Green Notebook from Batman Park

On the way from the centre of Melbourne to Albert Park, if you do not have a chauffeur, the trams stop at Batman Park. Bruce and Wayne are both popular names Down Under, but this is not Gotham City. So why do they celebrate Batman?

After some research I discovered that a man called John Batman founded Melbourne. Well, some people think that anyway.

Others say it was another john called Fawkner, who also has a park named after him. Who knows? Perhaps they both settled at the same moment. In The Chronicles of Early Melbourne, an account of the city’s history, the author Garryowen reached an entirely different conclusion, arguing that the first settlers were “five men, a woman, and a cat”, which sounds like the cast of a soap opera set on a desert island, although the names of this party have been lost in the mists of time.

To be fair, who pitched the first tent is not the real issue. You can be fairly certain that some indigenous person dropped by before that happened, roasted a possum and then went walkabout elsewhere.

Melbourne might never have amounted to much were it not for a gold strike at a place called Poverty Point in 1851.

This ironic moment led to a lot of people becoming wildly wealthy and, it being a time when gold rushes were in vogue (think California 1849), diggers rushed in and headed to the goldfields near Ballarat, 70 miles to the west of Melbourne. They say that 6,000 a week arrived in the early days.

Much of their money found its way back to vaults in Melbourne. The city became a financial centre with vast ornate banks, built in the Venetian-Gothic style, a number of which are still in use today.

Thus, Melbourne is an eclectic place when it comes to architecture – and when one considers the population.

There are about five million people in the Melbourne metropolitan area. In surveys only 22 percent of them say that their families are Australian. About double that number trace their roots to English, Scottish or Irish ancestors. Nine percent are Chinese, seven percent Italian, five percent Indian and four percent Greek. The result of this is a wildly interesting list of restaurants (the Armenian was very good), but also a high degree of integration. There are still some neighbourhoods dominated by one group or another,  but fortunately no suburb has yet started a war with one another.

Young Australians spend much of their lives out of doors (the weather helps) and do lots of sports, although statistically more boys are overweight than are the girls. The bad news is that the statistics for obesity increase dramatically with age.

This may be due, in part, to the fact that the nation likes a drink. A recent survey revealed that the average Australian gets drunk 27 times a year, which is about twice the global average. Still, there seem to be a lot of healthy and sun-kissed women running around, who (statistically) don’t mind having a drink or two. A combination which never seems to create complaints in the F1 world.

Perhaps the booze is why the state of Victoria has become the Queen Victoria of nanny states, which is not amused by much and wants everyone to follow their rules. There is an entire class of whiney-voiced bureaucrats (often of the non-sporty variety) who declare that everything they do is justified because of “health and safety”. I have even heard locals talk of Victoria being a police state where personal responsibility and self-control have been eroded away by these self-righteous clipboard-carrying monsters.

Fortunately I have generally managed to avoid the worst of them, apart from at airports.

Despite these dead weights, Melbourne is a dynamic, diverse and charming city, with tree-lined streets and the rattle of trams, which clang their bells at all hours.

You never know who or what you will get next. I took a few cabs during the F1 weekend and as usual I chatted to the drivers and discovered one who was born Vietnamese, but escaped in clandestine fashion, back in the late 1970s on a small boat across the Gulf of Thailand to Malaysia. A four-day trip which included two encounters with pirates. It was a ripping yarn. Today, Melbourne is often ranked as one of the world’s most liveable cities and it is easy to understand why. Sydney may have more natural charms, but Melbourne is more interesting to talk to.

The city has been the home of Formula 1 in Australia since 1996, when the Victorians nicked the Grand Prix from sleepy Adelaide and set up shop in Albert Park. The world moves quickly in F1 and today things feels rather outdated in F1 terms. They need new buildings but the clipboard-wearers whine that no-one should be allowed to add more permanent structures in the park. The fact the Grand Prix saved the park from being a place of drunks, druggies and ladies of the night is overlooked at this point in the discussion. So the drainage systems in the paddock don’t always work, as Alpine – which is already deeply in the do-do – discovered this year – which did not really seem fair given their other troubles.

There continue to be rumours about the future of the Enstone team, although no-one seems to know anything about it, except that Luca de Meo, the boss of Renault, who thought he understood how to run racing teams, must decide this for himself. Renault has plenty of other challenges and I am sure the PR folk can quite easily come up with a story as to why it makes sense to sell the British end of the operation, as fixing the mess will not be the work of a moment. Nasty people keep bringing up the “100 race” project, first devised in 2021. By the end of this season, the team’s total will hit 90 races, which means that the whole thing looks like a massive cock-up which Renault might wish to move on from. There is no shortage of investors rushing into the sport… So a sale looks like a jigsaw puzzle piece that might fit. Alpine could keep the engine division and use some of the money raised to improve the power units or make the target to win Le Mans instead. Or maybe to enter IndyCar, which is a whole lot cheaper than F1.

