Green Notebook from Transylvania

To the west of Bucharest, north of where the Danube carves its way through the Carpathian mountains (also known as the Transylvanian Alps), there is a small city by the name of Deva. I fly over it on a regular basis on the plane from Paris to Doha. In fact, I’ve flown over it eight times in the last nine weeks. When I see Deva come up, on the clever inflight map they use on Qatar Airways, I always have a little chuckle to myself, imaging myself walking the streets below, looking for the railway station.

“Excuse me,” I say, “please could you direct me to Deva Station?”

And I imagine the local replying: “Well, let me see now. If I was going there, I wouldn’t start from here…”

Last week I was very happy to be flying to Doha, as my former staging post in the days of Emirates was Dubai International Airport – and it was under water, with some folk being trapped there for days. After more than 20 years as an Emirates gold card holder, I’ve given up and I am now a happy platinum with Qatar.

I feel loved again. I still had about 70,000 air miles left with Emirates and tried to give them away to one of my pals, as I’m not going to use them. I don’t know the Arabic for “Go f*&k yourself”, but if I did, I would definitely have used it when Emirates told me that I could give my miles away at a cost (to me) of €2,100.

Anyway, the point I’m making, in a transcontinental fashion, is that we’ve been travelling a lot in F1 in recent weeks.

Hours spent flying are never wasted. If one gets upgraded one can work, and if one is down the back, one can watch movies. If you travel too much, the movies run out, unless you are into fantasy films or ex-special forces people saving the world. As a result I discovered the delights of watching the foreign language films (which usually have subtitles) and so I’ve been taking in some excellent movies in French, German, Italian, Swedish and even Catalan.

One English language film I did see was Gran Turismo, the “based on fact” story of Jann Mardenborough, who went from being a gamer to become a professional racing driver in Nissan’s clever Gran Turismo Academy virtual-to-reality contest. It should not to be mistaken for Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino.

Some parts of the Mardenborough film are true. He did win the Nissan GT Academy competition, which was created by Nissan’s global motorsport director Darren Cox. In the movie Cox becomes Danny Moore (a character played by Orlando Bloom) while Gerry Halliwell Horner plays Jann’s mum.

There is a fictional engineering hard ass called Jack Salter (played by David Harbour), who mentors Jann. The Salter character is rather less interesting than the late Richard Divila, who fulfilled much of the role that Salter is given. The multi-talented Divila designed F1 cars, but also created a Volkswagen Beetle that lapped faster than sports cars such as the Ford GT40 and the Lola T70. He could speak English, Portuguese, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Czech and Russian and could read Greek philosophers in their original language.

He also had the world’s most eclectic musical taste (the CDs for which filled a large part of his house) and he would never have turned his nose up at Enya, the kind of music that Mardenborough listened to while chilling out before races.

Still, movie people are often fast and loose when it comes to facts and one generally needs to accept this if you want them to make a movie. To give the film credit, it does include the nasty accident in 2015 when Mardenborough went over the barriers in a crash on the old Nurburgring (which killed a spectator) but they twist the timeline, making the incident into something that motivated Mardenborough to do better. In fact he achieved his Le Mans podium in 2013, two years before the Nurburgring accident. The Le Mans success, commendable though it was, is turned into something it was not. The impression is given that he won Le Mans. The truth is that he finished third in the LMP2 class, ninth overall, and was 21 laps behind the winning Audi.

One should feel a little sorry for Spain’s Lucas Ordóñez, who won the Nissan GT Academy three years before Mardenborough and still holds the record for the programme’s best result at Le Mans (second in LMP2), but it did not suit the scriptwriters to have a Spaniard as the lead character.

There were a few moments in the movie that were commendable, such as discussions between Mardenborough and his father about how racing would not get him anywhere. “You told me to do what I love…” Jann says, leaving his father unable to answer back.  In this respect it is an inspirational movie because it shows that one can make impossible dreams come true. And there are moments that capture what the drivers are looking for.

“It’s just you and the car,” says Salter at one point. “It’s kind of magic.”

The idea of taking virtual racers and turning them into real competitors is something that is more acceptable today than it was 15 years ago. The top F1 drivers today are often star players in the virtual world as well, while we also have Max Esterson, a young American now racing in FIA Formula 3, who did no karting at all and started his career in Formula 1600 four years ago and is showing what virtual players can do on track. Sponsorship from iRacing is obviously helpful in this respect.

Racing is prohibitively expensive for most people and so the idea that one can get a break by way of the virtual world is a nice idea.

Cinderella in racing boots.

