There are not many traditionalists in Formula One, but a few old coves have surfaced on the message boards to gripe about the big watershed tomorrow, when motor racing steps out under the floodlights (1,485 projectors in all) for the first time, at the Singapore Grand Prix. Even in a sport that has had more revolutions than my old student union, night racing is regarded as über-radical and not entirely welcome.

When Brammall Lane hosted the first floodlit football match in 1878 - the lights suspended from four wooden gantries and powered by generators at both ends - many fans were hostile. “Who wants to play football by artificial light? Day light is quite good enough and long enough,” is the way one local reporter put it, according to Hunter Davies in his volume Books, Balls and Haircuts.

Cricket purists, too, were up in arms when Kerry Packer, that divisive visionary, introduced day-night matches in his revolutionary World Series. Kilowatt cricket, some sneered; it cannot possibly last.

I do not know what the fuss is about. If you ask me, all sport should take place under floodlights: football, cricket, Formula One, the Derby, crown green bowls. What is there not to like? I remember going to my first football international at Wembley Stadium in 1978 and being more struck by the lighting than the football. We walked out of the dimly lit streets, beneath the twin towers, up the steps and then it hit us - the radiance of a million watts of energy.

The pitch was like the Garden of Hesperides in Technicolor and the players, bathed in flashbulb light, seemed real and unreal, remote yet immediate, their faces transformed into those of film stars under the purple skies. We were so mesmerised by the magic of the thing that my brother and I optimistically tried it when we got home, playing headers and volleys in the back garden by the light of the kitchen and upstairs bathroom.

I was reminded of all this when I went to New York last September. It was ostensibly a trip to conduct a series of interviews - Jake LaMotta, Billie Jean King, Marty Reisman - but it was the nights that really sparkled: taking the subway out to Queens as the sun set over Manhattan, jumping out at Shea Stadium station and then walking down the huge ramp into the luminescent splendour of Flushing Meadows.

Night tennis. There is nothing like it, sitting alongside men and women who have worked their butts off during the day and then headed out for a bit of nocturnal entertainment. The tennis, under those incandescent lights, with the planes roaring above, is somehow more gladiatorial than at Wimbledon but also rawer and more romantic. SW19 is populated by those who took the day off work, Flushing Meadows by those who could not afford to. And then, at the end of the day's play, there is the late trip back into midtown, where the bars are alive and swinging.

It was demographics that created the demand for floodlights in the first place - sport for the working man - although the timing of the Singapore Grand Prix has little to do with local fans and more to do with European television viewers (the race starts at 8pm local time, which is 1pm in the UK). There is nothing unusual in television calling the shots, but one wonders how the locals will react when they realise that they are little more than an afterthought to Formula One's commercial rights-holders.

The concern among some drivers is that the night lights may affect visibility, particularly if glare is created by rainy conditions. Pedro De La Rosa, the chairman of the Grand Prix Drivers' Association, addressed this point on Wednesday when he said that he was satisfied that the new Marina Bay Street circuit would be safe. Even so, there will be a lot of nervous energy expended by those with responsibility for drivers' safety.

The deeper issue is that of the environment. Some will be appalled at the colossal waste of resources in manufacturing lighting conditions that would have been created freely by nature a few hours earlier.

But this is a point that can be made about football matches and rock concerts in a thousand locations on any of a thousand evenings. If we are going to have an ethical debate about the environmental consequences of floodlighting and entertainment, let us apply it universally and not only to Formula One.

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• Graham Spiers