Anyway, just to finish up on Melbourne, the Grand Prix is for many in F1 one of the highlights of the year, even if it is at the other end of the world. For years the Australian GP was the first race of the year and the F1 community could get a little sunshine after the winter of meteorological discontent in Europe. The good news is that next year Melbourne will be back in the number one slot. I haven’t read the Koran and I’m not entirely sure what is wrong with motor racing during Ramadan, but it is deemed a bad idea to have an F1 race at that time of year and so in 2025 the Grands Prix in Bahrain and Jeddah are moving back in the calendar, until after Ramadan is over, and so the World Championship will start in Melbourne (probably on March 9) and will be followed a week later by the Chinese Grand Prix.

There should then be a weekend off before the Japanese Grand Prix on March 30, which will be the start of triple-header with Bahrain on April 6 and Saudi Arabia on April 13, as Ramadan 2025 ends on March 30. That would make Miami likely to take place on April 27 and the European season would start soon afterwards with rush of races before Monaco on the traditional weekend of May 23-25.  None of this yet confirmed, but it all makes sense and is better than this year’s early weeks which feature a series of intercontinental stand-alone fly-aways, which F1 is trying to avoid to rationalise travel and make the sport more sustainable.

In a perfect world Miami would be twinned with Montreal but the Canadians refuse to move the race and they have a long contract that specifies one of two weekends in June each year. Miami cannot move because the Hard Rock Stadium hosts the Miami Open tennis tournament in late March or early April and there is much work to do to convert the facility from being a tennis centre to becoming a Formula 1 racing circuit. So for the moment we are stuck between a Hard Rock and a place in Canada, if you see what I mean.

There was a certain amount of irony in the fact that the Melbourne race was won by the one top driver who is out of work next year (Let’s not discuss Sergio Perez for the moment for fear of upsetting Mexicans). With Lewis Hamilton jumping to Ferrari (he is a fan of freefall parachuting after all), the evergreen Fernando Alonso has seemed keen of late to change colour to silver (before his hair goes that way) and join Mercedes, although it seems unlikely that this will now happen. His fiddling about with the brake and accelerator pedals at the end of the Australian Grand Prix will not have helped the situation. As F1 heads up to Japan one might speculate that now would be a good moment for Aston Martin-Honda to announce it has retained the mature Spaniard for another year or two, as this might stop the rest of the paddock speculating about the future of Lance Stroll. Alonso beats his indulgent team boss’s son most of the time, but he says positive things about his team-mate from time to time and leaves the criticism to nasty outsiders.

The reason I mention this is that F1 is undergoing a thing which could be called The Bearman Effect as teams up and down the pitlane are reminded that hungry (and cheap) young drivers can do a very good job and one does not need to hang on to the experienced (and expensive) drivers to get the best out of a car. There is a place for experience, of course, but not in every seat. Linking up Alonso and Honda might not seem easy given his troubled history with the Japanese firm, which refused to provide engines for him at Indianapolis because of the things he said about it when he was McLaren between 2015 and 2017, but people move on.

Bearman was not born when Alonso won his first F1 race (weird, but true), but he did a great job in Jeddah and now everyone is looking at their reserve drivers and at Formula 2 and saying: “I wonder…” A number of existing F1 drivers may find their seats at risk as a result. This group will include Valtteri Bottas, Kevin Magnussen, Daniel Ricciardo and Nico Hulkenberg. In addition there are some younger drivers who have yet to do enough to prove themselves in Formula 1, including Stroll (shh… don’t menton it), Logan Sargeant and Guanyu Zhou. I feel very sorry for the latter because every time he does something good the team in Hinwil mess it up for him (most recently with disastrous pit stops) and he deserves a better image.

The word is that Haas would be happy to take Bearman, probably alongside Hulkenberg, in 2025, if Ferrari asked them nicely – and offered a suitable discount on engines. In any case, Bearman is definitely in the picture as Ferrari will be keen to train up a youngster to be ready to replace Lewis Hamilton when he retires. That might not be until 2028, but that would give Bearman time to learn F1, as Charles Leclerc once did with Sauber, back in the day.

The big question is whether the Bearman effect will impact on his Prema Formula 2 team-mate Andrea Kimi Antonelli, the Mercedes protégé who is already doing good things in the series, despite having jumped straight in from Formula Regional. The 17-year-old Italian will soon start to do a series of private F1 tests with a 2022 Mercedes in order to begin preparation for a career in F1. He already has enough points for a superlicence, but he cannot be granted one until his 18th birthday in August. One can speculate, however, that Antonelli has the makings of a superstar (if it doesn’t all go to his head) and that Mercedes might see value in the idea of moving him up the ladder VERY quickly. It needs to replace Hamilton but going straight into a Mercedes, with all the pressures that go with a top team, might be unwise, although it might be good to get him into a Williams as soon as he turns 18. That would give him a year and a half to get up to speed in F1 before Mercedes would need him in 2026. There would need to be someone who would take a one-plus-one deal with Mercedes in 2025 and as George Russell’s contract is up at the end of that year, it could (in theory) become a permanent gig in 2026, if Lewis’s replacement outperformed George. My money would be on Esteban Ocon, who has long had Mercedes links and is clearly in the wrong place at Alpine. One might suggest that George’s mate Alex Albon might be a good choice for Mercedes, but he is believed to have an attractive offer to go to Red Bull Racing in 2026, which could be a very good idea. The idea that Red Bull Racing will implode seems to have gone away now, with an apparent return to peace inside the team. It will be interesting to see how long it is before Helmut Marko decides to retire and whether or not Jos Verstappen will spend more time rallying and less in F1 circles, but Christian Horner seems to be on solid ground, even if he may now have given up on the idea of the racing division being spun off from the main company.

