Being an all-surface material, the transport properties of graphene are altered by a wide range of interactions with the environment. These interactions can originate from molecular and atomic species adsorbed from the atmosphere on the graphene or from the presence of a specific substrate surface. Such interactions can lead to an unintentional doping but more crucially introduce a variety of chargecarrier scattering centres such as charged impurities, lattice strain or resonant scatterers. Hansel, Lafkioti and Krstic´ (see their Letter on pp. 376–378) report on the development of the fractional quantum Hall state with the filling factor 4/3 in graphene on hydrophobically rendered SiO2 surfaces at 4.2 K. The study demonstrates that this physically fundamental manybody state can be realised by strongly suppressing shortrange scattering due to the elimination of localised charged scatterers usually induced by a bare SiO2 surface in contact with graphene. Specifically, the study reveals that upon reduction of charged scatterers the increase of the ratio of meanfree path to chargecarrier separation prevails over the generally believed necessity for an extraordinarily high overall mobility to enable the formation of fractional quantum Hall states in graphene and, thus, provides new insight in the development of the fractional quantum Hall state in relativistic fermion systems.