I’ve a suspicion that this full-body phenomenological experience justifies a substantial fraction of the ticket price. It’s just after three in the afternoon, and there are various exhibition and practice round races to enjoy before today’s main event: the qualifying time trials at 21:00. 

There are tiers of ticket price that include access to proper restroom facilities, and my SG$198 Zone 3 and 4 access pass is not anywhere near that category. I say this to introduce an obvious observation completely undetected on any form of TV coverage: the robust presence of lengthy arrays of portable toilets. Strategically located away from the more brightly lit sections of the circuit park grounds, they’re all provided by a company called Qool Enviro, whose website boasts they have “grown from an initial fleet of 50 portable toilets to our current strength of over 1,000 toilets.” More impressive than the quantity — unfortunately I didn’t count how many out of the 1,000 strong are deployed here at the SGP — are the unexpected capabilities available to the occupant. That is to say, these are not the open pit style potties I once knew. Qool has truly got the Ferrari of festival toilets, which come complete with an airplane-style lid flush system and a whole sink complete with circulating water. Flusher and sink are operated with two black foot pedals, which combined with the rest of the various geometrical facets of chunky oversized plastic give the whole thing a kind of low-resolution cockpit like ambience. Very Qool!

Even more technologically impressive than those is the track lighting, the most physically obvious manifestation of the nighttime race schedule. Designed and built by Italian company DZ Engineering SRL, there are 1,600 custom-made lights that ring the track, hung from a metal space frame structure that’s suspended some eight or so meters up. It’s a pragmatic setup, with each column buttressed by a metal arch that connects to a plate held fast simply by the weight of two hefty concrete traffic barriers plunked down by a forklift some weeks or months ago during setup. (The SGP takes five-months to set up and two months to take down, meaning some aspect of this ostensibly three-day event is evident in some form for over half the year.)

Over three-million watts are needed to power the track lighting alone, but of course, it’s not just lights that are suspended from the space frame. In between are loudspeakers and intermittent jumbo TV screens. In total, the metal space-frame armature becomes much more than a super-scaled light-up tinker toy, it’s effectively the information-broadcasting spinal cord serving all of us in-person attendees. There is a strange area where two parts of the track and corresponding metal broadcasting apparatus approach audible proximity to one another. British-accented announcers blare from each of the segments, but one is noticeably more delayed than the other. The mutual interference makes individual words impossible to discern, and when combined with the periodic roar of turbo V6 engines the auditory experience of the SGP is at peak Formula One ambience.

The information feed that comes through the TV and speakers is absolutely crucial, though, since to watch F1 live at a complicated urban course without it would be a frustratingly fragmented experience. At best, the longest straight section visible from grandstands is about half a kilometer, a distance the cars cover in a matter of seconds. Accounting for this, the crowd settles on a little rhythm: a collective swift tilt of the head from right to left to track the rapidly accelerating and decelerating machines, followed by a recentering to look at the jumbo screens. This ritual is repeated dozens of times as the race spreads out and cars snake their way around the circuit. Later, I witness the cycle broken as the entire grandstand stands up to watch a driver overshoot a turn, forcing him to reverse and realign before speeding away. Race-wise, it’s pretty much the most eventful thing I witness “live.”

In their quest for a better feed of race information, a lot of attendees simply plop down at the “Smooooth Pit Stop”, a Heineken branded outdoor bar and seating area with a jumbo screen some distance from the circuit itself. The bar canopy itself and the elevated television are made from the same space frame metal as the 5k broadcasting loop. It’s not a bad place to camp out, since there’s smooooth beer (I’ll take the sign’s word for it), the audio-visual feed is clear, and the metal chairs punch a notch or two more comfortable than the sun-bleached grandstands of the circuit-side stadium setups. Still, it’s in contrast to the amenities enjoyed by attendees who have paid no less than €10,000 for the “Paddock Club Pass”, enviably close to the start/finish line some one-kilometer away. There, deep pocketed individuals can saunter around the pit lanes and car garages and enjoy “world-class food & beverage offerings, free-flowing Champagne, fine wines and spirits, beer and soft drinks”, among other bullet pointed benefits.