A Ferrari 1-2 in Melbourne and the shenanigans surrounding the FIA President will push the Horner story down the news agenda, although it looks like Mohammed Ben Sulayem will be making a comeback in terms of newsworthiness in the months ahead, despite the findings of the FIA Ethics Committee. Some of the folks at the federation are out of sorts because so many people laughed when the committee cleared the President of all the accusations  levelled at him by a whistle-blower.

The problem is one of perception and, in the modern age, perception is reality and so the FIA really needs to consider why no-one is surprised by the ruling of the Ethics Committee. Whether the President and his sidekicks like it or not, there is an image problem and the reaction across the board has been very simple: why would anyone expect a different result? The FIA needs to fix this. It is more intelligent to try to change the image than to be antagonistic towards F1, a nonsensical strategy which bites the hand that feeds the federation with money – the one thing it needs as much as trust. The FIA is dependent on F1 for its very existence. The President may feel safe because he has the support of lots of little mobility clubs that need him to get good roles inside the FIA empire, but if they feel that the existence of the FIA itself is at risk, they will switch allegiance to someone else. Ben Sulayem has come out with the worn out old argument that a big bad external force is threatening the federation, in the hope that this will unite the membership. It’s classic high school Machiavelli. It probably does not help that Ben Sulayem seems to think that if Donald Trump gets more popular when he attacked, it will be the same for him.

The thing he and his crew need to worry about now is the law. French law. Susie Wolff announced as soon as the Ethics Committee announcement was made that she has filed a criminal complaint against Ben Sulayem, relating to the brouhaha in December when the FIA announced it was investigating Wolff and her husband Toto, based on claims in a minor magazine which reported that a number of F1 team principals had raised concerns with the FIA about leaks of confidential information. The Wolffs were not named but FIA people apparently briefed journalists that the actions related to them.

It was very odd for the FIA to react to a single unsubstantiated report and the reaction of the entire F1 community was very clear. The 10 F1 teams and F1 all came out with statements that demolished the article in question and thus the basis of the investigation was undermined. This was an unprecedented show of support and it was clear that the F1 world felt that the FIA was out of order (in more ways than one). The investigation was killed with impressive haste and then, fortunately for the federation, Christmas intervened and everyone forgot about it. Susie Wolff did not. In French law defamation is a criminal offence for which people can be jailed. Under these laws it does not matter if the disputed fact is true or false as long as it is sufficiently precise to be subject to verification. The person accused can only avoid conviction if they can prove the authenticity of the allegation, which is going to be pretty hard to do.

Writing on social media at the time, Wolff said: “I might have been collateral damage in an unsuccessful attack on somebody else, or the target of a failed attempt to discredit me personally, but I have worked too hard to have my reputation called into question by an unfounded press release.”

What happens next is that a magistrate, known as a “juge d’instruction” will conduct an investigation to decide if there is a case to be answered. If there is sufficient evidence to warrant a trial, then there will be a trial. The juge d’instruction has wide-ranging powers to gather evidence and must be given access to all evidence. They may issue warrants allowing the authorities to raid offices and residences and seize evidence if those involved are not helpful. It is most unwise to try to dispose of evidence or to trust others involved to do the same. There might even be claims of conspiracy, which is where two or more people work together to commit a crime. It will all take a while, but those involved can expect to see policemen coming to call – and that is not great in any election campaign, as Donald Trump will tell you.

Some think that all of this is bad for Formula 1, but after talking to fans at my recent Audience in Melbourne, I am not so sure.  The nature of modern F1 means that this could actually be making the sport MORE popular because of the tangled and improbable melodramas that might have come straight out of a soap opera. Fans don’t seem to be too bothered that Max Verstappen wins a lot of races and they are happy to watch the goings-on. Perhaps one should consider the fact that the sport’s most popular figure is the less than choirboy-like Guenther Steiner, who seems to have a roguish charm that has made him so popular…

And if you think this is far-fetched, remember that Netflix will almost certainly soon announce that there will be two more seasons of Drive to Survive (to cover the 2024 and 2025 seasons) and we will be getting Brad Pitt’s unnamed movie as well in the summer of 2025. I’m told that the delays in finding a title for the film are caused by discussions over the trademark of F1™ and who should have what rights. As always it is all about money.

There are also fairly advanced plans for an F1 scripted drama (think The Sopranos, with tyre guns), which will tell keep the fans enthralled in the years ahead. Perhaps one day soon Guenther will have a fictional rival as the matinee idol of F1. If he does, her name will be Felicity…

So what happens on the race track might not be that important. There’s a paradoxical thought.

And here’s another: F1 is now heading north and the Australian autumn turns into the Japanese spring. Japan will be in its annual cherry blossom frenzy and the world will be pinker than Barbie’s nail varnish…