Green Notebook from Cogoleto

Looking out of the window I can see the Ligurean Sea and the beach at Cogoleto. Away in the distance is the eastern part of the port of Genoa and, if it wasn’t cloudy, I could probably see the Portofino peninsula beyond that. I stopped here on the way to Monaco because the hotel promised a sea view and, just for a change, I have not been disappointed.

Cogoleto is interesting enough, but lacks good restaurants on a Tuesday night. There was a battle of sorts in 1800 when the French were trying to break the Austrian siege of Genoa. This failed, but sneaky old Napoleon won the war by beating the Austrians at Marengo, further to the north, which I will touch upon again a little later.

There is an ongoing battle in Cogoleto over whether or not this was where Christopher Columbus was born. There is a house in the centre of town, where there are various inscriptions saying that Columbus was born there, but it seems that there are other claimants. Given that Columbus was born in 1451, the records are not great, so the modern battle for tourist dollars is not easy to settle. Genoa also claims him, but it could be that the confusion comes because Cogoleto was part of the Republic of Genoa at the time. To be honest, I’m not bothered either way but the locals seem keen to keep fighting over him.

I’ve travelled 1,100 miles since I left home and it has been great to be back on the road after a couple of months in airports. The unruly hedgerows of northern France and the trundling tractors, splattering the roads with mud, are signs that the winter is over and the glories of summer are ahead. This year Paris will host the Olympic Games and I shall be avoiding it, because the roads are already clogged. It took several hours to get around the ring road, let alone go into the city. By the late afternoon, however, as I was climbing up through the Jura, heading towards Geneva, the odometer in my old trusty Toyota Prius registered 470,000 km. This is roughly 12 times around the world or, if the car could fly, we would now be on our way back to Earth after visiting the Moon.

In celebration of another 10,000kms under her belt, the car decided that it was time to renounce the quiet life and have a mid-life crisis and transformed her exhaust note into a rorty torty V8 rumble. The man in the ticket booth at the Mont Blanc tunnel said: “Oh, I thought you were a Ferrari” as I pulled up.

“Nope,” I replied (in French). “Just an old Prius with something wrong with the exhaust.”

“Sounds great,” he said.

It did, and heading down (literally) into Italy in the early evening, it was amusing to see heads turning, expecting to see a Ferrari but instead getting a rather antiquated but very reliable Toyota. This kept me amused as I roared across the paddy fields of the Po, where one is surrounded by water. Around the city of Vercelli the Italian rice industry produces 700,000 tonnes of rice a year. This makes a lot of risotto.

This part of the world is all about food and even the Battle of Marengo, which took place near Alessandria in 1800, is now best remembered for a chicken dish named after it by Napoleon’s chef. After one reaches Piacenza one turns to the south-east, down the autostrada running parallel to the Roman Via Emilia, with the coastal plains to the left and the foothills of the Appenines on the right. This is the land of Parmigiano, Parma ham, Lambrusco wine and dark gloopy balsamic vinegar from Modena. There is the colossal monument to food just outside Parma, in the form of the Barilla pasta factory, which churns out 450,000 tons of pasta a year, which makes the Barilla family very rich, although Paolo Barilla, once an F1 driver and winner of the Le Mans 24 Hours, knows how to  be inconspicuous and can pass through crowds unnoticed while flashier folk, who are poor by comparison, jingle with bling and dress to be noticed.

Before one gets to Imola one passes through the so-called Motor Valley, where supercars are born. This is one of the reasons that Imola holds an F1 race, to promote the automotive engineering cluster of Emilia Romagna.

The race name is slightly longer than the silly Welsh town of Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch, being officially known as the “Formula 1 MSC Cruises Gran Premio del Made in Italy e dell’Emilia Romagna 2024”. This is held at the Autodromo Internazionale Enzo e Dino Ferrari, which is positively short by comparison.

I cannot imagine any commentator saying all of this, even if they could manage it without tripping over their own tongue.

So we all get around the problem by calling it “Imola” and then moving swiftly on to chatter about the bad old days 30 years ago. One should remember these things, of course, but I find the whole “On This Day” movement to be a bit of publicity bandwagon, onto which lots of people wish to jump. Those who were present at Imola in 1994 (and there are not many left in F1 these days) are less keen on dressing up in Senna yellow and parading about for the TV cameras, as many of those who were not there are currently doing.

It was a busy weekend at the autodromo, in part because the local police force created a strategic traffic plan which involved closing as many roads as possible, in order to drive visitors bonkers as they tried to navigate in or out of the city. Each morning we watched people coming in looking frazzled from the traffic even before the work had begun.

Stefano Domenicali is a native of Imola, and the city is obviously delighted with the work he has done getting them an F1 race. He was duly granted the keys to the city by the mayor Marco Panieri (the one in the tricolor sash) but Stefano has yet to have a street named after him. I know this because we visited every thoroughfare in the town trying to get out one evening, after unwisely deciding to eat in the charming medieval downtown area.

What was clear is that the Roman Empire was not built by policemen from Emilia Romagna.

