Thoughts at the airport

Regular readers will know that the life of a Formula 1 reporter is one that tends to leave a trail of destruction, with children in odd places and residences that once had a purpose. I even have a very dead car sitting in a barn somewhere, next to box loads of F1-related documentation and other bric-a-brac. The lock of the barn is broken and so to access this treasure trove, one needs to climb through a window that is hidden behind undergrowth, where even cats fear to tread. I guess it’s a bit like those cars one hears about that have been bricked up in old garages. Alas, this is no Bugatti Atlantic but rather a humble Golf, dented by Paris parking à l’époque. I am not one of those people who fill their houses with F1 stuff so it all sits in lofts and garages. My wife is a practical soul and says that I should start an F1 museum of my own with all the memorabilia that lurks in the dark corners of my hideouts. It is worse than it sounds, because in addition to the flotsam and jetsam of my own F1 career, I have inherited the collections of others that stretch back to an age when I was still in short trousers. Still it is nice to have things like Frank Williams’s original brochure in 1969, or a Matra press pack. I have so much, I don’t even know what I have. A few years ago I spotted a file marked “Le Mans” and inside, amongst a number of other folders, I found a sheaf of original reports from the 1955 Le Mans 24 Hours, typed on the thin copy paper that they used in the old days. There were even editing marks. I had inherited it from a colleague, who had inherited it from a colleague…

There was a time when good fortune on the property market meant that I owned a nice apartment just off the Avenue Foch in Paris, school fees took care of that and I was left with a cottage in a delightful country village, about an hour and a half out of Paris, where streams have carved their way through the limestone of the Oise and created deep wooded valleys where, in medieval times, people built abbeys, donjons, priories and manoirs. For a while I lived out in these lovely sticks, but then life conspired to shift my focus back to Paris itself and so I have a weekend house and a life that requires me to be away for more than half the weekends in a year… All of this means that I don’t get to visit the house very often, indeed this year I spent one night there between February and the start of September. This meant that my wisteria was threatening the peaceful existence of the village and my tree (of unknown genus, let alone family) has grown so high that it was blocking out the sun for my neighbours. The architecturally-minded spiders of the neighbourhood had moved into the house, killing off the flies and had constructed a city of artful webs, untouched by human intervention. One of the joys of my existence is that I am not tied to one place, except by others and so when my other half had some holiday time we took off to the cottage and embarked on some clear-up. It is good to get away from the computer screen for a few hours each day and chopping down trees is as good an exercise as riding a bike. The other reason for the trip is that from now until the end of November there is not much time available to do such things. Thanks to the current F1 calendar, we are playing yo-yos to Asia for the rest of this month and then, because Sochi is really in the back of beyond, we have to come back to Europe in order to go there, by way of Moscow. The only option was flying through Istanbul and those flights sold out months ago. There may be other routes with correspondences in Tashkent, Yerevan, Yekaterinburg, Chișinău, Ulaanbaatar, Bishkek, Tambov, Ufa and Boompsidaisy, but I can live without such experiences. After we’ve done that, we get a brief break and then it’s Austin, Sao Paulo and Abu Dhabi in quick succession. And then it’s into the Christmas shopping… Fortunately, in the autumn months the wisteria doesn’t grow that much…

So while I was doing all this, the F1 world sailed on. The only news of any real important, or certitude, was that Mercedes announced the appointment of Pascal Wehrlein to the position of reserve driver. The 19-year-old from Sigmaringen had an impressive early career in single-seaters but lack of money led him to DTM, where he was the youngest driver in the history of the series and recently became the youngest ever winner. Little known to the world was the fact that he has spent 30 days this year in the Mercedes simulator this season, covering over 12,000 virtual kilometres in an F1 W05 Hybrid. He got his first chance to drive a proper F1 car at the Autodromo Internacional Algarve in Portimao recently.