The Singaporean women who took F1 from a hobby to a calling

During the Singapore Grand Prix every year, thousands of Singaporeans flock to the Padang or squeeze onto a hotel balcony to watch the race light up the Marina Bay skyline. We scream at overtakes, argue about team radio drama, and go back to our normal lives on Monday.

But for a small group of Singaporeans, the race weekend never really ends. What started as fandom became something much bigger: a job, a title, and for some, a seat on the grid

Kareen Kaur

Kareen Kaur shows what it looks like when the love for racing takes you all the way onto the track itself.

Kareen discovered karting at just nine years old, racing with her father, Kuldeep, at Turf City in Bukit Timah. Seven years on, that early hobby has carried her to an F4 seat – a first for a Singapore female. And last month marked a bigger milestone, as she represented Singapore and fought for a seat at the F1 Academy Rookie Test held at the Circuito de Navarra in Spain.

For the uninitiated, F1 Academy first launched its inaugural Rookie Test last year, which saw seven drivers graduate to full-time seats on the 2026 grid, while two other drivers made Wild Card appearances during the season. The programme includes a training camp, where drivers can glean science-backed insights into female athlete development, as well as performance progression and transition challenges, to help them become more well-versed in the motorsport ecosystem.

After the training camp, drivers moved on to the Rookie Test, where they were fully immersed in the F1 Academy team environment – from observing driver briefings to gaining insight into the operational demands of racing, as well as off-track responsibilities such as media briefings and assessment activities.

For a country better known for hosting a race than producing the drivers in it, Kareen’s rise is a big deal. “Finding out that I’d been selected for the F1 Academy Rookie Test felt out of this world,” she says. “I feel incredibly grateful and excited. I’m ready to embrace every opportunity and make every lap count.”

For Kareen, the platform that she has isn’t just personal. “I hope that my journey in motorsport inspires other girls to take up the sport, and believe that they, too, can succeed.”

Valencia Ong

Valencia Ong’s love affair with cars started as early as her fifth birthday when she asked for a remotecontrol car, and the scratches on her family’s cabinets still show for it. But it wasn’t until 2008, when Singapore held its very first Grand Prix, that things clicked into place.

Back then, she was a student watching from a staircase in a mall that happened to overlook a slice of the track. “The first time I heard and saw the cars was an utterly visceral experience,” she says. She even recorded the sound of the engines on her phone, just to replay it after the race weekend was over.

And while it could have ended there, a photo changed everything. “A friend had shared some photos that were not taken from the spectator grandstands,” Valencia recalls. “The unusual POV caught my eye, and I reached out to ask how they got to be there.” That’s when she found out that ordinary fans could apply to be race officials – and just like that, she was in.

She applied in 2010 and got in on her first try. Her first role was as a communications observer, now called a radio marshal, which is essentially the person who calls in what’s happening on track to Race Control.

“The adrenaline rush was unreal,” she says. To make things even more nerve-racking, her post ended up helping recover an actual F1 car that very first weekend.

“I was so afraid of making mistakes and sounding like a complete idiot on record!”

She didn’t. And more than a decade later, she’s now a lead paddock marshal, running the support paddock. While it may look easy at first, this role never really stops. While the F1 cars are out on track, her team is already lining up the next race’s cars on the grid. When the chequered flag drops, they’re straight back into directing returning cars. Even during the quiet stretches when no cars are on track, the work continues.

That’s why it’s safe to say this life isn’t as glamorous as it seems online. Valencia remembers Qualifying Day in 2022, the first time the race moved to October, right into monsoon season. Part of her marshal zone flooded early into her shift.

“Standing on waterlogged feet for 10 hours was tough,” she says. “I remember sitting on my doorstep that night dreading taking a shower, because that meant standing in more water.”

But why do people like Valencia go out of their way to take leave from work and marshal when it’s entirely unpaid? “The fact that we come back year after year says it all,” she states simply, explaining that what keeps her coming back isn’t just the race, but the people. She likens the annual gathering of the marshal community to “a mega family reunion”.

“Being able to work and spend time with people who share the same passion and commitment level is a privilege. The Marina Bay Street Circuit is my happy place.”

Faith Thiam

Faith’s entry into F1 wasn’t sparked by a race at all – it was at work. While interning at a crypto company organising a yacht party for the Singapore Grand Prix, she noticed the names of some of the sponsor companies she’d invited plastered across the cars her colleague was watching on replay.

“I didn’t want to embarrass my company if someone asked me about F1 and I couldn’t answer, so I decided to study up on the sport,” she says.

What started as due diligence eventually turned into genuine obsession once she realised there was far more to F1 than cars going around in laps. She also decided, somewhat randomly, to support Carlos Sainz for that year’s Singapore Grand Prix – and when he went on to be the only non-Red Bull driver to win a race that season, she took it as a sign to keep going.

Her first-ever post was, in her own words, about “a really scuffed beginner’s guide to F1”. It was basically mostly explainers on how race weekends worked, and Faith admits that she was tempted to delete it more than once. But she left it up and kept posting.

At the peak of her posting schedule, a single race week meant three separate posts covering each session, a breakdown of FIA (F1’s governing body) decisions, and a lap-by-lap race recap. And she was doing all this on top of a part-time law degree and a full-time internship.

“I was easily overworked and got really sick frequently,” she recalls.

These days, her focus is mostly on the FIA document reviews, even if she can’t manage them every single weekend anymore. Ironically, she now has less time to post because her platform has grown – she gets invited to more collaborations and events than before, on top of working full-time.

And despite the growing following, Faith says she doesn’t actually earn anything from her content. “It’s really a passion project, but if I can turn this into a full-time job someday, I’d definitely jump at the chance,” she says.

She’s also had to deal with the usual assumptions that come with being a young woman in F1 spaces online. Her first instinct was to prove herself by learning everything in painstaking detail. Eventually, she let that go.

“There’s no actual thing as a ‘real fan’,” she states. “You’re a fan if you like it, regardless of why you like it or how much you know.” She’s since made a point to welcome newer fans into the sport however they choose to enjoy it – and has largely stopped worrying about critics.

But it’s also brought her some of her proudest moments. Being accredited as a content creator for F1 Academy stands out above the rest.

“Holding it in my hands, I was so proud I almost cried,” she says. “It felt like I was finally somewhere real, and that my effort was being recognised by the sport – especially since I was the only Singaporean there that weekend.”