F1 Singapore Grand Prix verdict – like watching paint dry

By Les Tan/Red Sports

I don’t know about you but just let me say this: the Singapore Grand Prix was boring. It was like watching paint dry.

As a visual spectacle, the race has no peer. The city of Singapore looked beautiful on television, the most striking image on television was that of the cars going up the Benjamin Sheares Bridge while the F1 cars race below.

The $150 million – $90 million of which is our taxpayers’ money – that goes into the race yearly is well spent to advertise Singapore to a reported audience of 100 million worldwide. This year’s race is the second of a five-year deal.

If tourists see Singapore on television and think of coming to visit, then it’s money well-spent. Tourism receipts are reported to be in the region of $168 million from the 2008 race (just don’t ask the businesses at Suntec City which was a ghost town).

It was postcard pretty but hey, nobody looks at a postcard for two hours. The race was a bore with no overtaking of note in the race, and for the longest time, the top 10 drivers didn’t change positions. It was next to impossible to overtake.

The drivers only changed positions on the grid when Nico Rosberg and Sebastien Vettel made pit lane errors and were slapped with drive-through penalties. Lewis Hamilton led from start to finish, ahead of Timo Glock, while last year’s Singapore GP winner, Fernando Alonso, finished third.

Halfway through the live blog we were doing, I was more interested in the moon cakes we got from Amara Hotel (which are very good).

As a sport, F1 just leaves me a little cold. You can’t really say who is the best driver because the car plays a huge role in determining the winner. Would Jenson Button be leading now if he was driving the Renault? Last year’s champion, Lewis Hamilton, is now only the sixth best driver?

The F1 is just so European though. The Europeans usually never think of a level-playing field in sport probably because of ther feudal history. Unlike the Americans and their constant desire to level the playing field, the Europeans would hold their noses if you even suggested that F1 teams should all have the same car and use the same technology.

Of course, all that money sometimes doesn’t produce anything worthwhile. Ferrari, which is one of the top-spending teams in F1, aren’t even competitive this year. And look how much Toyota is spending for nothing much. No wonder the car manufacturers want to pull out. Honda already did and BMW will at the end of the year.

All I want to see is a competitive race, with drivers, and not the engineers in the paddock, being the final arbiter of the race outcome, but maybe that’s too much to ask of F1.

2008 F1 Team Spending
Toyota: $445.6m
McLaren: $433.3m
Ferrari: $414.9m
Honda: $398.1m
Renault: $393.8m
BMW Sauber: $366.8m
Red Bull Racing: $164.7m
Williams: $160.6m
Toro Rosso: $128.2m
Force India: $121.85m
Super Aguri: $45.6m

Total: $3,073.45m

REDpoll

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