Verstappen couldn't win in Singapore even during his unprecedented dominance of 2023
Red Bull
Formula 1 has barely drawn breath since Sepang. A rain-delayed Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia ended with Max Verstappen taking Red Bull‘s first win of 2026, and Kimi Antonelli‘s second place stretched his championship lead to 84 points after George Russell‘s late retirement.
Mercedes had brought its first major upgrade since May, but left Malaysia unsure whether it was a step forwards or backwards and will need to find answers in Singapore.
Now the championship wraps up the first of three consecutive triple-headers at Marina Bay, a circuit that has resisted Verstappen throughout his career and a far more representative test of Red Bull‘s progress, McLaren‘s form, and Mercedes‘ new package than a wet, chaotic Sunday in Malaysia.
Antonelli has little to fear in the standings this weekend, but everyone else may have plenty to prove.
Max Verstappen finally got his 2026 season properly under way in Malaysia, even if it’s too late to think of a 2025-style comeback.
After a run of three podiums in a row and five over six races, Verstappen took his first pole of the year and then converted it into a comfortable win at Sepang last weekend to continue with his record of having won at least one race per season since 2016.
Fittingly, now comes the one circuit that has continued to elude him.
Aside from the all-new Madring, Singapore is the only venue on the current F1 calendar at which Verstappen has never stood on the top step of the podium. He has finished second at Marina Bay, including last year behind George Russell, but victory has so far remained frustratingly out of reach.
That makes this weekend particularly intriguing now that Verstappen is a real contender and arrives with momentum.
Verstappen was unstoppable in Sepang, but Singpore might be a different story
Grand Prix Photo
However, Sepang and Marina Bay demand very different things from a Formula 1 car, and there’s no hiding from the fact that certain factors played into Red Bull’s hands in Malaysia.
Sepang has long straights, fast corners and an abrasive surface that gave Red Bull plenty of opportunity to exploit its strengths, while Singapore is a much slower, more intricate proposition, with 19 corners packed into a lap and little room for error between the walls.
So the question is not simply whether Verstappen can repeat his Sepang performance, but whether the progress Red Bull made in Malaysia is transferable to a circuit that has historically been one of Verstappen’s more troublesome.
Singapore has repeatedly exposed weaknesses in a car’s low-speed behaviour, traction and ability to deal with the demands of a bumpy street circuit.
Verstappen’s own history at Marina Bay illustrates the difficulty, and even during his period of overwhelming dominance, Singapore remained the exception.
In 2022, Verstappen took 15 wins, and five in a row before Singapore, but it was his then team-mate Sergio Perez who won at Marina Bay as the Dutchman qualified eighth and finished seventh.
In 2023, when he had won 10 consecutive races going into the weekend, Red Bull struggled badly in qualifying and Verstappen started only 11th. He recovered to fifth, but Ferrari‘s Carlos Sainz went on to end Verstappen’s extraordinary winning run.
The circumstances are different this time.
Red Bull is not arriving as the overwhelmingly dominant team, and Verstappen’s championship chances are non-existent, but Sepang’s and his previous results suggest that the team has taken a significant step forward.
So the question to watch is whether Malaysia marked the beginning of a genuine Red Bull revival, or if it was simply a perfect combination of circuit, conditions and circumstances.
If Verstappen can win in Singapore, he will not only add another victory to his 2026 tally, but also finally erase the longstanding blank space from his list of victories at current F1 circuits.
Just three races ago, McLaren looked like the team to beat. Now it is trying to work out where its pace went and asking itself where it exactly stands in the competitive order.
Norris has dropped behind Leclerc in the standings after two difficult weekends
The turnaround has been as abrupt as it has been unpredictable: from Lando Norris winning at both Zandvoort and Hungary and looking the man to beat in Madrid, to enduring two of the team’s most disappointing weekends of the season in Baku and Sepang.
The problems have not all been of McLaren’s making. In Baku, Norris was struggling badly for straightline speed and admitted afterwards that he had made a mistake before being caught up in the first-corner collision involving Franco Colapinto and Pierre Gasly.
Oscar Piastri, meanwhile, made a costly mistake and lost a podium position.
While McLaren left Azerbaijan without a point, Sepang was a far more revealing weekend.
McLaren had expected the circuit’s higher downforce demands to suit its car, but instead found itself behind Red Bull, Mercedes and Ferrari.
Norris qualified sixth and Piastri seventh, and the team subsequently described itself as having the fourth-fastest car over the weekend.
The race didn’t help. McLaren’s decision to start both cars on medium tyres proved to be the wrong call as the damp conditions persisted, leaving Norris and Piastri badly compromised in the opening laps.
Norris then lost further ground when he had to take avoiding action behind the safety car, eventually recovering only to ninth. Piastri salvaged sixth.
That leaves Singapore as an important test for the team, and for Norris.
McLaren left Sepang looking for answers
The reigning world champion has made mistakes during the last two weekends, but it would be too simplistic to make him the sole focus of McLaren’s problems.
The bigger concern is that the car no longer appears to have the inherent pace it had before the past two races. Norris has said he is uncertain whether the straightline-speed issue can be fixed in time for Singapore, while McLaren has acknowledged that rivals have made a significant step forward.
That is particularly significant because Singapore should, on paper, provide a different test.
Marina Bay places a premium on downforce, traction and low-speed performance rather than the kind of straightline efficiency that has exposed McLaren recently. If the MCL40 is genuinely struggling because of a fundamental shift in the competitive order, however, Singapore should expose that too. Otherwise, McLaren should be among the teams to beat.
The sprint weekend means McLaren has only one conventional practice session before competitive running begins. That makes finding answers quickly more important – and more difficult – than usual.
For Norris, this is about stopping a frustrating sequence from becoming a trend. For McLaren, it is more serious: the team needs to establish whether Baku and Sepang were simply two bad weekends, or whether Red Bull and the other leading teams have genuinely overtaken it.
The Singapore Grand Prix is synonymous with Marina Bay and with being the first ever F1 race to take place under the floodlights.
But Formula 1 was not the first form of grand prix racing to take place in Singapore, and the country’s original circuit was about as far removed from the modern venue as it is possible to imagine.
Thomson Road race in 1967
National Archives of Singapore
The first Singapore Grand Prix – not a Formula 1 race – was held in 1961 on the Thomson Road circuit, a 3.02-mile street track running through the northern part of the city. The event was initially organised as part of the “Visit Singapore – The Orient Year” tourism campaign, with motorcycles and cars sharing a weekend of racing. Ian Barnwell won the inaugural car race in an Aston Martin DB3S.
For the next four years, the race was known as the Malaysian Grand Prix, before reverting to the Singapore Grand Prix in 1966 following Singapore’s independence from Malaysia.
It continued until 1973, when safety concerns finally brought an end to an event that had become one of the region’s most important motor races.
Thomson Road was quite a circuit.
The 4.8km lap included a mile-long section known as the Thomson Mile, a hump in the road that could launch cars into the air, a pair of hairpins and a section called the Snakes.
The road was narrow, with little run-off, and the surroundings were very different from today’s Marina Bay skyline. Drivers were negotiating public roads bordered by vegetation, drains, lamp posts and other unforgiving objects.
The Singapore GP was run under Formula Libre regulations, allowing an assortment of machinery to compete.
But the circuit’s danger eventually became impossible to ignore. Seven people died in racing accidents during the 11 years of the event. The 1974 race was subsequently cancelled, with safety concerns cited as the official reason.
That was the end of Singapore’s original grand prix era. It would be 35 years before the name returned to the international calendar, this time with Formula 1 cars racing beneath the lights around Marina Bay.
