Since 2008, when it gave Formula 1 its first night race, Singapore has been the race that happens in the dark. The lights around Marina Bay do the work of the sun: the FIA approved a system averaging around 3,000 lux, about four times brighter than most stadiums, and Fernando Alonso won under it that first night. This weekend, for the first time, part of the racing that counts will happen before they come on.

Over the years the city kept adding to the night. Fireworks go up over the water the moment the winner crosses the line, and other night races, Abu Dhabi and Las Vegas among them, now end with fireworks too. Concerts start once the track goes quiet and carry on late into the night, and over the years Rihanna, Shakira, Katy Perry and Dua Lipa have all played the weekend. Drivers began bringing helmets made for the lights. In 2012 Sebastian Vettel wore one with flashing LEDs laid out as constellations for his family and the people closest to him, and he won the race in it. Jean-Eric Vergne brought one designed to sparkle under the spotlights. Alex Albon once raced in a helmet painted by children from the Wat Sakraeo orphanage in Thailand, covered in elephants and smiling faces. The circuit itself has been redrawn more than once, and the biggest change came in 2023, when the lap went from 23 corners to 19.

Marina Bay · 2012The constellation helmet, up closeLAP 29 · Archive
Vettel’s helmet, lit upPress playVideo: Jens Munser Designs · Watch on YouTube

This year the bay has a new waterfront stage, the Barge Stage, Audi have painted their cars in a one-off livery that shifts with the light and carries a traditional Peranakan pattern, and Goo Goo Dolls, Lana Del Rey, Janet Jackson and Mark Ronson are on the bill. On the track, Singapore is running its first Sprint.

That means one hour of practice on Friday afternoon, in daylight, and then Sprint Qualifying that same night under the lights. The Sprint starts at 5pm on Saturday with the sun still up, and qualifying for the Grand Prix goes back into the dark a few hours later. Kimi Antonelli, who leads the championship, expects the track to change so quickly that every session will feel different. Alex Albon says the sun changes how the tyres behave more than the heat does, and that he will start the weekend from something safe and build from there.

Arvid Lindblad is the only person on the grid for whom all of Marina Bay is new. He is a rookie and has driven it only in a simulator. At the last two street circuits he crashed in second practice, and this weekend there is no second practice, so he has a single afternoon to learn where the walls are before the first session that counts. He remembers F2 weekends where a lap at night on soft tyres came in five seconds quicker than the same lap in daylight on hards, but does not expect a gap that big here.

Valtteri Bottas did not fly in from Malaysia with everyone else. He spun out at Sepang on Sunday and that evening set off south on a bicycle, through Port Dickson, Malacca City and Muar, along gravel tracks by the coast and inland past the plantations to Kulai, riding part of it in the dark. Four days and 419.67km later he was in Singapore. He admitted the idea had sounded a bit crazy and said sometimes you just have to jump into things. He has never liked snakes, saw a couple along the way, and found them “really chill.”

George Russell won here last year from pole. This time an engine failure in Malaysia means a penalty of at least ten places, and Mercedes expect him to start Sunday’s race from the back of the grid on one of the hardest tracks on the calendar to pass on. Mercedes have also put him back on the package they raced before their Malaysia upgrade, so they can compare the two cars across the weekend. He said Singapore would be close to the last place he would choose to take it, and also that it was a place he loves. The penalty does not touch Saturday’s Sprint, so he starts that one from wherever he qualifies on Friday night before he goes to the back.

Max Verstappen arrives having won in Malaysia and having never won here. He has finished second three times, in 2018, 2024 and 2025. In 2022 and 2023, when nobody could touch his car anywhere else, he finished seventh and fifth, and he says Singapore was never a track where it came alive. The race has had a different winner in each of the last four years, Sergio Perez, Carlos Sainz, Lando Norris and then Russell, and Verstappen would make it five.

This weekend is also his 250th Grand Prix. The first was in Australia in 2015, when he was 17, and on Thursday Red Bull marked the milestone in the garage with a cake. He has won 72 of those races, at 26 different circuits, and only Lewis Hamilton has won at more. Singapore is still missing from the list, even though he has started from the front row here four times, every time from second. Lewis Hamilton, third in Malaysia, has won here four times, and one more would equal Sebastian Vettel’s record of five.

Practice begins at 4:30 on Friday afternoon with the sun still on the bay, and somewhere in the first few minutes Arvid Lindblad will drive his first real lap of a track he has only ever seen on a screen. Bottas will be out there too, four days after riding in from Malaysia, and Russell will be learning what his old car can still do. By the time Sprint Qualifying starts at 8:30 the sun will be down, the track will have changed under them, and they will have one lap to find out by how much.