Singapore may not have a permanent race track, but that has not stopped Shane Ang from building one of Southeast Asia’s most formidable racing outfits—powered by grit, sacrifice, and a distinctly Singaporean “kampong spirit”
Singapore has no race track. Yet Shane Ang has built a championship team that has won, and continues to win, across Southeast Asia. It is an unlikely origin story for a professional racer. The country’s motorsport scene is small and fragmented, with aspiring drivers routinely forced to travel abroad for competitions, practice, and technical support. For Ang, the absence of infrastructure was never a reason not to try.
His fascination with racing began not on a circuit, but in a cinema. As a boy, he watched the 1995 Jackie Chan film Thunderbolt and became captivated by the world of professional motorsport. Go-karting, however, was financially out of reach for his family. Today, a professional kart race weekend costs between S$5,000 and S$8,000. Instead, Ang spent his early years behind the wheel of Daytona arcade machines, feeding coins into the cabinet and dreaming of something larger.
The leap from fascination to competition came almost by accident. A friend who had registered for a kart race at a local circuit could no longer attend and offered Ang the slot. He took it and promptly won.
That unexpected victory lit a fuse. Within the same year, Ang purchased a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution, the very car driven by Chan in the film that had ignited his passion. He began competing in time attack events alongside kart races, eventually securing six time attack titles and the overall championship in the League of Champions karting series. It was the moment he understood that racing might be more than a hobby.
“I told myself I may have some talent in racing,” he recalls. “And from then on, I wanted to be a professional race car driver.”
The spark came easily. The road that followed did not. Motorsport is notoriously expensive and the financial barriers are steeper still for Singaporean drivers, who must compete in regional series hosted overseas. Logistics, technical support, travel costs, and limited sponsorship opportunities made the climb formidable.
The breakthrough required a gamble few would dare to take. To move from amateur racing into a professional series in Thailand, Ang took out a personal bank loan to purchase a race car, staking his future on the promise of delivering championship results to attract sponsorship backing.
Looking back, he describes the decision with characteristic candour. “My love for racing blinded me from reason,” he says, laughing.
Reckless or not, the bet paid off. In 2022, he became the first Singaporean to win the Malaysia Speed Festival Super Turismo Championship. The following year, he secured the Super Turbo Southeast Asia Trophy Championship and led an all-Singaporean team to victory in the Super Endurance SEA 600-minute race; the first time a fully Singaporean team had won an outright event. In 2024, he clinched the Siam GT Pro II championship. In 2025, he became the first Singaporean driver and team principal to win in the international Super Series Super Car GTC category.
Trophies, however, do not define Ang’s ambitions. If anything, the championships merely laid the foundation for his next move. After years of navigating unreliable mechanics, questionable garages, and the hard lessons of racing logistics, Ang founded Team Supersonic, now known as Shane Ang Racing, to create a clearer pathway for aspiring drivers from Singapore. “I want to help them skip all the bad things that happened to me,” he says.
The team fields drivers including Ken Hooi, Gladys Lam, Aiden Chong, and Kenneth Ho—a diverse group united by a shared sense of purpose. For Ang, the formula goes beyond speed. What binds them, he says, is a distinctly Singaporean spirit. “We have the ‘kampong spirit’,” he explains. “The will to win as a group from a small country where there isn’t even a single race track.”
Motorsport, after all, is as much psychological as it is mechanical. Where outsiders associate racing with adrenaline and spectacle, Ang insists the real skill lies in the opposite quality: composure.
“The irony of racing is that the more calm and emotionless you are, the better you’ll perform,” he says.
That mindset has deepened over the years, particularly since he became a father three years ago. The arrival of his daughter tempered the once-reckless instinct to win at all costs.
“The ‘die also must win’ mentality was gone,” he says. Patience and calculated risk now guide his driving. Ironically, the change made him faster.
Experience has also reshaped his relationship with fear. Rather than something to suppress, Ang regards it as an essential guide. “Fear is our greatest ally,” he says. It is a signal of where a driver’s limits lie and a reminder that skill, not recklessness, is what separates winners from the rest of the field.
Today, Ang continues to compete across Southeast Asia while expanding his team’s reach. His tally stands at more than 90 time attack and race victories since he began competing in 2016. The pursuit, by his own measure, remains unfinished. For drivers like Ang, the chase never really ends.
This story first appeared in the May 2026 issue. Purchase it as a print or digital copy, or consider subscribing to us here
