SINGAPORE so successfully turned night into day last Sunday that most people in the Formula One family came away singing the praises of the island's efficiency.
It is tempting to accuse Luca di Montezemolo, the boss of Ferrari, as treading sour grapes after his team finished point-less for the first time in 47 Grands Prix.
He had the two fastest cars on the track, and one lost the race in a pits cock-up, the other hit a wall.
"A bitter day," admitted di Montezemolo.
Those who know him well, and I must divulge a friendship going back almost 20 years, know that a Latin fire runs through his veins, and sometimes his words.
He is there to win, he learnt motor racing from Enzo Ferrari himself, and it was di Montezemolo who restored the Prancing Horse reputation both on the track and in the showrooms by force of his driven personality.
The reason di Montezemolo was not in Singapore, and is seldom in the paddock, is the other side of his nature. He worries like a father fretting over a son or daughter exposed to danger.
He watches the races, usually in solitude, in his restored family villa near Bologna. A man in a darkened room, living every corner like a white-knuckle ride.
I am no apologist for his emotive reaction; nor do I defend a privileged man out of friendship. It was a bitter day for the Italian. His world championship might have gone up in smoke on a street circuit under lights, and he was not there in person to see it.
Di Montezemolo is enough of a businessman to know that the move towards the East is the future for a sport which guzzles money and sponsorships the way these multi-million-dollar cars devour fuel. He puts more pressure on himself than on his staff, so the combination of losing and the prospect of fast disappearing markets to sell his expensive motors will eat into him.
Nevertheless, I think he was right to smell injustice in Singapore last Sunday. Clearly, the host gave Formula One such hospitality and such a concerted effort to make a novel idea work.
The racers will be back, and they will trust Singapore.
But examine what di Montezemolo did say: "When you race on a circuit where it would be better to have a circus, or something else, anything can happen because the show is the safety car.
"This is humiliating for Formula One."
He was not attacking Singapore, or even the street-circuit element which makes overtaking highly improbable, just as it always has been at Monaco. He was having a go at the ludicrous safety-car rules which turn a race into a lottery.
His ire is turned not on the Republic but on the circus run by Bernie Ecclestone. And that is intriguing because F1 without Ferrari is Hamlet without the Prince, and Bernie knows it.
Where di Montezemolo is right - and by no means alone - is his condemnation of the safety-car circus. Felipe Massa had driven the new track to "perfection" to earn pole position, and was driving away with the Grand Prix until the safety car came out.
His brilliant handling and his car's proven supremacy were reduced in a minute to trailing around behind at a tourist's pace. It is the luck, the ill luck, of a system so flawed even McLaren, which capitalised on the situation, called it "a bit of a lottery".
It is compounded by the stupid rule that cars cannot enter the pits to refuel without incurring a penalty that, in the case of Robert Kubica, completely wrecked a fine drive.
It is a chance lottery that, with each car running a different fuel strategy, handed Fernando Alonso a win he did not earn, and put Kubica and others at the back of the field through no fault of his.
And who caused the deployment of the safety car? Alonso's teammate Nelson Piquet, who crashed while under orders to go faster than he could handle.
On this, I am with di Montezemolo. The essence of racing is ridiculed by unfairness when a driver is penalised because he runs out of fuel when another man makes a calamitous error.
If, on the other hand, the Ferrari president intended criticism towards Singapore, he is out of order. Those who were there believe the event, with reservations about the bumpy road, was as organised as could be.
This article was first published in The Straits Times on Oct 6, 2008.
