2013 Singapore Grand Prix: Singapore’s "Total Controlled Racing"

On my eighth birthday, I was given my first and, thank God, only train set. It personified the 70s – a dull, dreary decade when strikes, power-cuts and a Labour Government depressed the adult population.

Cold winter’s mornings meant spending an hour outside the front of your house trying to get your family’s Morris Marina or Austin Princess to start. It depressed parents further.

Returning from work, if your father had a job and was not on strike, early evening TV on the only three channels in existence offered little comfort. It was pretty much wallpapered with game-shows presented by fossils such as Larry Grayson and Hughie Green. All featured contestants aged somewhere between 60 and deceased. Resultantly, Prozac replaced LSD as the drug of choice.

Unlike those British cars, I suppose that train set of mine did work but, as a kid’s toy, it was as appealing as Ted Roger’s Dustbin. Round and round and round it went for hours on end; it did absolutely nothing else. Depressing.

A Scalextric is what every self-respecting nine-year-old yearned for. That went round-and-round too but you held a control and you could make it go faster or slower. And every half-lap, you could interact with your toy by picking up a stranded car from the floor and placing it back on its track.

It was fine for a while but, sadly, from my bedroom above the front-room, those little electric motors interfered with Dad’s TV and put lines over his nightly dose of ‘The Professionals’ and ‘That’s Life’. It meant I would have to revert to playing Connect 4 by myself for an hour or two but, all-in-all, I had it good.

It was the Christmas of 1980 when the world was stopped on its axis. Total Controlled Racing (TCR) TV commercials arrived on Saturday morning TV screens.

Every 15 minutes, in-between a badly dubbed Three Musketeers, Stingray, Champion the Wonder-Horse and Multi Coloured Swap Shop, a commercial displaying the thrill of cars racing at night-time with a scale-speed of 275 mph which could change lanes, overtake and actually race, left a generation of boys spellbound.

The primary problem was its cost. A modern day conversion made a TCR set about as costly as Max Chilton’s drive at Marussia. For certain, at the time, a second-hand [British] car could have been bought for less. But, just like Max’s parents, mine loved me dearly and on December 25th, I got the present all little boys craved.

By December 26th, the meaning of the letter ‘C’ in TCR had been changed to ‘Crap’ as overtaking with such fast fragile cars was impossible and, essentially, all the cars did was smash into the side-walls with terminal consequences.

Now, on the eve of the Singapore Grand Prix, I think you may guess where I am going with this…

Only once since – the futile hunt for Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction – have the public miss-sold something on such a scale. We cannot give the Singapore Grand Prix back anytime soon but on December 27th, the TCR was returned to the supermarket where Santa bought it from.

“Most claimed it stopped working after two hours,” said the woman in the shop. That is, incidentally, exactly how long each of the five Grand Prix staged at Singapore’s Marina Bay’s Street Circuit have lasted. All have been interrupted by a Safety Car. I digress. “We have had 307 of these TCR sets returned so far,” she added, “I’m particularly impressed as we only sold 300 of them.”

Clearly, there had been some fraudulent activity, just as there was in the 2008 edition of the Singapore contest. It requires no further autopsy. Subsequently, three pole-setters have won this race, a sequence that would have been extended to four had Hamilton’s McLaren not had mechanically failed on him last season.

It’s nonsensical to attempt to identify a winner beyond the pole-setter and that makes the task so much simpler. Successfully complete the sequence: VVHRRRVHHHHV and you should be on a very strong favourite. V, as in Vettel, is already Betvictor.com’s even-money fancy to win the race, so I’m going to look elsewhere, to last year’s rightful winner, H (as in Hamilton).

I’m also hoping that the often ridiculed Pastor Maldonado can negotiate a clear passage around the inevitable carnage and confirm my belief, supported by the stats of 2012, that he is actually quite capable around this kind of circuit. It would be great if he could double his team’s points tally for the season (by scoring a single point).

Despite Singapore’s street circuit offering little more than the spectacle of men with brushes dispersing the carbon fibre shards that will rain down on every corner and a flash car with flashing lights regularly heading a colourful traffic jam, off track there is plenty to like about this prospering sophisticated former British colony.

A third of the women on the island aged 30 to 34 are single. Half of Singapore’s men aged 30 to 34 are single. Ok, the laws of supply and demand are not great but there is abundantly more availability than in my part of the global woods.

And, alarmingly for Mr. Ecclestone, who will doubtlessly still be alive and running F1 in thirty years’ time, his Singapore audience will diminish as the island city state has the lowest fertility rate in the world. With a birth-rate far below the replacement rate, on demographic trends, the 5.2 million Singapore population will be halved within three decades.

If you are in your early 40s, re-live your childhood here: