The Malaysian driver grew up watching his father race, but his own career is being built across prototype racing, engineering, Europe and Asia. As Formula 1 returns to Sepang, he is thinking less about legacy than about making the most of every day he gets to be at a track.
There is a particular kind of chaos that belongs to a racetrack.
When Alister Yoong was a child, he remembers it as something almost physical. The noise, the colors, the people moving everywhere at once. Everything was loud and overstimulating, a world that seemed to make no sense until, gradually, it did.
“I remember it always feeling like chaos until one day it all started to make sense,” he says.
The explanation is familiar. He started racing because his father raced. But Alister is 23 now, and the inheritance is more complicated than a surname.
His father, Alex Yoong, remains the only Malaysian driver to have competed in Formula 1. Alister grew up watching him race, collecting memories of A1GP cars carrying the Malaysian flag and GT machinery circulating through Sepang. In 2016, when Alister was 13, his father took him to an F1 race in Malaysia. At a gathering for Jenson Button’s 300th Grand Prix, Alex introduced him to Fernando Alonso, his former teammate.
“That’s when I first started falling in love with the sport,” Alister says.
Nearly a decade later, he is building a career of his own.
For the 2026 season, Alister is racing prototypes in the European Endurance Prototype Cup by Ultimate Cup Series with Switch Racing. His calendar has taken him to circuits including Paul Ricard, Magny-Cours, Mugello, Spa, Navarra and Portimão. He has also worked as an F4 mechanic, tested across Asia and competed in different disciplines of circuit racing.
It is a less glamorous education than the surname might suggest.
Modern motorsport has become an industry in which a driver’s job increasingly extends beyond the cockpit. There are social media feeds to maintain, sponsors to satisfy, cameras to face and a public identity to construct.
“It is crazy seeing how much media has picked up in the sport,” he says. “It has always been pretty present in motorsports. It is just one of the parts of being an athlete you need to work on these days.”
But the internet does not show the whole job. The casual fan sees the paddock, the cars and the family name. What it does not always show is the financial uncertainty underneath.
Racing is expensive, and the costs have risen sharply over the generations. For drivers outside the traditional European motorsport pipeline, currency differences and access to opportunities can make the distance between talent and a professional career even wider.
Alister is matter-of-fact about it. He does not talk about a distant championship dream or a carefully constructed five-year plan.
“In the car I am just another sensor, to be honest,” he says. “Looking to give good and accurate feedback as well as, of course, driving the car on the limit consistently.”
It is a practical description of a profession often romanticized from the outside. The driver becomes another component in a complicated machine, responsible for feeling what the car is doing and translating that feeling into information an engineer can use.
Outside the car, he says, the objective is much the same: work with the team and extract as much as possible from everyone involved.
Legacy can wait.
“I haven’t really thought of a legacy after all the racing is done,” he says. “It’s such a volatile sport that realistically if you don’t have the funding you can’t look too far ahead. I just make the most of every day at a track because it’s a gift every day I get to be at one.”
That perspective becomes particularly relevant as Formula 1 returns to Malaysia and Sepang prepares to once again sit at the center of Southeast Asian motorsport.
For Alister, Sepang is not simply a national circuit. It is one of the most demanding tracks he has driven, combining high-, medium- and low-speed corners with multiple-radius turns, heat and humidity.
“It’s mostly the difficulty,” he says. “And it always produces good racing and overtaking, too.”
He hopes the return of F1 will do more than fill the grandstands. Southeast Asia, he says, is full of talented drivers, but talent alone does not solve the problem of getting to Europe, where much of the professional racing ladder is concentrated.
“F1 coming back will help sponsorship opportunities for drivers. Hopefully.”
He is careful not to overstate what one weekend can accomplish. A Grand Prix can inspire a generation, fill a circuit and bring enormous attention to a country’s motorsport culture. What happens afterward is harder to predict.
For young people watching from the grandstands, though, the symbolism matters.
“We need more people involved and passionate to build a stronger motorsports ecosystem,” Alister says.
That ecosystem is what his own career reflects. A driver can be a mechanic, an engineer, a coach, a simulator driver and a racer. Alister is still looking for opportunities to do all of it. He expects to spend part of the winter racing and engineering in Asia, while continuing to pursue opportunities in Europe.
And when he is not at a circuit, he is surprisingly ordinary.
He plays video games. He runs through jungles in Malaysia and trails in France. He scuba dives. He surfs, although he admits it mostly involves falling over. He misses Luna, his four-year-old dog, when he is away. His mother has seven dogs in Bali.
He likes being outside because, after a life spent around engines, radios and people, silence has its own value.
“I like the peace of being outdoors and just being away from people sometimes,” he says.
Then there is the philosophy that perhaps explains him better than the surname ever could.
“Try your best and treat people nicely.”
It sounds almost too simple for a sport as difficult as this one. But Alister has spent enough time inside racing to understand that it does not need to become harder than it already is.
“It’s stressful enough as it is,” he says. “Everyone’s kind of a family in this sport.”
For now, he is not trying to decide what that family will remember him for. There are races to drive, cars to understand, contracts to extend and another season somewhere on the horizon.
He will take it one track at a time.