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Hamilton says night racing not a problem

Lewis Hamilton is confident there will be no problems with racing at night at next week's Singapore Grand Prix

The Asian country will host Formula One's first ever flood-lit race, and although there have been some concerns about how the event will go, Hamilton believes everything will run smoothly.

"I've never raced at night before, but I don't think it is going to be a problem," said Hamilton in a team preview.

"It doesn't seem to be a problem in other sports and there have been huge preparations for this, so I think it will be great. We are racing on another street circuit, which are a particular favourite of mine.

"From what I understand it is wide and fairly flowing in nature, which is not what you usually expect from a street circuit, but it sounds like it will be pretty spectacular."

Hamilton admitted, however, that it will be a challenge for the drivers to acclimatise to the night schedule.

"Our doctor has prepared a very precise schedule for the drivers to stick to because all the sessions are so late in the day," he said.

"Essentially we must not acclimatise to the local time, which is totally different to how we normally operate. Our training programmes ensure that over a race weekend we are at peak performance during the afternoons and as a result we are going to be staying in European time so this doesn't get disrupted.

"Apparently not acclimatising is much harder than adapting, because your body naturally wants to change. For the drivers, our meal, waking and sleeping rhythms will all be in European time, for example we will get up early afternoon for breakfast, have supper at 1am and go to bed at around 3am.

"It will be very different preparation to any other race but we'll try and do the best job we can."

Teammate Heikki Kovalainen also believes getting used to the odd timetable will be a demanding for the drivers.

"It is a much more demanding task to make sure you don't switch to the local time, because your body automatically wants to change, external factors such as light, temperature, humidity are all encouraging it," the Finn said.

"As with any flyaway race, the process will start from when we land in Singapore, we will stay up until early morning on the day we land."

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