Stefano and his troops are busy building the Formula 1 empire at the moment and the latest excitement in this respect is the delivery to the teams of the first draft of a new Concorde Agreement, to get the sport from 2026 to 2030. For those who do not know, the Concorde Agreement is a commercial agreement between the various parties that governs the sport. It was created more than 40 years ago and continues to work pretty well, although it needs updating from time to time.

Much of the new deal is not contentious, but there are things that need to be sorted out. It is all secret, by the way, so knowing what is in it is not easy. The prize money structure is likely to be changed to give the smaller teams a better share and the extra money that Ferrari receives will remain, but it will be capped and no longer a percentage of the revenues. There is also a new  system for new entries, which will require applicants to fulfil certain requirements (as yet unknown, but likely to include racing and winning in Formula 2 and Formula 3) and a bigger anti-dilution fee that applicants will have to pay to get access to the prize money. There may also be a first year without any prize money to make sure that any new teams are serious. The FIA’s involvement in this is minimal as it has the separate Concorde Implementation Agreement, which runs until 2030, covering governance and associated fees, which are index-linked.

Politics was a bit of a talking point as there were Prime Ministers aplenty with Thailand’s Srettha Thavisin and Bahrain’s Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa both on the grid. Thavisin wants  a race and Al Khalifa is the man who decides what happens at McLaren and was present following Lando Norris’s victory in Miami.

The Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was going to attend but was busy and so sent along her deputy Matteo Salvini. They were joined actor Hugh Grant, who I seem to recall once played the role of being a Prime Minister in a rom-com, although it was so good that I have forgotten the name of the film.

The grid was a Presidential-free zone as Donald Trump was busy in court and Mohammed Ben Sulayem was busy scheming how to get re-elected as FIA President in 2025.

There was an odd statement from the FIA declaring that the Formula 1 group and the federation are going to make peace and live happily ever after. This caused a few wizened eyebrows to creak upwards. There has been a state of friction since Ben Sulayem was elected in December 2021 and so this was a bit of a surprise. This was clearly something that he and his sidekicks wanted in the public domain and the Formula 1 group did not object. However they did not issue the same statement, only acknowledging it and making the vaguest of conciliatory noises. This indicated to me that Liberty Media does not want to waste energy on conflict with the FIA, which serves no useful purpose, but whether they want to help the current FIA President be re-elected is quite a different matter.

There were political moves of a different kind at Audi with Oliver Hoffmann now beginning to make changes to get the F1 project as he thinks it should be. Hoffmann is the General Representative of Audi F1 and is responsible for managing Sauber, the power unit division at Audi Formula Racing GmbH in Germany, and managing the relationship between the team and its parent company Audi AG. Politics within the Volkswagen Group, of which Audi is a part, sometimes makes the Borgias look like a parochial church council. It is hard to follow who is trying to murder who and even Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple might struggle to see the fingerprints on some of the knives. This is not a great way to go racing and those with long memories may recall the Ford Motor Company getting its knickers into a similar kind of twist over Jaguar Racing 20 years ago. What the project needs is F1 people who know what they are doing, rather than corporate pole climbers. We will have to see how it all turns out but the dynamics of the entire project have changed since it was announced in August 2022. Originally the project was led by Markus Duesmann, a former BMW F1 engineer, who was then Audi CEO. To cut a long story short, he put in place a group of ex-BMW people to run the project. He lost out to Oliver Blume in the fight to become CEO of VW Group. As a result he was duly taken out by a well-aimed corporate bullet in the summer of 2023, when Gernot Döllner was made the boss of Audi. Hoffmann, who was chief development officer of Audi under Duesmann, was then hit by a flying axe but survived and staggered into the F1 role. He has now decided that his long-time assistant (I have heard him described as “a hit man”) Julius Seebach, who was at one point the head of Audi Sport, should now become chief operating officer at Sauber. Manufacturers have a habit of breezing into F1 thinking it is all very easy and they almost always end up with egg on their smug faces. Alpine’s bosses are currently trying to wipe off the remnants of their recent omelette-interface, while GM is busy scrambling its eggs in preparation for a disaster it will not see coming.

This sort of thing does confuse the driver market because the boys in F1, who are generally not good at cooking, are trying to figure out where best to go to avoid executives who think they know what they are doing, but usually don’t.

Carlos Sainz was the talk of the town at Imola with lots of surreptitious meetings regarding his future. What emerged is that he is unlikely to get a drive with either Mercedes or Red Bull, but Audi is willing to pay him a LOT of money. Apparently the number is actually a little shocking, but Carlos is not someone who needs more cash and he would prefer to have the best available seat. Audi (I am not sure who exactly) has set some targets that seem pretty unrealistic of being at the front of the midfield by the end of 2025. Given the state of the team at the moment, this is about as likely as Hugh Grant becoming a Prime Minister, although there have been some new hires at Hinwil, including the American engineer Steven Petrik, who has been at Ferrari (with Sainz) and Lee Stevenson, Max Verstappen’s chief mechanic at Red Bull in an effort to get the team up to speed.

