Picture Credit: Instagram/@F1
During the FP1 session of the Singapore GP, lizards invaded the Marina Bay Street Circuit, causing the cars to slow down multiple times on track under yellow flags on September 15, Friday. Max Verstappen, the multi-time F1 World Champion, had to take evasive action when he spotted a lizard, while completing his lap as part of the FP1 session in Singapore earlier this evening.
Notably, Monitor Lizard, a popular lizard breed in the country, is one of the many reptiles, who are regularly sighted around the city centre of Singapore. The green spaces on the Marina Bay Street Circuit, where these reptiles are located, allows easy access to the lizards to find themselves on the track from time to time.
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On September 15, when the lizards made their way onto the track, Max Verstappen, the Red Bull driver was quoted as saying on the team radio, “Oh! There's a lizard again on the track! A smaller one this time”. It led to his engineer Gianpiero Lambiase funnily saying, “Ok, understood, maybe Godzilla had a kid,” referring to the 2016 incident involving a lizard, when they had famously given it a name “Godzilla.”
The reigning world champion commented on a hilarious anecdote, “I mean it makes sense. Ha!” The other drivers on track also reacted to the lizard invasion on the Marina Bay Street Circuit, all of which was packaged in a video by F1 social media team on their official Instagram account.
Watch the video of lizards invading Singapore GP here:
Moreover, in his quest to win 11 straight F1 races in the 2023 season in Singapore this weekend, Max Verstappen made a steady start in the FP1 session with a third-place finish, clocking the lap time of 1:33:476. He was behind the Ferrari pairing of Charles Leclerc, who topped the charts with a lap time of 1:33:350, while Carlos Sainz finished in second place with 1:33:428 lap time.
