Autoblog

Opening night can be the worst time to see a new production. But it can also be the most painfully entertaining, watching all the actors trip over their toes and forget their lines with the pressure to perform bearing down and the bright lights glaring in their eyes.

This weekend's Singapore Grand Prix wasn't just the first race on a new track and in a new host country. It was also the very first Formula One race held at night. No problem, you might figure, for these are the most professional drivers in the world. Well, not quite. But opening night was still highly entertaining; probably more so as a result. If you've recorded the race and haven't watched it yet, move along. But if you haven't, or even watched part and skipped out before the end, you'll want to follow the jump to see how Formula One's foray into the nocturnal panned out for this year's crop of championship hopefuls.

Racing fans were excited at the announcement that Singapore would join the 2008 Formula One calendar as the series' first night race. But it's one thing to make the announcement, quite another to actually pull it off.

Lighting up a road circuit in the middle of a bustling city is not like lighting up an outdoor stadium or even an oval speedway. The track snakes along over three miles through downtown Singapore, and needs to be lit up enough to provide sufficient visibility for the drivers, spectators and television cameras, all the while minimizing glare off potentially wet surfaces. To execute the illumination, the organizers turned to Italian lighting specialists Valerio Maioli SpA, who worked up a custom lighting system just for the Singapore Grand Prix.

The system devised for the event will consist of some 1600 lighting projectors, hanging in clusters 10 meters above the surface on 240 steel pilings placed 32 meters apart from each other around the circuit and connected by over 100,000 meters of cable. The system will draw 3.18 Megawatts of electricity from 12 pairs of generators encased in sound-proof containers, each with its own engineer on standby in case anything should go wrong. Although the run-off areas will be illuminated as well, the lighting will be dimmer than the track surface to avoid confusion for the drivers. That's a pretty impressive system, which all in all will be four times brighter than the lighting in an ordinary stadium.

[Source: GrandPrix.com]