Sepang 2026 · Stories
Malaysia's Only Formula 1 Driver
By Will Tygart · September 28, 2026
Only one Malaysian has ever raced in Formula 1. Alex Yoong drove for Minardi — the tiny Italian underdog team that, through twenty years of reinvention, became today's Racing Bulls.
That's the thread. Pull it, and the whole story comes with it.
Yoong got his shot in 2001 and 2002 with Minardi, perennially the poorest team on the grid, the one running on heart and spare parts. And then came his home race: the 2002 Malaysian Grand Prix at Sepang. He qualified 22nd — dead last — and if that sounds like a footnote, watch what happened next. Off the line, he jumped his own teammate, Mark Webber. For a while, the Malaysian kid in the slowest car on the grid was running ahead of the Australian in the identical machinery, in front of his home crowd, at his home track.
It didn't last. A tangle with Eddie Irvine and a gearbox failure ended his afternoon on lap 29. That's racing, and that's Minardi — the car gave what it could, which was never quite enough. But for those opening laps, Sepang got to watch one of its own racing wheel-to-wheel in a Grand Prix, and nobody who's honest about this sport will tell you that doesn't matter.
Here's the part that gets me, twenty-four years later. Minardi didn't die. It became Toro Rosso, then AlphaTauri, and now Racing Bulls — the same Faenza operation, the same lineage, the same underdog DNA. When that team rolls into Sepang this October, it will be the first time the direct descendant of Alex Yoong's team has raced at his home circuit in the hybrid era's strangest season.
Yoong never got the machinery his talent deserved — that's the universal verdict on his career, and the numbers back it up. But he got something rarer: he got to be first. The first Malaysian on a Formula 1 grid. The first to hear that crowd. Every Malaysian kid who dreams about racing now dreams it because Yoong proved it was dreamable.
So here's to the circle closing. The little team from Faenza comes home to Sepang, and somewhere in the grandstands, the man who started it all will be watching. Twenty-four years. Same team, different name, same dream.
Some homecomings take a quarter of a century. This one's worth the wait.