F1 Circus

Singapore hosts a round of the 2008 F1 GP Championship on the 26th September. The backstory is that Malaysia built a new F1 circuit, Sepang F1, a few miles north of K.L. and hosted its first F1 race in 1999. Its one claim to fame is that is the only circuit with the protected trademark "F1" in the name. Sepang is the place name (of the former swamp).

Singapore is never out-gunned within its local region and as a matter of prestige and income, decided to have an F1 race. The crushing lack of land space forced it to be a street circuit (like Monaco and Montreal) around the Marina Bay roads. Singapore last ran an F1 race back in 1973; this 61-lap race is one of only three anti-clockwise circuits on the current tour and uniquely, the first F1 race run at night under floodlights.

The circuit is downtown and actually runs underneath the bay grandstand that hosted the NDP-08 show. The cheapest ticket for the Bay Grandstand was S$248 (£93), although this prime location is sold out. The official website is showing 92% of tickets sold at the beginning of June and 93% sold at the current time.

The initial flurry of activity (and perhaps enthusiasm) have waned somewhat. The inevitable feeding frenzy and blatant profiteering of hotels with over-looking rooms has settled a little and overall, the Times ran a piece in June about the continued availability of rooms for the event. SingTel quickly snapped up the prime sponsorship prize and have their own fancy website including a competition to select the grid girls.

I've attended a GP race, actually at the Sepang circuit, and while it was an interesting and memorable experience, I have no desire to repeat it. First, you medically require ear plugs to avoid hearing damage. Second, a static track-side view is the worst as you see each car for 4secs out of every 50secs. You need a portable TV to get the live overview or at least a radio with headphones. Malaysia in August was also Hot, +35degC and despite a hat and even a sarong as sunscreen, I was sunburnt through the material. It was also crowded with congested roads and amateur arm-wavers hired for the day to impose leadership on tired and irritable visitors.

So I have to balance nationalistic oneupmanship, greedy hoteliers, girl-next-door beauty pageants, deafening noise, the £100 a head cost and the inevitable overcrowding against seeing that Hamilton chap do amazing things. Hmmm, nah, I'll catch the result the following day on the RSS news feeds thankyouverymuch.

Don't Use the F-word

It's the natural state of humans to compete and whenever a country or city announces a new skyscraper, airport, theme park or other attraction, journalists reach for the record books. Singapore has now finished its latest attraction, the Singapore Flyer, a large wheel with observation pods that turns; yes, it looks like the London Eye and it claims to be the "world's largest observation wheel".

Of course, it has to be the biggest, otherwise what would be the point, and it's a lot bigger, at 165m tall (~42 stories) it's fully 30m taller than the Eye. It doesn't cantilever out over water, rather its hub is held conventionally on both sides like a bicycle wheel, but the rest of the details are similar; air conditioned pods that rotate to offer a smooth, 360deg turn offering views over Singapore.

The flyer is built downtown-ish, across from the planned Marina Bay Sands casino complex, near where the F1 race pits will be. It's not opposite the Parliament buildings or anything like that which is where the London Eye comparison starts to break down a bit.

When building attractions, it's all about location. Malaysia is rightly proud of the Petronas Twin Towers, at the time of construction, technically the world's highest building (452m). Mind you, they have just 88 floors and the Skybridge (170m) between the towers is way, way lower than Toronto's CN Tower Sky Pod (446m). But they are pretty buildings, visible right across KL and that's the point; they are the only high buildings in KL. Contrast with Manhattan and the Empire State, Chrysler, World Trade, etc. The World Trade towers had 110 stories and that's a 2-for-1 deal. Makes the Taipei-101 (509m, 101 floors) look pretty, but lonely. The big daddy is the Burj Dubai, which when finished will take all records; currently (April 2008) it has 162 floors and is over 600m high, and might be over 900m when done (they haven't decided yet). Very impressive, but even lonelier.

What sometimes gets lost in the hubris of world records is relative scale. If the London Eye was bigger, you would have to put it somewhere else to avoid a visual clash. A spike, nearly a kilometer high, rising from the vast Dubai desert can never look too big. The Singapore Flyer is tucked out of the way and doesn't clash with a relatively low-rise downtown Singapore.

I've been on the London Eye and it's a nice view. The river location, opposite the Palace of Westminster is immediately familiar and you can easily see as far as the Dome and beyond. No, I haven't been on the Flyer yet. Standard fare is $29.50 (£11) which isn't bad (the London Eye is £13.95) so I'll check it out at some point, but it's a toss up between daytime for visibility and nighttime for effect.

The Great Wheel Corporation spent $340 million (£128m) building the Flyer (you're not allowed to called it a Ferris Wheel, the F-word is banned). Mind you, they re-couped some of that quickly as the first "flight" (another London Eye reference) was charged to corporate clients at S$8,888 (£3,340), for luck. Less lucky for Singapore is that the Great Wheel Corp is already planning bigger wheels in Beijing and Berlin over the next 2 years. Which brings us to the moral of the story; people only remember the first and the best.