Sepang 2026 · Stories
Why Sepang
By Will Tygart · September 29, 2026
They say technology disconnects us, but one night in Kuala Lumpur it helped me fall in love with a culture.
It was December 2025. I was in Malaysia, staying away from the tourist centers to get work done, and I ate at a local spot where the server took charge of my plate. I trusted him completely, even though I had no idea what he was serving. Afterwards I used AI to identify the meal. It told me two things: I was eating tripe curry — a first for me — and that by smiling and accepting his recommendation, the "campur" or mix, I was showing the ultimate respect to his craft.
I was the only Westerner in the hall, listening to the Friday evening chanting, eating food I had been scared to try, and I had never felt more welcome.
That's the Malaysia I know. Not the postcard version — the real one, where a stranger takes charge of your plate and you let him, and it turns into something close to a spiritual experience.
The first time
It wasn't my first trip. In March 2020, Stefani and I spent our last day in Malaysia before flying to Australia in the morning. I wrote that night: "Such a beautiful place Malaysia is, with wonderful people, fantastic food, and so much to explore." A year later I posted a photo captioned simply: "Right outside Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia last year."
Malaysia kept showing up in my life at the hinge moments. The country was the doorway to the Australia chapter — the sheep farm, the lambing season, some of the most present months I've ever lived. You don't forget a place that hands you off to something like that.
The second time
By December 2025 I was back, this time in Cyberjaya — the quiet planned city south of KL — doing deep work on an AI project. I posted about it in Malay: "Syarikat saya bernama Tygart Media" — my company is called Tygart Media. I wrote that the city was calm and inspiring, a good place to build.
Here's the part that gets me now: Cyberjaya sits about twenty minutes from the Sepang International Circuit. I was building, in Malay, in the shadow of a racetrack that hadn't hosted Formula 1 in eight years — and I didn't know yet that the race was coming back, or that I'd end up building this site.
Why a race, why now
I'm a Formula 1 fan of three years and counting. That's not a long time. I came to the sport late, the way you come to anything that rearranges your weekends — all at once, and then completely.
When the news broke that F1 was returning to Sepang, two things I loved collided: the sport I'd fallen for and the country that had already won me over years earlier. Most people will tell you about Sepang through the racing — the 2013 team-orders controversy, Vettel's emotional Ferrari win in 2015, the heat that breaks cars and drivers. All of that matters, and we're documenting all of it.
But I kept thinking about the Malaysia I knew from those trips. The server who took charge of my plate. The calm of Cyberjaya. The feeling, as the only Westerner in the hall, of being completely welcome. That's the Sepang I want this site to carry — not just the circuit, but the country around it. The food, the rain, the call to prayer on a Friday evening, the twenty-minute drive from a tech city to a racetrack in the tropics.
What we're building
RaceSepang is the site I wished existed when I started caring about this race. Practical enough to plan a trip around. Honest about what we know and what we don't. Steeped in the circuit's nineteen years of history. And Malaysian to its core — not as decoration, but as the point.
We're publishing the definitive record of F1 at Sepang, race by race. We're compiling the numbers. We're writing the guides, and flagging every fact we haven't been able to verify directly — then going and asking the people who know. When the circuit, the teams, or the sponsors answer, you'll read it here first, because we asked them.
I fell for Malaysia before I fell for Formula 1. Now the two have met, and I'm building the home for everyone who feels the same pull. Selamat datang — welcome. This one's personal.