My experience after the Malaysia Grand Prix
So I'm Malaysian and attended all 3 days of the race. I'm an average F1 fan who happened to stumble onto an opportunity to attend a F1 race in his own country. I bought k1 grandstand, relied solely on public transport to get to the circuit. And here was my experience.
I'll start with the good things. On track action was phenomenal, once the race got going, the overtaking, the sound of the engines, the atmosphere it was amazing to experience that in person. The people, so obviously there were gonna be a lot of locals and foreigners attending and I talked to a few of them and everyone was very friendly. Overall, it was what I come to expect from a F1 race.
Then I will share the bad things, I am sure everyone has already seen the reels and news about the terrible crowd management from day 1 of the event. I want to come out say, I hope everyone knows that BIC was in charge of everything and didn't want the help of SIC. Now I am not blaming any party, I truly believe that both parties were at fault, 1 underestimating the size of the crowd, Bahrain peak attendance on race day is 35k people (a quick Google search on Bahrain average attendance) Vs Sepang already reaching 30k on day 1 (low estimates I found online) and SIC not being proactive enough. However, I must say thank you to SIC, Rapid KL, Prasanna, JPJ, the local authorities, for stepping up on day 2 and day 3.
On day 1, the shuttles that dropped you off at the circuit from the KLIA airport, had no priority lane, no road closure, barely any support and even dropped you off on the side of the road and you had get onto an internal shuttle where there no signs, no designated pick up zone or anything. On day 2 and day 3, all that changed, JPJ closed down the road leading to circuit prioritising the shuttles over individual vehicles with parking passes, this improved getting to the circuit massively. Once you reached the circuit there was now a designated staging area for people to queue and designated pick up zones for people to get onto the internal shuttle with ease.
Leaving the circuit has also massively improved, day 1 chaos, all the busses lined up on the side of the road, nobody were queuing up, the people in charge gave up enforcing the queus, utter and complete disaster. Day 2 and 3, the effort from SIC, Rapid KL, Prasanna and the local authorities cannot be ignored, there were metal barriers, designated queus for certain routes, water was passed out by the SIC CEO. I know queues for the shuttles were still long but atleast it was controlled and the mood was significantly better, people actually yelled at the bus drivers when they arrived but didn't opened the doors, well maybe because everyone was crowding around the bus on the highway?? Day 2 and 3, people cheered when the bus showed, that must have been an amazing feeling for everyone involved.
The water situation, I don't know if everyone knew this but water bottles were allowed to be brought in just not the plastic, easy to litter/leave everywhere ones. I had a Tupperware water bottle and made it in just fine. They even made emergency repairs to the K1 water fountain and improved the water pressure so people could fill up faster. I didn't go to the mall area or the fan zone area because I came here to watch cars go vroom, not fanboy over the drivers, so I can't really say much about the mall, main grand stand area queues for water but I heard it was bad.
The vendors, simply put, not enough vendors, the wait time for food was around 1-2 hours for me, I just stuck in snacks on day 2 and 3 onwards, the price was way too expensive for me as a local anyways.
That was my experience of the Malaysia Grand Prix, as a local, I will remember the exciting atmosphere, the sound of the engines, the amazing effort put in by everyone to improve the situation. That's just how us Malaysians roll, we fumble, we mess up but we always get back up and move forward.
Just sharing my experience and respecting the effort of everyone from SIC, Rapid KL, Prasanna, JPJ, and the local authorities for stepping in. If you have a problem with people making an effort to improve, then make your own post.