MY Malay Singaporean friends are fond of exclaiming "So cartoon!" when a remark or situation strikes them as ridiculous.

You could call that Singlish. But it is Singlish that correctly describes an English word. The word describes the art of using exaggeration in drawings to entertain, to comment or to ridicule.

Humour, of course, is the usual objective of cartooning. And, as a long-time Formula One motor racing wannabe, I was tickled by The New Paper artists' rendition of their takes on the probable coming of F1 to Singapore.

My favourite among the five cartoons published last Friday was a drawing of a race track straddled by Electronic Road Pricing gantries. Says a bespectacled man in the cartoon: " and that is how we intend to generate money out of the F1 race."

I would have given the artists another idea: a pasar malam (roadside night market) by the start line, drivers racing to make last-minute purchases and putting them into bicycle-type carrier baskets, one driver saying: "Can't wait till the race ends. All the best buys would be gone!"

The possibility of night racing in the streets is being studied as an alternative to a stadium track. There are currently no night F1 races, but there are two held in the streets.

F1 driver Mark Webber came to Singapore to try out a 4.8km street circuit in the Marina and Esplanade areas. He did not drive an F1 racer but a Renault cabriolet. And, we are told, he observed traffic rules during the daytime test run last Saturday.

He told the media that a daytime F1 street race here would be tougher than the celebrated Grand Prix in Monte Carlo, Monaco. That was because of Singapore's heat and humidity. Monaco has the much milder Mediterranean climate.

Facing the heat and humidity here would not be new challenges for the F1 drivers and their design, engineering and pit-stop crews. They have been racing in Sepang, Malaysia, since 1999.

The heat, humidity and sometimes torrential rain did not bother us when the Singapore Grand Prix captivated both participants and spectators between 1961 and 1973.

Yesterday was the 49th anniversary of my passing my driving test - at the third attempt! That was in 1958, when pre-Grand Prix motor racing action took place in smaller-scale events such as hill climbs.

As a newly-qualified driver without my own car, I would "borrow" my father's Ford saloon, or borrow peppier cars from trusting friends, and race up and down South Buona Vista Road. That windy, hilly stretch was known as The Gap.

After the Grand Prix made its debut, we non-racers would emulate our respective heroes by tearing around the old Upper Thomson Road. As we were doing that, the area's residents must have been tearing their hair out at the noise. Souped-up cars were not the only nuisance. There were also the noisier motorcycles.

So what is it about Grand Prix racing that embraces so many motorists? It is more than the thrill of speed. It is a man-and-machine communion, and a celebration of humanity's engineering genius.

But it is also not a green sport, in the general thinking of today, and a more than normally risky one. It is noisy. It spends billions of dollars even as it makes billions. It drives many critics up the wall. It drives fans to heights of passion.

So it drives all of us, but differently. So "cartoon" is the word!

The writer is the former editor-in-chief of Singapore Press Holdings' English and Malay Newspapers Division.