The power of dreams was highlighted in China when Guanyu Zhou (or Zhou Guanyu, if you prefer) went home to Shanghai to become the first Chinese F1 driver to race in China. Back in 2004, Zhou was in the grandstand, cheering for his hero Fernando Alonso. Twenty years later, he was racing in front of his home crowd (against the superannuated Spaniard).  The circuit was heaving, with some crazy numbers being bandied around about ticket sales. I don’t know how they worked it out given that the three-day crowd figure was 175,000 (with only 60,000 on Sunday), but it was said that 100,000 tickets were sold in 45 minutes. It was an emotional weekend for the Chinese driver, who learned how to speak English in Yorkshire. He did well, given the state of the team he drives for, and he will be an even bigger name in China by next year as a film about his life opened in 1,000 cinemas across the country on Friday. I hope that he is still around in F1 in 2025 as I think he deserves more given that the team has not been very good in recent years and this has held him back.

Still, dreams (even Hollywood ones) cannot always overcome harsh realities and it is clear that Audi has much bigger plans now that it has taken over the Sauber team. Having said that, there is no sign of any action at the moment and if there are Audi people about, they are pretty invisible…

Still, the German marque is busy in the driver market, trying to pin down some star names for the future. It is clear that the likes of Carlos Sainz and Nico Hulkenberg (the two top choices for Audi) do not wish to be pinned down this early – as there are bigger and better drives possible. The driver market is currently held up because Mercedes wants to try to lure Max Verstappen away from Red Bull Racing and because Red Bull is not making any decision about Sergio Perez. The chances are that Max will not leave Red Bull until he has seen what the engine situation is after the 2026 season. Alonso has signed for Aston Martin because he did not get enough interest from Mercedes or Red Bull and thus jumped early to ensure a seat for years to come.

Red Bull is thinking: “Why change something that works?” Perez is doing a better job this year, even if the cynics say that Sergio always wakes up at contract time. The amusing reality is that it is probably best for Red Bull NOT to sign Sergio until the end of the year, so he keeps up his current performance and does not go off the boil once he has a contract in the bag.

Sainz might be a better option in terms of performance, but Carlos is a different character and much more political (so they say). There is also the question of 2026 and beyond as Red Bull seem to be pretty keen on securing Alex Albon for the future. Williams would like to keep the Anglo-Thai for longer and he might be tempted to stay on if the team builds a better car, but he may be keen on Red Bull because if Max leaves Albon could become the team leader.

Audi is offering Carlos a lot of money and thus he must decide whether he wants performance or cash. But what he would like is time to make a decision and Audi does not want to give him that. It is the same with Hulkenberg. Audi is pushing but he is still not sure. Drivers are there to win races. Money follows success. So Audi really needs to get things moving before trying to catch big stars in their butterfly nets.

Mercedes has a different problem. The team is currently assessing whether it’s a good idea to put its prodigy Andrea Kimi Antonelli into Lewis Hamilton’s seat in 2025. The 17-year-old Italian recently spent two days testing a 2021 Mercedes W12 in Austria and a string of further tests is planned in the weeks ahead with a 2022 W13. The team seems keen to promote Antonelli but is worried that this might be too big a step and that it would be better for him to get some time in a smaller team before joining Mercedes in 2026. Antonelli could be loaned out to Williams, which is looking for a driver right now. Williams would take Antonelli if they could have him for 18 months, but the problem is that he is not old enough to get a superlicence until August 25th, when he turns 18. Williams might try asking the FIA for a dispensation, given that Max Verstappen was fine when he entered F1 at the age of 17, and if a youngster has what it takes then he should be allowed in.  This is a fair argument.

There is a lot of value in F1 getting a new rising star, particularly one from Italy. It’s a positive story – and the FIA could use a few of them at the moment. Refusal would be another negative story about the federation. If Antonelli did get a dispensation, he would be in the Williams at Imola on May 19, the perfect place for a Bolognese driver to make his F1 debut.

Logan Sargeant would get to race in front of his home crowd in Miami before being let go… This might all sound brutal, but F1 is about excellence – Top Gun, the elite, the best of the best – and Sargeant has had plenty of chances. I think Williams has been fair with him and has really wanted him to succeed – because an American F1 driver would be great news for the team and for the sport. The problem is that the battle for points this year is cut-throat.

To date the top five teams have scored 534 points and the other five teams have picked up 12 between them. The difference in prize money between sixth and 10th places is tens of millions of dollars, so every point down at the back is worth a fortune. Thus far Visa Cash App RB has scored two top 10 results and seven points, while Haas has managed four top 10 finishes but these have given the team only five points. Williams, Alpine and Kick/Strike/Sauber have not been far off so the fight is intense.

Someone is banging an old drum and proposing that it would be good to change the points-scoring system to cover the top 12, rather than the top 10, on the basis that more teams should score points.

