FIA triggers first-ever heat hazard for Singapore GP: drivers face choice — cooling vest or ballast
Formula 1 is braced for a sauna at Marina Bay. The FIA has issued its first-ever “heat hazard” warning ahead of round 18 of the 2025 season in Singapore, with the forecast Heat Index expected to exceed 31°C at some point during Sunday’s race.
“In accordance with Article 26.19 of the Sporting Regulations,” read the governing body’s note, “having received a forecast from the Official Weather Service predicting that the Heat Index will be greater than 31.0°C at some time during the race at this event, a Heat Hazard is declared.”
There’s a new layer of strategy baked into that sentence. Drivers now have a decision to make: run the FIA-approved cooling vest in the cockpit, or go without it and accept extra ballast to equalise the car’s weight against those who do.
Article 26.19 spells it out. If a driver opts not to wear the personal equipment that forms part of the cooling system, the rest of the system—hardware and cooling medium—must still be fitted. On top of that, the difference in mass must be compensated with dedicated ballast in the cockpit. Practically, that could mean lugging around additional weight on a circuit where every kilo counts. Some in the paddock suggest teams could be hauling as much as roughly 5kg to reach the minimum weight if the vest isn’t used.
This all follows the sport’s bruising experience in Qatar 2023, when extreme heat and humidity visibly overwhelmed the grid. Logan Sargeant retired with severe dehydration, Alex Albon felt unwell, Esteban Ocon vomited in his helmet, and Lance Stroll later admitted he was close to blacking out in high-speed corners. “It’s ridiculous,” Stroll said at the time. “These temperatures, everything goes blurry… blood pressure dropping, just passing out, basically.”
The FIA responded by fast-tracking a driver-cooling solution: a wearable-tech vest threaded with metres of tubing to circulate chilled fluid around the torso. It’s clever, but it hasn’t won everyone over. When temperatures spiked in Saudi Arabia earlier this year, Oscar Piastri didn’t mince words: “No, is the answer. I think it still has a bit of fine-tuning to go. For me personally, it’s not quite ready to be used.” His main gripe was weight. Any vest you strap on is weight you carry to the flag.
Esteban Ocon flagged packaging headaches too. The system is “much more bulky and a lot bigger,” he said, enough that teams would “basically need to redo a complete seat,” and even then he wasn’t convinced it would behave well in fast corners.
Not everyone’s unconvinced. George Russell tried the setup in Bahrain and sees the upside, especially at venues like Singapore where the cockpit can turn hostile. “Every car is also different, every cockpit runs at different temperatures,” he noted. “We’ve seen our cockpit getting up to 60 degrees before, and the heat hazard is at 31 degrees. When you compound that with the sunlight and the temperature of the cockpit, it is like a sauna in the race car.”
Russell also backed giving drivers latitude to manage their own comfort. “Like footballers on a cold day—some wear gloves, some go short-sleeved—that should be the driver’s choice.” He even wondered if the threshold for declaring a hazard might need tweaking “by a few degrees,” because “we’ve not yet gone over it.”
That debate will simmer all weekend. Singapore is physically brutal even on a “cool” night. Tight walls, heavy braking, relentless corners—now add a humidity blanket and 300 km of racing while strapped into a heat trap. The vest-plus-ballast rule is a genuine performance trade-off. Wear it and you’re heavier and potentially altering how the seat and belts fit. Skip it and you’ll still carry extra weight to level the playing field, just without the cooling benefit. Either way, strategists are sharpening pencils, because tyre wear, stint lengths and in-lap/out-lap pace can all swing with a couple of kilos and a cooked driver.
The headline, though, is bigger than setup quirks. This is F1 formalising what was once shrugged off as “just a hot race.” The first heat hazard designation is a line in the sand: driver welfare now has procedural teeth. Teams will adapt, drivers will choose their pain, and somewhere in all that, Singapore will hand us another test of who’s fast when the car feels like an oven and every mistake costs twice.
