Ten minutes before Formula 1’s first ever race at Marina Bay in daylight, the sky over Singapore opened. Gazebos went up over the cars on the grid. The Medical Car went out to check the track and splashed through puddle after puddle, with standing water at Turns 2 and 3. The start was delayed, and while the field waited, Kimi Antonelli sat in his Mercedes under a gazebo and took a radio call from an unexpected voice in the garage. “Who is this? Oh, George!” he chuckled.

It was that kind of Saturday, a Sprint of firsts. Every race here since 2008 had been run under the lights, and this was the city’s first Sprint. Max Verstappen started from his first pole of any kind at Marina Bay, and by a quarter past six he had his first win here of any kind, too.

The track the drivers finally found was three tracks in one. The first and third sectors were soaked and the middle one barely damp. “The spray is very bad,” Oscar Piastri reported from behind the safety car, while Liam Lawson found the middle of the lap almost “completely dry.” After two formation laps, Race Control settled on a standing start at 17:36, more than half an hour late, with every car on intermediates and Overtake Mode switched off for the low grip. In the wet, anything is possible, and everybody knew it.

When the lights went out, George Russell did to Verstappen exactly what he had done at Sepang last weekend, sweeping past from second into Turn 1. Behind them, Lewis Hamilton launched from sixth to third off the line, taking the inside and passing Charles Leclerc and both McLarens. Late braking and wet conditions: you would be unwise to bet against Hamilton in either.

Russell’s lead lasted one lap. He pulled a second clear of Verstappen. Then, coming out of the final corner, Turn 19, he got more power than he expected from the battery, ran a little wide and put his right rear wheel on the painted white line. The Mercedes snapped round into the pit wall and was flung back across the track. “I’m fine,” he radioed. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” Afterwards he did not reach for an excuse. “The number one rule in the rain is don’t touch the white line,” he said. “It’s a very silly mistake – overly confident. I think it’s my first crash of the year.” A 40-place grid penalty already meant he would start Sunday’s race from the back. The Sprint had been his chance.

The safety car came out, and the attrition kept coming behind it. Lance Stroll and Sergio Pérez had collided under braking for Turn 16 on the first lap, the Aston Martin out on the spot and the Cadillac limping back to the pits to retire. Isack Hadjar’s Red Bull lost power and stopped at Turn 5, and Franco Colapinto’s Alpine came to a halt at Turn 14. Five cars were out in as many laps, and Arvid Lindblad spun behind the safety car and dropped to the back. When racing resumed at the end of lap 6, seventeen cars were left.

Verstappen nailed the restart. Behind him, Oliver Bearman made a smart move on Pierre Gasly through Turns 1, 2 and 3 for eighth, the last points-paying place. At the back, the queue had compressed into Turn 16 as it lined up for the restart: Alex Albon ran into the back of Gabriel Bortoleto, and Valtteri Bottas into the back of Albon. All three eventually retired. “Everyone was bunched up in the last sector after the Safety Car restart, and I got hit from behind,” said Bortoleto. “There was nothing I could really do.” The stewards put it down to a concertinaiConcertinaWhen a queue of cars bunches up and stretches out again, like the bellows of an accordion. If the cars at the front slow unevenly, each driver behind has to brake a little harder than the one ahead, so the squeeze is worst at the back of the queue, often behind a safety car or at a restart., though they said Albon and Bottas could each have left more room. With both cars out of the race, no penalties followed. Two laps after the restart, Nico Hülkenberg cleared Gasly into Turn 1. “He pushed me wide. Hulkenberg didn’t leave me space,” Gasly protested on the radio, to no avail.

Then the race settled into the shape it would keep to the end. Between them, Verstappen and Hamilton have eleven world titles, and from the restart they edged away from everyone else. Halfway through, Verstappen led by 1.3 seconds. Hamilton could stay close, but never close enough. “There’s basically one line here,” he said, “and so overtaking is very, very difficult. And yeah, also to overtake the most powerful engine on the grid is not so easy either.” When he pushed through the dry middle sector, his right-side tyres began to grain, and the gap stretched to almost five seconds. He adjusted the settings on his steering wheel and came back at the end, setting the fastest lap of the race, a 1:45.457, on the very last lap.

Behind them, Leclerc was in trouble. He had set his Ferrari up with a weak front end, the opposite of Hamilton’s car, and it worked while the track was wet. When it dried, “I was nowhere,” he said. Over the radio he called his front tyres “destroyed.” The McLarens closed in, Piastri ahead of Lando Norris, with Antonelli right behind them, and lap after lap they queued, unable to pass on a track with one line.

On the final lap, Norris saw a gap at Turn 5 and dived for the inside of his teammate. The gap closed. The two McLarens touched and both spun. Piastri hit the wall and was out, while Norris recovered to take eighth and the final point. Leclerc only found out from his mirrors. “I checked in my mirrors and I saw red lights of the back cars of the McLarens,” he said. “So, I knew that something happened.”

Norris stood his ground at first. “It was a big gap, I went for it, I have the right to do that,” he said. Piastri said he had not seen him at the apex. The stewards decided both had contributed and took no action, and by the evening Norris had apologised to the team. McLaren were less forgiving. “Very simply,” said team principal Andrea Stella, “it is unacceptable that two McLarens ever come together on track.”

Ferrari’s second and third places were worth 13 points, more than any other team scored. Antonelli took fourth and extended his championship lead to 89 points. Lawson was fifth for Racing Bulls, and Bearman, from thirteenth on the grid, finished sixth. “The car was mega, super fast,” he said. Hülkenberg took two points for Audi in seventh. Only thirteen cars reached the chequered flag.

And Verstappen? He had won, and he made a point of not making much of it. The start had been “horrendous again,” he said, and he had been “a bit lucky” with what happened to Russell. This was not the win he had come to Singapore for.

The three drivers on the podium had a bigger worry. When they were asked whether Singapore has a future as a Sprint venue, none of them made much of a case for it. “If it was dry, that would have been probably the most boring race for you to have watched,” Hamilton said. “It was the wet, the rain, that made it exciting.” Verstappen went further. “I think we shouldn’t host a Sprint where you can’t pass,” he said. Leclerc agreed. “I don’t think it makes sense to have any Sprint races on city tracks in general,” he said. “Whereas here or Monaco, I don’t think it adds anything to the weekend.”

Hamilton put the day best. “I love driving this track in the rain,” he said. “So as soon as the heavens opened, I was like, ‘This is a great day.’” For twenty laps on a Saturday evening in Singapore, it was. A first Sprint, a first pole, a first win, a first crash, and the last Sprint of the 2026 season.