Daytime rain plus resurfaced track sections to tax teams in Singapore · F1 · RaceFans

The longest night of the season awaits teams this weekend in Singapore for one of the toughest physical and mental challenges they will face all year.

The race around the Marina Bay circuit routinely approaches the two-hour mark with its regular Safety Car deployments and its relatively low average speed.

That, coupled with the heat and humidity of the south-east Asian nation, makes this a difficult round at the best of times, but the monsoon rains of the region can also spring a surprise at any point. Just as George Russell found during a game of padel with his Mercedes mechanics earlier in the week.

“Thunder and lightning and rain came from nowhere,” said Russell. “It’s almost every year we see in Singapore there is bad weather around.

“I think that was around race time as well – that was 8pm when it poured down with rain. So if that happened on Sunday, it’ll probably mix things up a little bit.”

Russell and his team will be keeping their eyes on the weather radar on Sunday as rain is indeed expected again. However, that rain is forecast to fall in the hours before the race, which should mean that the start will be dry, given how quickly wet tracks can dry in this kind of climate. However, should the rain be delayed by a couple of hours, it may well have an impact on the start of the race.

There is otherwise little chance of any wet sessions over the race of the weekend. Friday’s daytime first practice session and evening second session after dark will take place in warm, dry conditions with temperatures sitting just below 30 degrees Celsius for both hours of running.

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Saturday’s final practice session will likely be the hottest of the weekend, taking place without cloud cover, before qualifying is run in similar conditions to the two other night time sessions – dry and warm but with temperatures slowly beginning to fall throughout. The low wind speeds of just nine kilometres per hour on Sunday will also be the gentlest that teams should experience across the weekend.

The only other factor to consider is heavy rainfall on Saturday morning. While far too early to be a concern for F1 or the F1 Academy drivers, 9mm of rain at 11am could easily wash away a lot of the rubber built up around the circuit on Friday.

That could prove particularly significant this weekend as several sections of the track have been resurfaced. New asphalt has been laid across a substantial amount of the track, from turns three to eight, turns 10 to 12 and much of turns 14 to 17.

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For more updates on the track conditions during each session keep an eye on RaceFans Live and the RaceFans X (formerly Twitter) account.