Singapore’s aiming to be a hub in so many areas, could the next thing be racing?

This is no idle question because 3 Singaporean amateurs beat pro AT&T Williams drivers Alex Wurz and Narain Narain Karthikeyan on Apr 4.

This shocking defeat happened at the Singapore leg of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) Grand Prix Challenge final at the National Museum of Singapore.

The trio – Alvin Ng, Jonathan Lee and Alvin Koh, qualified for the finals having beaten over 1,000 other competitors who had signed up to race in the state-of-the-art AT&T Williams simulator parked at Caltex House from Mar 28 to Apr 3.

Participants were vying not only for the right to race against real Formula 1 (F1) drivers at the final, but also for the chance to win the experience of a lifetime – the opportunity to represent Singapore at the Grand Finals of the RBS Grand Prix Challenge in Europe later this year.

According to RBS, the Grand Finals will see Singapore’s winner, Alvin Koh, “compete in a real car, on a real race track, under the guidance and tuition of racing experts” against the winners of the other legs of the RBS Grand Prix Challenge.

Alex Wurz, AT&T William’s principal driver, who will be competing at the Malaysian Grand Prix from Apr 7 to 8, joked at the press conference prior to racing in the simulator that he was lucky that he was driving for AT&T Williams.

Because Sir Frank Williams (owner of AT&T Williams) wouldn’t be giving him the sack in the event that he lost the race to a few amateurs.

With our top 3 drivers clocking in with qualifying times below 1 min 16s on their 1st attempt (the average time is 1min 30s), these professionals who’ve dedicated a large part of their lives to racing were in for a tough fight to prevent their pride from getting bruised.

But lose to amateurs both he and Karthikeyan did, and in the latter’s case, in rather spectacular fashion.

While Wurz managed to clock in with a time of 1min 17.409s, his counterpart, the 1st Indian F1 driver in the history of the sport could only muster 1min 21.635s after running onto the sand trap a few times on the simulator.

And so it was the turn of our local amateurs to completely blow these professionals completely off the track, figuratively speaking of course.

Jonathan Lee finished 3rd with a timing of 1min 15.555s and Alvin Ng coming in 2nd at 1 min 15.465s.

The Challenge winner Alvin Koh, 25, a bank associate with American Express, clocked in with an impressive 1min 13.864s.

It also seems that Koh isn’t a newbie when it comes to racing tournaments, having won 2 titles in the radio-controlled Tamiya Car Asia Cup Championships since 2000. In 2005, he was even ranked 4th in the world for the sport. But he has since retired from the competitive racing due to time constraints.

Even though he has an “F1 simulator [game] at home [on his computer]”, he doesn’t think that he “can commit to buying [even] a steering wheel” to help him prepare for the Grand Finals.

So while Alvin cruises around in his dad’s Toyota Vios (unmodified, of course), he might just be thinking about his future as an F1 driver. With the glitz and glamour that surrounds a driver and the chance of an F1 Grand Prix coming to Singapore, a career switch from the routine of banking to the lucrative, pulse-racing world of burning up the track might be more than a remote possibility for this young man.

After all, he is going to be representing Singapore as an F1 driver, for the RBS Grand Prix Challenge. Who knows? He might even prove be better than the last South East Asian F1 driver, Alex Yoong. Our best wishes go with him.