The eternally disparate worlds of Zone 4 and the Paddock Club are temporarily brought together, when in a time-filler activity probably broadcast only locally on such screens as the Heineken jumbo, a reporter is featured walking around the Paddock club making light chit chat with the attendees. One of them, wearing a bright orange (McLaren) shirt, is asked by the reporter who her favorite driver is. The interviewee looks bewildered, and a man next to her whispers something. “Max Verstappen?” she says. A hearty laugh goes through the crowd around me…Max Verstappen races for Red Bull, identified by black shirts. Another question, this time to a group of dudes each reassuring themselves of where the bottom edge of their shirt is and trying not to come across on television like they’ve been slugging cocktails in the Paddock Club all day. “How many laps are there in the Singapore Grand Prix?” Silence, followed by The Price Is Right style guessing: “39?” “82?” “40!” This time the outdoor Heineken jumbo crowd groans. We may be plebeians but at least we all know there are 61 laps. Full of air-conditioned F1 ignoramuses, the Paddock Club is. The true fans are here in Zone 4, and I’m proud to be among them. 

I continue to direct my attention toward my fellow lower-end-of-the-ticket-price-spectrum inhabitants as evening turns to night. They’re an interesting bunch. There are amusing moments, like when a slightly lost looking man searches for a place to light up a cigarette and eventually settles on a post, the post sporting a sign that says NO SMOKING IN PARK: $2,000 FINE. Leaning on and standing under the sign and all, he can’t read it; he may never read it unless one of the machine-gun weilding security guards decides to inform him of his transgression. And there are touching moments, like when a large crowd stuck in a bottleneck near a grandstand entrance misses the early qualifying runs. In the uncomfortably dense pack of people, a man a few meters in front of me pulls up a video feed of the race coverage on his very-large cellphone, holding it up high for everyone behind to see. “Absolute legend!” a British voice next to me says, followed by claps and a collective swinging of plastic cupped Heineken.

What really grabs my attention from a broader cultural point of interest is an interesting heuristic I invent regarding the relation between commonwealth accents and post-pandemic men’s hair styles. More often than not, it seems the Brits have gone with the tropical-ready fully shaved head and face. But long hair and mustache? Invariably, Australian. No idea if there is anything to this. Maybe it’s just a Zone 4 thing.

Saturday’s events end on a poetic note when, a few minutes after qualifying is finished, the chain link gates in the fence lining the circuit are thrown open. We can exit by literally walking on the hallowed F1 asphalt itself. A couple who knows this routine runs out ahead of everyone first to get a picture of themselves on the empty track before it fills with people. It’s far more pleasant than the log jam it took to get in to this section of the stadium, and people are noticeably more relaxed. A handful of the more, erm, Heinekened of the fans climb the side fences and do pull ups, their feet dangling above everyone while their buddies snap clips soon to be blasted out on TikTok. The SGP is by no means lacking in the security department, yet if any among the force notice these impromptu gymnastics, they let it slide for now. It’s a grand exit of jaywalkers on asphalt still warm from the previous vehicular occupants.

And that’s just what happens inside the gates. There’s another universe in the Singapore Grand Prix, and it happens to lie outside the gates all while still remaining inside the circuit. This spatial riddle is possible thanks to the existence of the Marina Square Mall, located smack in the middle of the circuit. It’s open for business — and as such, to the public — during the entire event.

It’s because of this that concerns by government and billionaires about “leakers” may have actually been underestimated, or at least misplaced. Thanks to this mall, an entirely different kind of freeloader is able to catch snippets of the race at the lovely price point of $0. It’s now Sunday, the day the 20 drivers will race at night for two-hours in hopes of grasping SGP victory. Today I am ticketless, but sufficiently addicted to the sound of F1 engines (they’re technically called power units, but this whole thing is going on long enough without unpacking these technical specifics) and so I will yet again enter the event from the City Mall MRT station. But this time I head to the basement level CityLink Mall, a subterranean link whose property owners decision not to close down during F1 is surely a revenue based one, yet coincidentally is highly convenient for freeloaders like me. One mall collides with another and I come up for air when I’ve reached the four story Marina Square Mall, the portal into the middle of the Marina Bay Street Circuit.