This horse has been flogged before and the reality is that only the FIA would gain from this. The federation is bound by a commercial deal (signed in 2013 and lasting until 2030) that means that it gets licence fees from the teams and the drivers, on the basis of the points they score. Originally this was $5,000 per point per team and $1,000 per point per driver, but the numbers are index-linked and so, 11 years later, depending on the index-linking used, this means that an additional eight points awarded to teams and drivers per weekend would add around $1.5 million to the FIA revenues from F1 per year.

No-one in F1 wants to give the FIA more money, because not much of it is spent on the sport, although I did hear that the federation is also trying to charge each F1 circuit to grant it a licence. Given the troubled relationship between the various parties and the scale of the money that the FIA already gets, it is safe to say that no-one else wants to see more points awarded.

Anyway, back to the driver market. The intensity of the battle for points means that the bottom five teams are looking at their drivers with unforgiving eyes and Daniel Ricciardo, who was being discussed at one point as a Perez replacement, is now looking down the barrel of a gun, wondering if someone is going to pull the trigger. He got a new chassis for the Chinese GP and felt better with the car, but he was then rudely assaulted from the rear by Lance Stroll and had his race ruined. This explains why the Honey Badger was so angry with Stroll after the race. The Canadian was given a 10-second penalty, which was fair enough, but it did not help Ricciardo, who is only a few races away from being booted out and replaced by Liam Lawson, if he does not get some points.

Stroll, who is under no pressure thanks to his dad owning the team, thought his punishment was undeserved, while others believe that is a good description of his continued presence in the second Aston Martin.

The thing about Lawson is that his Red Bull contract stipulates that he must be given a race drive in 2025 or he can walk away to a rival team. Some other teams are interested, so Red Bull must decide what to do and logic suggests that they might as well sign him for next year and start training him up straight away, hoping that he will score more than the two current drivers.

Haas is happy enough with its two current drivers, but the team knows that it can get a lot of benefit if it takes on Ferrari youngster Oliver Bearman next year – and so it will need to decide whether to keep Hulkenberg or Kevin Magnussen. Hulkenberg has scored four points to Magnussen’s one and so the choice might seem to be fairly obvious, but The Hulk is in demand elsewhere (not just Audi), while Magnussen has been with the team for six seasons and is a jolly good chap. However, the quest for points means that tough decisions need to be made…

One can say that Valtteri Bottas and Guanyu Zhou have both not done very well, but that is unfair. The car has not been great and the team has been fairly shambolic and so the opportunities that did come along were wasted with mechanical troubles, poor pit stops and strategy calls that were not correct. Both are in danger of losing out next year, although that is not really fair… Still, with Zhou being so popular in China, Bottas needs to watch out as the combined consumer markets of mullet-favouring Finland and Australia do not amount to much when it comes to marketing value.

The Alpine situation is interesting in that both drivers have won F1 races and clearly they cannot do much with the current car. The team is improving as quickly as it can, but both Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly are out of contract at the end of the year and are both looking for other opportunities. If one goes, it might open the door in 2025 for Jack Doohan.

In the overall scheme of things, however, the driver market is still dependent a little on current performance and thus the only move one might see in the next few weeks is if either Carlos or Nico decide to take the Audi bait.

Other gossip is fairly thin on the ground at the moment, although the large number of race contract negotiations this year is providing some interest. China is the big one, of course, and the excitement this year generated by Zhou, is interesting for F1, even if the geopolitical situation between China and the West is not great. The trade war, started in 2018 by US President Donald Trump, has impacted both economies. Belligerent noise from China about Taiwan has not helped, while Chinese willingness to do business with Russia, although obvious and sensible in a Machiavellian world, has not gone down well in the West.

China is not the vast consumer market everyone imagined it would be 20 years ago. Instead of buying Western stuff, the Chinese are developing their own technologies and are now trying to export them around the world. Unfavourable opinions about China are largely based on fear for the future, but fascinating though country may be, it is not a popular venue for F1 people.

China wants a Grand Prix to show itself to be a global player, to promote its impressive economic power and the greatness of The Party. The thing is that while trying to create positive feedback, the underlings who do the bidding of the overlords, have spent endless years perfecting The Great Firewall of China, to stop pesky foreign visitors from communicating with the world outside. One can understand that internal opposition can be fed from abroad, but it seems utterly pointless to spend money on Formula 1 and then do everything possible to stop everyone who attends telling the world about the race.

The Great Firewall of China used to be something we could find ways around, but in the five years since F1’s last visit, the Chinese have closed most of the VPN loopholes. It is very clever, but at the same time, it is not clever at all. The struggles to get into the country and then trying to communicate during the weekend means that it is deeply unattractive to a lot of journalists.  There were not many there next year.

