CARS
NIGHT MOVES
The furious whine of the Formula One racecars reached Singapore at dusk one Friday last September. The banshee wail of engines bounced off bridges, overpasses, and skyscrapers, as the drivers, each visible only as a helmet and a pair of gloved hands, stormed through their first practice runs on the tiny nation’s brand-new street circuit. Grand landmarks like City Hall and the colonnaded Fullerton Hotel were suddenly transformed into a backdrop for an invading army of bright, screaming capsules. With their tapered snouts and huge wheels, riding so low they seemed glued to the ground, they looked like a different species from the Porsches and Aston Martins that had appeared on the track earlier in the day. The spectators gaped wide-eyed as they plugged their ears.
If Singapore’s inaugural race felt like a science-fiction movie, that’s because it represents the future of a sport that’s already laps ahead of modernity. Long gone are the days when auto racing was the weekend pastime of joy-riding aristocrats; more than ever, the Formula One Grand Prix, established in 1950, is a high-tech global obsession. The only sporting events with bigger audiences are the Summer Olympics and the World Cup.
Singapore, though, signals an upshift. For one thing, it’s a street circuit. Cities have been transformed into racetracks before—Monaco, most famously—but today, hype-mad organizers seem increasingly willing to take on the logistical burdens. (Valencia also debuted a street circuit last season.) More significantly, Singapore hosted the first night race in Formula One history, illuminated by a state-of-the-art lighting system four times as bright as the lights in a soccer stadium. Even so, you got the feeling that demons had been unleashed into the night.
All the drama is great for business, of course—as is the emerging Asian market. While America remains stubbornly fixated on sluggish stock cars, Singapore is the latest success story in Formula One’s eastward expansion, which has also brought the sport to Malaysia, Shanghai, and Bahrain, with Abu Dhabi and India on the horizon. The Singapore Grand Prix, like the former British colony that hosts it, was a fastidiously managed rendezvous of East and West. Hotels made inaccessible by road shutdowns enlisted brigades of golf carts to shuttle guests. Complaints about the surface, coarser than most despite a costly bitumen-emulsion resurfacing and the substitution of custom-made manhole covers, gave way to almost universal appreciation of the curvy, 3.1-mile circuit’s quirks. And concerns that a wet track at night would produce disastrous glare were rendered moot when the weather cooperated.
The careful stage managing was to be expected, since, for all the romance and sex appeal of fast cars, Formula One is as rational and precise as any other big-money industry. The cars themselves are physics experiments on wheels that can slingshot out of a turn like no other machines on earth. The main preoccupation of FIA, Formula One’s Paris-based governing body, seems to be keeping them from becoming guided missiles. The regulations are strict: a 2.4-liter V8 engine is the maximum allowed, and all cars must weigh at least 605 kilograms ( 1,333 pounds) and max out at 19,000 RPM. To keep the smaller teams competitive, FIA froze engine development in 2006. Since then,
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