Notebook from TGI Fridays

It’s six in the morning (or it was when I started writing this) and here in Pulkovo Airport in St Petersburg, TGI Fridays is quiet. The coffee machine is broken, which doesn’t help attract business, but the waitress is placidly friendly and helpful and the apple juice is spectacular, as it seems to have involved some real apples at some point in the not-too-distant past.

There are a couple of things going for the 02.20 flight out of Sochi to St Petersburg: firstly, it’s not as bad as the 03.30 to Moscow, nor the 04.00 to Istanbul; secondly, Pulkovo is a small, modern airport and it’s less painful than the venerable Moscow airports,which are reminiscent of another age. Either way, one can get home by midday, which is a bonus given that we didn’t leave the circuit until midnight. Another bed-less night is no big deal in the F1 world at this time of year…

So, anyway, I’m watching the World Bartender Championship, simply because I don’t have the energy not to. A Polish reporter who was on the same flight has passed by and we briefly discussed the fact that we are sitting close to the birthplace of motorsport in Russia. You have to be a uber-fan to know this sort of stuff, but a mile or two south of the airport is a road called the Volkhonskoye Shosse, or Волхонское шоссе if you go native. This runs from Strelna, up on the coast, all the way down to Alexandrovskaya, where the Catherine Palace, the summer home of the Tsars of Imperial Russia, is located. The road is a 13-mile long straight and it was used for the first Russian motor race in October 1898. For the record, it was won by Pavel Belyaev riding a Clément tricycle, who completed the up-and-back course at a stately 16.9 mph, despite some snow. It’s snowy a lot in St Petersburg. There were even a few hints of it on the ground when we flew in on the way to Sochi.

Russia is a big country. It was three hours and 25 minutes flying from Paris to St Petersburg, and it’s three hours from St Petersburg to Sochi.

Down in Sochi, there was snow on the mountains, but on the coast it was warm and sunny. This is not surprising when one considers that the city is on the same latitude as Nice and Biarritz, so at this time of year it should be delightful. I didn’t go down to walk by the sea, but I am told that on a good day, you will see dolphins swimming offshore.

I’ve not been a fan of the race in Sochi up to now, but I have continued to visit because I believe that the duty of an F1 reporter (a proper one) is to go to all the races. Lots of people stay at home and write as though they are present, but I’m afraid I find that completely fraudulent. This year there seemed to be a few more journalists in the Media Centre, but a closer look revealed that the number of international media was probably down a little on last year, but there were a lot more Russians. That is a good sign because it indicates that Russia is getting into F1 a little more. The crowd on Sunday was 60,000, with 150,000 passing through the gates in the course of the weekend. I’m told that President Vladimir Putin was keen to find out whether the drivers on the F1 podium thought that there were more Russian fans than before. Sebastian and Kimi apparently said that this seemed to be the case, while Valtteri (quite rightly) said that he was enjoying being a race winner and had not really thought about such a question. Putin seems to like being on the podium each year – which is one of the reasons I always felt uncomfortable about the race.

This year, however, the podium provided the GP+ photographer Peter Nygaard with a chance to show his genius, with a spectacular photograph (right) which appeared in GP+, which should win a lot of awards this year.

If you want to see more of his work, go to www.grandprixphoto.com.

Anyway, one of the reasons that F1 people didn’t much like Sochi was that most of them stay in the old Olympic precinct, where you never feel that you are experiencing the real Russia. This year, because of rampant gouging by the airlines and a dubious cancellation of hotel reservations (because they wanted to raise the prices), I ended up arriving a day early and moving about a kilometre, from one side of the circuit to the other. It made a world of difference because the west side of the track was actually in Russia, while the east side is in this strange Disney-like vacuum world. It was fun to try to communicate with the Russians. One evening, for example, I asked for the bill at the end of dinner and ended up another beer instead! I didn’t understand why they constantly played ‘All I want for Christmas is you’ on the hotel tannoy and I never did comprehend why the whole place was billed as being a ‘boutigue hotel’, but it really didn’t matter. I felt connected to real Russians and was much happier as a result. I’ll be back there next year…

The first note in the green notebook over the weekend was “buy a new green notebook” because the current one is beginning to fall apart. The spine has detached itself from the cover and there are only a few pages left for my scribblings.