On the engineering front there is rumoured to be a big change at Brackley where the Mercedes team’s continues to struggle. This has led to the departure of Gioacchino “Jack” Vino, who has been the chief aerodynamicist of the team since 2022 and has been with the team since 2018. Vino is an Australian but with a name like that will probably end up a Ferrari, which likes picking up ex-Mercedes people.

Haas is busy trying to build a better future and the whisper is that since Nico Hulkenberg signed for Audi, the team has been looking to have Esteban Ocon replace him. The other seat is going to go to Ferrari protégé Oliver Bearman, although the news has yet to be announced. Ocon is also on the list of drivers that Audi is interested in, but the state of the Swiss team and the time it will take to be fixed, plus uncertainty about the Audi engine in 2026, makes Haas a better option.  The suggestion is that if Sainz and Ocon do not join Audi the available seat there will go to Pierre Gasly.

Alpine says that it is happy with its current drivers (which cannot be said vice versa). Team boss Bruno Famin says (quite rightly) that the priority is to get the car more competitive and then drivers can be sorted out.  If the current drivers depart, the team will probably look at Guanyu Zhou (a former Renault Academy driver), who knows the team and is a big bonus in marketing terms being Chinese. Mick Schumacher is racing for Alpine in WEC and is also a possibility, as is the team’s reserve Jack Doohan, who was out testing an old Alpine at Zandvoort in the week before Imola. If the team wants someone with race-winning experience and a funny hairdo, it might choose Valtteri Bottas.

Elsewhere, the chances of there being an Indian Grand Prix have again receded after Moto GP ran into trouble with the promoter and with the Indian authorities. F1 left India because of tax demands from the country’s bureaucrats and will not return until these rules are changed. The planned circuit on Gujarat is rumoured to have been axed as a result. This is a shame as India is potentially a fantastic market for F1, although progress can be made through TV and social media even if the red tape is impenetrable.

This brings me back to traffic. On Monday morning, after a long night of work, I had to stop to rush a colleague to the airport in Bologna. The experience was such that when a few hours later I set off to drive towards Monaco, I took the decision to go south, up the valley of the Santerno, rather than trying to get through Bologna on the autostrada. For once there was a bit of free time and I had a vague plan to go across the hills, by way of the Futa Pass – once a big deal on the Mille Miglia road races from Brescia to Rome and back, and then down through the Mugello valley towards Florence where I could pick up the motorway up the west coast of Italy to Genoa. What I didn’t realise was that the damage done in these parts by last year’s flooding was such that it is still being fixed and the roads are a mess, with constant temporary traffic lights where repairs are required. There was evidence of some impressive landslides along the way.

I was tired and had not eaten anything that morning and so after less than an hour on the road I stopped to have lunch. The food was wonderful, including a mysterious dessert called Zuppa Inglese, which translates as “English Soup”. I don’t quite know how to describe it but it was wonderful…

The waiter explained that this was an invention of Caterina Sforza, the Lady of Imola, who had encountered an English trifle somewhere along the way and asked her chefs to create something similar. It is far, far, better…

Naturally other regions also claim this dish as their own. One can easily start an argument (if not a war) by claiming that pizza was invented in Naples.

I decided after that that I would stay overnight and spent the whole afternoon asleep, too tired to go any further. That evening I discovered that the village had a amazing cobbled humpback bridge, dating from 1500, which so they say inspired Leonardo de Vinci to design a bridge for Istanbul (which was never built).

There was also an old fortress which today houses various museums about the heavy fighting which took place in the area in 1944 as the Allies battled to breach the Gothic Line. There was also a  museum devoted to the chestnut.

I drove up through the Futa Pass in cloud and rain, pondering whether to drop into Pisa, or La Spezia, or even Portofino, but I just kept going. One thing that was amusing was that Imola provided a first for me. I had never before been asked for a selfie on the grid… It made me wonder: could I now call myself “an influencer”? I guess if I was commercially-minded I would have found a sponsor for this column and you’d be reading The Green Notebook, brought to you by Maalox, or such a thing. I guess that if I thought that way I might also be driving a loaned Ferrari rather than a Ferrari-sounding Prius. Mind you, this column is as much about the romance of travel as it is about motor racing, so a Prius is a better travelling companion than a flashy Ferrari. One of the great travel writers Robert Louis Stevenson might never have been successful if he had called his book “Travels with a Racehorse in the Cévennes”, as this might not have sold as well as his adventures with Modestine, a belligerent ass.

I’m laughing as I write, because that last line could give me a great segue into quite a few people in the world of motorsport and I’m having to “bite my tongue” not to take advantage of the moment…

Anyway, I concluded that having a Ferrari loaner would be a disaster as someone would nick it if I took it to some of the places I travel. And I’d probably get a lot of speeding tickets.

Still, a smart influencer would be driving around in a free Ferrari, sponsored (virtually) by Imodium, with a Maalox-funded green notebook in their Boy Bag by Chanel.

Not really my world. I’ll stick with Zuppe Inglese and racing cars.

Joe Saward is hosting an Audience for fans in Montreal, if you would like to along and ask questions, click here