My Own F1, five months early at the Marina Bay circuit
The story of how the Marina Bay Circuit became my favorite place in all of Singapore
There’s a line in F1 (the movie) that I didn’t expect to resonate. Sonny Hayes, describing what keeps pulling him back to the car: that rare quiet where his heartbeat slows and, for a moment, nothing can reach him. I’ve never driven anything faster than my own impatience. But I knew that feeling the second he said it.
(Right now it’s 9pm and I’m in Yogyakarta, writing this across a small table from my good friend, who at this point I can call my cousin, after 13 going on 14 years, the label barely registers. There’s coffee between us and a room so easy to sit in you don’t actually care to consume caffeine at this hour.)
But I’m not really here, not in the part of me doing the writing. I’m still in Singapore, the way I always seem to be, moving through past, present, and future at once. In that sense I relate to Midnight in Paris: that pull toward some other version of the night just around the corner. Except mine isn’t midnight and it isn’t Paris. It’s evening, and it’s the Marina Bay circuit, my new favorite spot in SG. About five months too early for the only Grand Prix Southeast Asia gets.
Ok, quite honestly, I don’t know how I’d connect this F1 theme to anything besides the actual F1 movie. So let me just go there, the way you end up somewhere you didn’t plan to.
But here’s the honest answer to why I’m tying all of it together — the film, this circuit, my love life, well, life in general. Because we’re all running our own race, and the opponent was never the car beside us. It’s us. The version that hesitates, that overthinks the apex, that brakes too early because the corner looks scarier than it is. And for once time isn’t chasing me down the straight. Right now it feels like it’s riding in the back, just right on my side.
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And that’s because of who I walked the circuit with. A fellow writer who still turns up on the first floor of The Working Capitol some days. His words are historical. Which matters, because writers narrate a place even when they’re not trying to. His cadence is its own kind of map. He talked about F1 the way some people talk about scripture, and somewhere between the apexes the conversation stopped being about racing and started being about, well, everything. That’s how we ended up walking two kilometers of it, all the way down to the box.
Going back, here’s the thing about Sonny Hayes. A rising star in the ’90s until a crash nearly ended everything, then three decades drifting — a racer-for-hire taking whatever seat would have him — until an old teammate pulled him back into the place that had broken him. The film hands him a brutal nickname: “the greatest that never was.” It is only earned by being good enough to matter and unlucky enough to miss.
On the walk, somewhere around the box, he told me he didn’t actually like the film, but one thing we agree on is the human part of it. Sonny went back and tried after failing miserably. They modeled his backstory on Martin Donnelly’s near-fatal crash at Jerez in 1990, real wreck, real damage, the kind decades are supposed to bury. He went back anyway. Not with a strategy. He says “hope is not a strategy,” though the film is gentler than that line pretends. Mostly he just rolled with it.
Actually, when you think about history, the circuit has a comeback story too, if you want one. The first Singapore GP ran in late September 2008, F1’s first-ever night race, and the first street circuit in Asia. It was the 800th World Championship race ever held. But here’s the detail I keep going back to: it marked the return of racing to Singapore after a 35-year absence. The country had been on the calendar from 1961 to 1973, then it stopped — partly over safety, too many accidents. A whole generation grew up never knowing Grand Prix racing existed there. But the dream didn’t die. It waited.
Thirty-five years for the city. Thirty years for Sonny. The same shape, a long silence, then the lights flickering back on. Fernando Alonso won that first night race over 61 laps, in a result later shadowed by the “Crashgate” scandal, proof that even the comebacks come back messy. Nothing returns clean. It just returns.
So obviously I had to think about Sonny, sitting here at a borrowed 9pm in a city that isn’t the one I’m writing about, the coffee nearly gone, my “cousin” who just drew a comparison to the pacing of MotoGP’s fast quali and sprint, signaling that everyone has their own race and time. And when I really think about it, the whole idea was simpler than all the parallels I keep drawing. I walked two kilometers of a circuit that came back, with the things I had planned from last year, and none of them really came true, but somehow it works way better.
The circuit is five months out. I’m early. But maybe early was always the move — show up before you’re ready, stay past what the plan accounts for, and let the rest arrive on its own clock.
But the thing is, getting the timing right was never the win. Walking those two kilometers with you was.
[John, you’re the better editor here, and you’ll want to draft the version that’s cleaner than mine. When you do, leave this part in. It’s the only line I got down before I could talk myself out of it, and I’d rather the world hear it slightly early than have you never hear it at all.]
