Sep 17, 2011
Watching George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, Lerner and Loewe had the clever idea to add some tunes and make it a musical called My Fair Lady; some bright spark thought the Snow White pantomime wasn’t entertaining enough so they decided to stage it on an ice rink.
We know My Fair Lady is no match for the real deal that is Pygmalion, but it’s entertainment and that is what the Singapore Grand Prix is to the Formula 1 calendar: street racing not exciting enough for you? Then stage it in the tropics in the middle of the night. Marina Bay Circuit is never going to be Monaco, but fans and TV viewers are drawn to it like moths to a flame, hopefully without making that Zzzz Zzzz noise as they finally crash and burn into the 100 watt killer rack. If you want to look for pantomime moments, this is the race for you, starting with the very first running in 2008, when the sort of plot you couldn’t write actually happened, as one driver deliberately crashed into the wall to let his team-mate win, or what about one team claiming the tram lines under the track had affected their cars’ performance?
The heat and the night are the event’s unique selling points, although surprisingly, homo sapiens has been making light since the eighteenth century and Eddison demonstrated his first light bulb in 1879, therefore over 150 years later, lighting up a stretch of road has not proved too demanding. As for dealing with working at night, which involves sleeping during the day and getting up at lunchtime, this is something students the world over have been perfecting for centuries. Sunday night’s race does go on a bit, because with 61 laps of a 5.073 km long track and an average speed of under 150 km/h, its duration gets precariously close to the regulation time limit of 2 hours. That and the sticky conditions, as well as the very bumpy surface, makes it a hard day’s night for the drivers. Like all street circuits, it requires very high levels of downforce, is tough on brakes, but is not too hard on tyres – we’ll be running Pirelli’s Soft and Supersoft here.
It all adds up to what Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons were evidently singing about all those years ago: “Oh what a night, late September…”
Credit: Toro Rosso (www.scuderiatororosso.com)
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