I guess that if the Chinese pay enough, they can have a race from 2026 onwards, but if they baulk at the price, I can see F1 politely telling them that they can forget it. There are plenty of other places that are attractive alternatives.

The city of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) sent representatives to Shanghai to see Stefano Domenicali about their fancy F1 project, but I do not see China getting two races and, in any case, the decisions about such events will inevitably come from Beijing, not from local bigwigs.

There are, incidentally, a few rumours about a possible race in Hong Kong, but the same rules apply, even if it is a special administrative region of China with a level of autonomy.

What we do know is that China wants to rebuild its tourist trade which has been destroyed by the various factors mentioned above. In 2019 there were 145 million visitors to China each year, in 2023 there were only eight million. And those numbers come from the Chinese government…

F1 is willing to give some tracks a little leeway because of their historical value, but it is not wise for any track to feel they have a god-given right to a Grand Prix. These days, they don’t.

Looking elsewhere, it is fair to say that Italy will have only one race in the future and the current situation should be read as Imola having been used to put pressure on Monza to make changes. The Belgian and Dutch Grands Prix are likely to fall into some kind of alternation agreement, but we must wait until the Belgian elections in June before decisions are made.

In theory Spain will have two Spanish GPs in 2026. It is not 100 percent clear who owns to the Spanish GP name (probably F1), but if there are two Spanish races in one year, Madrid will likely become the Madrid GP until Barcelona drops out. A second race in Spain in 2027 is very unlikely, but the future of Monaco is up for discussion again so maybe it will be used for a lever for a while longer. Right now, the signs are that we will have a rematch of the slugging match in 2022 between the Automobile Club de Monaco (ACM) and Formula 1. The ACM still has the same problem in believing that it is the only perfect race in the world and everyone should learn from them, but the reality is that Monaco’s attitude is as up to date as launching a steam-powered rocket to the moon.

The Principality has always paid a minimal fee, in recent years this has been about half the amount of the average F1 race. The biggest problem is that Monaco rarely produces a good race and there is an absolute refusal to change the circuit. There is potential in the Swimming Pool area, which might create a passing place, but Monaco does not want to know.

As part of the 2022 squabble, Monaco was forced to give up the TV production, which opened the way to new ideas and new camera angles. There were concessions also regarding hospitality and trackside signage. But more concessions are required. No-one in F1 enjoys working at Monaco and yet many agree that it should be on the F1 calendar. So now is the time for compromise and humility, although there seems little of either such commodity in the Principality.

Elsewhere the plans for India offer F1 some potential, but there are things that need to be sorted out. It is a very attractive market from a demographic point of view but F1 enthusiasm for the idea is well under control, although the sport is working on expanding the Indian fan base, with low-cost F1TV availability and a big push into the Indian markets with social media.

The race is supported by the Indian Prime Minister Prime Minister Narendra Modi and, if all goes to plan, it will take place in the Gujarat region, his home province. He is currently going through  national elections but is expected to win a third five-year term. The problem is that there are believed to still be legal actions going in relation to the last Indian GP – 11 years ago. This took place at the Buddh International Circuit in Uttar Pradesh, but claims for taxes and equipment being seized by the authorities, mean that F1 is wary of getting involved in India again unless conditions are different and not involving bureaucrats. So it is not just about building a track…

Build Your Dreams is the name of a major Chinese car company (aka BYD) and in the last five years, despite the pandemic, China has built a lot. Not long ago, the Chinese set a new world record for a train, travelling at 281 mph (451 kmh). They reckoned that the next generation of Maglev train (using superconducting magnets in a low-vacuum pipeline) will be able to travel at 621 mph, floating on air, eliminating friction and noise pollution. The original (and only) operational Maglev train still goes from Shanghai’s Pudong Airport to a station near the city centre, covering 19 miles in around seven minutes. It’s fun, but the plan is to create a network across the country by in the years ahead. This will help to reduce the cars on the road and planes in the sky. One thing that we noticed in China was the increase in the number of cars, the reduction in motorbikes. The road system is clogged more than before, but the air quality seems better probably because there are a lot of electric cars. There are still plenty of foreign firms doing good business but BYD and many other local brands with unusual names are emerging: watch out for exotic machines from Forthing, XPeng, Zeekr, Yangwang, HiPhi and Skywell… Not to mention the Ora Funky Cat. They are coming your way… and the Western car companies are going to struggle to compete. It is no laughing matter, but maybe F1 can provide a few good names for new cars. How about the Incredible Hulkmobile? The Ferrari Chuck Wagon or the Honda Honey Badger?

Maybe even the Deva Station wagon?

If nothing else, it will make me giggle…