Singapore Grand Prix night race at Marina Bay. Photo: chensiyuan via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Max Verstappen spent more than a decade trying to win the Singapore Grand Prix. When he finally did it, sweeping the sprint and the grand prix, one of his loudest post-race opinions was that the place needs redesigning.
Not the heat, not the walls, not the humidity that wrings kilos out of drivers. The shape. Sitting beside Lewis Hamilton after the rain-hit sprint on October 10, Verstappen backed his old rival’s suggestion that Marina Bay needs a longer straight, adding that “a proper hairpin” would do the job too. Hamilton, who opened by insisting he loves the race, said the circuit has the bones of a great one but offers roughly one realistic passing spot. (FIA post-sprint press conference transcript.)
It is easy to file that under drivers moaning about street tracks. The inconvenient part for anyone tempted to do so is that Marina Bay has already run this experiment once, and Sunday’s race showed the results.
The passes happened where the 2023 straight ends
Before 2023, the circuit had 23 corners. Organizers removed the Turns 16-19 section and replaced it with a straight, cutting the count to 19 and the lap to its current 4.927km (F1 circuit guide).
Now look at where the decisive overtakes came in the grand prix, according to the FIA’s race report. Kimi Antonelli took third from Hamilton at Turn 16. Oscar Piastri took fifth from Hamilton at Turn 16, and needed several goes to make it stick. George Russell, climbing from the back of the grid, got past Esteban Ocon at Turn 16.
Turn 16 is the braking zone at the end of the run that 2023 created. That is the closest thing to a controlled trial F1 track design ever gets: one section was rebuilt around a long straight, and three years later that is where the racing lives. Hamilton’s “one place” was not an exaggeration. It was a map reading.
It is also where his other complaint sits. Hamilton pointed at the crest around Turn 16, where the cars bottom out and throw sparks because the road is not flat, and wondered whether it is shaped that way for rain drainage. The best overtaking spot on the circuit doubles as its bumpiest braking zone, which makes a late lunge there a little more of a gamble than it should be.
Why the 2026 rules make Singapore’s problem louder
DRS is gone this year. The tool that replaced it, Overtake Mode, is an energy allowance rather than a slot in the rear wing. A driver within one second of the car ahead at the detection point gets an extra 0.5MJ of recharge and a more aggressive electrical power profile for the next lap, and that extra speed needs distance to convert into a pass. At Marina Bay the detection point sits after Turn 16, with activation at the exit of Turn 17.
Active aero does not fill the gap. Singapore has five Straight Mode zones, but every driver opens their wings in those zones on every dry lap, with no one-second rule. That cuts drag for the whole field; it does not hand the chasing car an advantage over the one ahead. On a circuit made of short squirts between 90-degree corners, Overtake Mode is the only true differential, and Verstappen’s verdict on it was that it “barely does anything here.”
That is why his second point matters more than the headline one. A longer straight helps, he said, but the cars also need “a bigger delta on the straight.” That is not an argument about concrete. It is an argument about how much extra energy the attacker gets compared with the defender, and that number lives in the regulations, not in the streets of a working city. One of these fixes requires closing roads and rebuilding barriers. The other requires a rule change.
Meanwhile, the races played out the way processional street races usually do: strategy did the overtaking. Verstappen led every lap on a one-stop. Antonelli said he spent about three-quarters of the race in dirty air, and Hamilton’s attempt to run long on softs turned a podium shot into sixth. We broke down that call in how Ferrari split its Singapore strategy.
A sprint without a pit stop is a sprint without a passing tool
Singapore hosted its first sprint this year, and the drivers on the podium were not exactly lobbying for a second one. Heavy rain delayed the start by 30 minutes, the field started on intermediates, Russell crashed out of the lead at the final corner of lap one, and the McLarens collided on the last lap (FIA sprint report). It was chaos, and Hamilton was blunt about why: it was the rain. A dry version, he said, would probably have been “the most boring.”
Charles Leclerc went further, arguing that sprints do not make sense on city circuits at all. Verstappen’s version was that F1 should not host a sprint where cars cannot pass.
There is a structural reason they are right. Sprints carry no mandatory pit stop, and on a track where the undercut is the main overtaking device, removing the stop removes the overtaking. Take away the weather and a Singapore sprint becomes qualifying followed by a parade in grid order. That is a useful thought for anyone designing the next generation of venues, including F1’s new Madrid circuit.
What happens next
Drivers do not get a vote on track layouts. Any change to Marina Bay is down to the organizers and the city, with the FIA signing off on the circuit. Nobody from the event has publicly committed to anything in response, and the 2023 precedent suggests changes come when the city’s own plans make room for them, not when two champions agree in a press conference.
Still, when Hamilton and Verstappen agree on something, it tends to be worth writing down. Combined, they hold 11 world titles, and they have both been passing people around Marina Bay long enough to know where it can and cannot be done.
The next test comes quickly. The United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of The Americas runs October 23-25, on a track with a long back straight into a heavy stop at Turn 12, which is exactly the kind of feature Singapore is missing. It is also where Antonelli can wrap up the championship. If Overtake Mode looks potent there, Verstappen’s “bigger delta” point will look even more like a Singapore problem rather than a 2026 one.
Image credits: chensiyuan via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0; Liauzh / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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