It’s 9:30pm, about 30-minutes into the race, and at this juncture there are two groups of people at the mall. The first are F1 groupies like me seeking race-view vantage points, and the second are ordinary consumers who appear to have simply decided that Sunday night is a good time to head downtown to go to the mall. In a total inversion of a normal Singaporean scene, it’s the latter group that look out of place. They chat with business acquaintances at Starbucks, laugh on dates at restaurants, and carefully inspect bowls and vases in department stores. All this is just a handful of meters from the SGP; every few minutes a near deafening roar comes through and rattles the many glass storefronts. Yet, this is apparently of little bother to those who simply wish to eat or sip coffee or shop at Marina Square Mall. How can this young couple possibly be studying the bottom of this basket with such focus at a time and place like this!? It’s a crazy juxtaposition, and in their commitment to ho-hum mall normalcy rather than Formula One Mania it’s also possible that this second group are the true rebels, the rest of us seeking to watch-F1-without-paying-for-F1 simply conforming to the race-weekend zeitgeist.

I counted four places on various terraces to catch reasonably good views of the race itself, there are surely more. Some are tucked away through odd, underused doors, and one is even off of a fire escape whose door is propped open. A security guard stands nearby, he’s cool with it as small groups filter through. Two floors up, a set of escalators dumps me into the check-in lobby of the Marina Tennis Centre, where about ten people are standing around a counter where two large TVs have the race on. A bored looking man who’s on counter duty is watching too, his back turned to the viewers. He turns around once and a while and looks unphased by the steadily growing, non-Marina-Tennis-Centre member gathering politely forming a crescent around his desk. 

The Tennis Centre sits like a little penthouse atop the enormous mass of the mall, so here it’s possible to walk outside, as I proceed to do with a slight glance backward to see if anyone minds. Nope. There are a few more groups scattered around up here, and I pass two police officers speaking sternly to a group of teenagers. The kids had jumped a low wall next to some air conditioning equipment to get what must have been an amazing view of the circuit near T6, and for this I envy them. It’s a strange world up here, made especially so by the sound of engines now coming from all directions. The Moon makes an appearance from behind some clouds. It casts an eerie glow over the white concrete over Portman’s hotel towers that spring up from the concrete crusted podium monolith. Not far from the police-teenager chat is a spiral staircase tucked behind some random catering carts. Slightly nervous about being accused of trespassing myself, I decide to walk up the stairs and arrive at a little mini-podium tucked up next to the hotel. Through large windows into some kind of dining area emerges a warm light, along with the muted sounds of conversation and clinking of silverware. Who are these people casually eating dinner at this moment? What a odd time to stay at this hotel this particular weekend, and do anything but watch race cars. The fear of leakers is vindicated after all, except these leakers aren’t even watching the race. Not even within its own circuit can the Singapore Grand Prix in all its hype quench the banality of normal life activities, this is the most city-like thing about this extraordinary venue. 

Nearby and one story below, there’s another group of freeloaders on a fire stair with a view of T16. Some of them are huddled around a laptop, and in a ritual identical to the one performed by ticketed fans, they alternate between looking at the screen to the real cars screeching through the turn. The laptop broadcast is periodically interrupted by some kind of commercial breaks, one has the sense that they’ve scraped together a decent Formula One outing for about $0 or so. 

Whether in Zone 4, the Paddock Club, or the Marina Square Mall, the urbane and the humane find ways to meet at the Singapore Grand Prix. I conclude it to be worth celebrating that when located in this particular urban setting, even a gated event concocted by billionaires and smooth operating technocrats has something for everyone, from $0 to $10,000.