The big news of the weekend was the Sauber-Honda deal, which was not a great surprise. It has taken a long time to put it all together but the announcement tends to suggest that McLaren and Honda will be staying together because part of the deal was for Sauber to buy McLaren gearboxes, which wouldn’t be much use if McLaren was switching to Mercedes. Whether or not Mercedes will be helping Honda with technology is a separate question, but I know I am not going to get an answer to that one. If we see a major improvement on Honda by the end of the season one will be able to surmise, with some accuracy, that Honda might have had a little help. This sort of thing is quite normal in the industry, where companies buy technology from one another all the time, to save time and costs, but when it comes to F1 there is a sort of corporate ego that gets in way of people admitting they cannot do things that their rivals can.

Rumour-wise things were pretty quiet. Bernie Ecclestone turned up but once again kept a remarkably low profile, perhaps understanding that saying too much might not please the new owners of the sport and the last thing Mr E wants is to have a pass that makes the wrong noise when he tries to get into the paddock. Actually, that will probably never happen because the new owners are admitting more people into the paddock these days and will be doing more of the same at all races. There are some interesting new developments going on to try to give fans a better deal, including – so I am told – a little more showbiz, some t-shirt guns, pyrotechnics and even some two-seater F1 cars. There is also a developing plan to have Mercedes AMG cars whizzing around tracks, giving fans ‘taxi’ rides. It is all part of a vision to be more fan-friendly. There is also going to be a big push to market the F1 brand a lot more. In the past this sort of thing has been minimal.

We’re still waiting to see about the way the calendar will develop, but we hope that there will be a list of dates for 2018 as early as possible and that we don’t have to wait until December as has been the norm. Next year we know we will lose Malaysia, but we will get Germany and France back, so that means 21 races. My feeling is that the goal is to push up the number of races over the next few years. That will only be possible if they design the calendar better.

It is interesting to note that there has been one very quiet impact as a result of Formula 1 becoming (at least in a legal sense) a US-based company, quoted on the NASDAQ stock exchange in New York. Since 2014 a number of Russian individuals and companies have been listed for sanctions by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. These include Boris and Arkady Rotenberg who, according to the US government “have provided support to Putin’s pet projects by receiving and executing high price contracts for the Sochi Olympic Games and state-controlled Gazprom.  They have made billions of dollars in contracts for Gazprom and the Sochi Winter Olympics awarded to them by Putin.  Both brothers have amassed enormous amounts of wealth during the years of Putin’s rule in Russia.  The Rotenberg brothers received approximately $7 billion in contracts for the Sochi Olympic Games and their personal wealth has increased by $2.5 billion in the last two years alone”. US companies are not allowed to do business with those who are sanctioned and so the Formula 4 race that was due to be run in support of the Grand Prix was axed because it is promoted by a Rotenberg company. Boris was much in evidence in the F1 Paddock over the weekend, in company with two rather hefty-looking individuals with earpieces, who even managed to get out on to the grid in Sochi.

The driver market is still pretty quiet, although the future of Fernando Alonso is much discussed at the moment, with the suggestion being that he has had a serious offer for employment from Renault for 2018 and beyond. This makes sense, although McLaren is still hoping to employ him. There seems to be little or no interest in his services from Ferrari, Mercedes and Red Bull. No-one doubts his driving skills, but it seems that his team-building talents are not highly-rated.

The odd thing about the Russian GP, on the race track, was that up to Sochi Mercedes had had the advantage in qualifying and Ferrari in the race. In Russia the roles reversed. The most notable element outside the big two teams was the fact that Red Bull Racing was well off the pace – and also not very reliable. The word is that Adrian Newey has been stung into action in recent weeks after the team’s poor performances. The theory is that Adrian has been wrapped up in the Aston Martin Valkyrie programme in the course of the six months and this meant that the F1 car did not get much of his attention. Now that it is not doing well, that is not good for the Newey reputation, so he’s back on the gas big time in an effort to close the gap. Clearly, Red Bull is pushing hard. The word in Sochi was that Ben Waterhouse, the deputy technical director of Scuderia Toro Rosso, has left the Italian operation and will shortly take up a new role at Red Bull Racing, as a member of the Milton Keynes team’s vehicle dynamics department, under Pierre Waché.

Now, I’m off to find a new green notebook…