The Formula One Singapore Grand Prix drew 301,294 spectators across its three days, organisers announced on Sunday, the second-highest attendance in the history of the Marina Bay Street Circuit and the highest since the track was altered in 2023.
The weekend ran from 9 to 11 October in difficult conditions. Transboundary haze from Indonesian fires pushed air quality into the unhealthy range for most of the three days, and organisers maintained throughout that the race and the trackside activities would go ahead as planned. The grand prix was also declared a heat hazard for the second year running.
On track, Max Verstappen won the Singapore night race for the first time in ten attempts, completing a weekend in which he had also won the circuit's first sprint race the day before. That sprint produced nine retirements in wet conditions, a record for the shorter format since its introduction in 2021.
Off it, the Padang hosted JJ Lin, The Killers and Lana Del Rey, part of an entertainment programme that has become as much a part of the Singapore weekend as the race.
The attendance figure sits within a clear recent trend. The three days drew 264,108 in 2023, 269,072 in 2024 and 300,641 in 2025, before this year's 301,294. On that run of numbers the circuit has added more than 37,000 spectators in three years.
The record it fails to beat was set in 2022, when the circuit took a different route. That year's turnout is given as 302,000. The route was subsequently amended to omit the Float @ Marina Bay, which could seat 27,000, to allow construction of NS Square.
So the 2026 race finishes 706 spectators short of the all-time mark, on a circuit with 27,000 fewer seats than the one that set it.
It is the 706 that deserves scrutiny. This year's figure is 301,294, which is a count. The record is 302,000, which is a count rounded to the nearest thousand, and a number rounded to the nearest thousand is a statement that the true value lies somewhere between 301,500 and 302,500.
The Department of Unnecessary Research observes that the gap between the two figures is therefore smaller than the uncertainty in one of them. On the published numbers alone, 2026 may trail 2022 by as many as 1,206 spectators or as few as 206. It cannot overtake it, but it can get within a rounding error of doing so, and has.
This newspaper accordingly proposes that the Marina Bay attendance record be reclassified from a figure to a range. The 2026 result would then be recorded as the highest attendance ever counted at the circuit, and 2022 as the highest attendance ever estimated.
The defence of the record is in any case structural rather than competitive. The stand that seated the margin no longer exists. Twenty-seven thousand seats were removed from the course in 2023, which is thirty-eight times the gap that now separates the two years.
The record is held, in other words, by a grandstand that has been demolished and a figure that has been rounded. Neither can be asked to confirm the other.
Formula One has a settled convention for results decided by margins this fine, which is to go to the timing data and read it to a thousandth of a second. The same convention, applied here, would require somebody to produce the 2022 turnstile logs.
Until they do, the circuit's busiest weekend remains the one nobody counted.