The eagerly awaited hearing today of the FIA Court of Appeal into Lewis Hamilton's demotion from winner to third place at this month's Belgian Grand Prix kicks off a critical week in Formula One that ends with the uncertainties of the sport's first night race, in Singapore.

Hamilton will be the star witness among a McLaren Mercedes delegation expected at the FIA headquarters at the Place de la Concorde in Paris that will argue the stewards at Spa-Francorchamps were wrong to demote him for gaining an “advantage” as a result of cutting a chicane during his battle with Kimi Raikkonen, of Ferrari.

Should the British driver win his case and be restored to the top of the podium, his World Championship lead over Felipe Massa, Raikkonen's team-mate, will jump from one point to seven with four races to come, starting on Sunday. Other possible outcomes in Paris are that the McLaren case is thrown out as “inadmissible” or the decision of the stewards is upheld and there will be no change in the points. The verdict will be announced tomorrow.

If the court action is a trip into uncharted legal waters, the grand prix in Singapore is a huge leap into the dark. Night racing has never been tried by Formula One but is firmly on the agenda as Bernie Ecclestone, the sport's commercial rights holder, looks to move Asian races to start times that will attract the biggest possible audience in Europe.

In Singapore, qualifying will begin at 10.00pm local time on Saturday (2pm UK time), with the race starting two hours earlier on Sunday night. Taking on this challenge, the Asian city state has commissioned an artificial lighting system all the way round one side of the new 3.15-mile street circuit in the Marina Bay area of the city. It is designed to produce illumination that is four times brighter than that used at Barclays Premier League football grounds.

The lighting will be run by 12 generators and the system should be fail-safe as a result of incorporating a complete duplicate power back-up facility should the primary generators fail. As a result, the horror show of 20 cars travelling at speeds of up to 185mph in the narrow confines of a street circuit in a sudden blackout is unlikely to happen.

The cars will have no lights and the drivers have not had a chance to practise night driving, even on simulators. One big worry is the possibility they will find themselves driving at night during heavy tropical rain, causing cause glare and sparkle that could affect visibility. McLaren are taking no chances in this respect and have developed a new set of helmet visors for Hamilton that will prevent water droplets collecting. The new visors incorporate a range of colourations to give Hamilton the best visual perception possible.

All the teams are going to try and stay on European time in Singapore, where drivers, mechanics and engineers will be working long into the night and will go to bed at around dawn local time and get up in the early afternoon. McLaren have organised hotel rooms with blackout curtains and arranged for their personnel to be undisturbed by cleaners or telephone calls, with meal times rescheduled to the European clock.

“Ensuring all the team personnel have the opportunity to get enough sleep will be the main challenge over the course of the weekend,” Martin Whitmarsh, the McLaren chief executive, said.

Hamilton is looking forward to the challenge. “Our doctor has prepared a very precise schedule for the drivers to stick to because all the [track] 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.”