Notebook from the Maison de Kyoto

I am having lunch at a Japanese restaurant near where I live, where the staff are wonderfully friendly, where the sashimi is good and where they have a photo on the wall of a Ferrari GT racing car, signed by some local hero whose name I do not recognize. On the way home I shall stop and have a quick perve at the Maserati dealership, and just around the corner from that there is a magnificent garage, an Aladdin’s Cave where they look after collectors’ cars and park them on the street when there is not sufficient space inside (see below). I have seen some spectacular machinery in there over the years…

I spent the whole of Monday driving home from Monaco, avoiding French people who don’t share the same passion for road safety as Jean Todt. It was a long weekend in France (Ascension Day) and so Monday saw a lot of folk heading home, colliding with one another and blocking the autoroutes, to allow rescuers and helicopters to pick up the pieces. In the end we left the motorway on the way up the Rhone valley, fed up with lunatics and listening to reports of massive traffic jams on the road ahead. Instead we crossed the river and, pottered up and over the Pilat massif and then descended into Saint-Étienne, where one can pick up a fast road to Clermont-Ferrand. The route is longer, but it is much nicer to drive, it avoids the carambolages of Vienne and the accordions of Lyon, where cars are forever stuck, stopping and starting, moving like the evocative musical instruments that give this traffic phenomenon its wonderful name. One can queue for hours to get through the tunnel of Fourvière and, to be honest, I’d rather be proceeding across the Forez (where they had a Grand Prix of that name back in the dark ages of the sport) leading to Clermont-Ferrand (the home of Michelin and the French GP, not to mention the Gordon Bennett Cup in another age). From Clermont one turns north and arrives into Paris on the western side of the agglomeration and so time is saved there too. It is an additional 60 miles, but they are scenic and a lot less stressful than following the madding crowd.

A rather dim Spanish truck driver did try to kill us when he decided to reverse at a toll barrier, without checking to see if anyone was behind him. He was also deaf because he did not respond to multiple (frantic) horn noises, as he pushed us backwards… the major damage was to his ears when he finally woke up to the fact that he was a dozy danger to shipping… After that I kept seeing other trucks from the same company, which I had never noticed before so, bizarrely, this incompetent fool managed to promote the XPO brand, albeit in a rather negative way. I’m not about to use a company that hires hibernating Hispanics to drive their HGVs.

The notebook from Monaco makes note early on of the price of the grandstand tickets, which was hiked this year. Today a decent ticket for Monaco is going for between €600-€700, while you can get a place on a VIP terrace for probably €1200, which apparently a lot of people have been doing because then not only do you get a great view (and a telly in most cases), but you also get fed and watered, If you are going to invest that much, you might as well add a bit more and have more fun.

Everything in Monaco is expensive and much of it is badly organised. The traffic planning was more disastrous than ever, despite the locals having built a great new tunnel to speed up access. One gets the impression that no thought ever goes into the planning and they simply do the same thing year after year.

There was some chatter in the paddock about a promotional event which F1 is planning for London in the week before the British Grand Prix. I am hearing that all the teams will be taking part but the venue and the timing are being kept secret to avoid vast crowds, particularly in this age where people have been known to drive vehicles into crowds because they imagine that their god would think this a good idea. So, if you are an F1 fan keep your eyes (and ears) peeled that week. Logically, it has to be in the middle of the week because the machinery has to arrive from Austria and is needed up in Northamptonshire by Thursday. I am a little lost as to the logic of having secret promotional events, but I guess that if this is the only way to do it, then it is worth doing.

Another note I have in the book is regarding the recruiting that is going on by the Formula One group at the moment. Ross Brawn is building up a small team of expert F1 folk to try to make sure that the decisions being taken make sense and that they are properly thought through. The word is that Ross was a busy fellow at the recent sale of Manor F1 assets, which gave him a windtunnel model of a current car, without the expense of developing one. This was cheap as chips, of course, because who else wants a windtunnel model of a modern F1 car, unless they intend to turn it into a coffee table or a garden ornament… I also hear that Ross is being very careful about recruitment because he does not wish to be accused of taking talent away from the teams – and so he is waiting for when good people leave (or are fired) and is picking them up as and when they are available. One name I have heard is that of Nikolas Tombazis, once the chief designer of Ferrari…

I also have a note about the possible departure of Petronas as a sponsor, because of the political troubles in the country, but I was firmly told no by the folks at Mercedes Benz. There is a contract etc etc etc… The question of Jolyon Palmer also came up on the rumour circuit with the suggestion being that the Brit needs to produce some more good results to avoid trouble. To be fair to Jolyon, he has had more than his fair share of mechanical troubles this year, but team boss Cyril Abiteboul says “We all have to deliver”.

The FIA hosted a Women in Motorsport event to show that the sport is all about performance rather than gender, but one does have to ask whether it is a good idea to draw attention to something that is not supposed to be a problem. The conference was revealing in that it underlined the belief that the biggest problem in getting young women to embark on careers in motorsport is what was termed “a poverty of aspiration”. This means that it is hard to get teenage girls to commit to engineering and race car driving because there are few with suitable ambitions. What is required is good role models to inspire youngsters to follow that path… What was interesting is that the FIA says that it has recently applied for funding from the EU’s Erasmus programme, which has an annual budget of €14.7 billion to support the development of education, training, youth and sport in Europe. This is aimed at creating an FIA Academy-style of training programme for young women drivers.

The other rumbling concern is the McLaren-Honda relationship with a major meeting taking place on the Friday. Everyone is being very tight-lipped about the outcome of these discussions. The word is that the Japanese are still not keen on getting help from their rivals (which is the fastest way to solve the problem) and want to continue to go through pain until it all comes right. This is the kind of philosophy that Mr Honda employed in building the company. He didn’t want his engineers to be frightened to innovate, but the problem with the F1 programme is that the company does not appear to be learning from its mistakes. McLaren cannot afford to strap itself to a rocket that is not flying. It has hung in with Honda for two and a half years of pain. In 2015 the partnership was ninth in the Constructors’ Championship. In 2016 it was sixth. This year, six races into the season, the team is 10th and last, the only team not to score a point. One can understand the frustration because McLaren is now beginning to get into a place where staff will start to leave because their input cannot overcome Honda’s problems. Holding on to good people is the toughest task in F1 and it is clear that McLaren is worried that more years of struggle will weaken the team, will make it less attractive to sponsors, and will damage its reputation. If the relationship is going to break down, Honda at least has a parachute in the form of Sauber, while McLaren could become a Mercedes customer for next year. The team might not win races, but the results would likely be better. Decisions are needed soon to avoid compromising the 2018 programmes.

The other story that has been bubbling away since the race has been the suggestion that Ferrari somehow screwed Kimi Raikkonen because it wanted Sebastian Vettel to win. In some respects Ferrari has only itself to blame for this because in the past it has focussed on one driver, to the detriment of the other. It was efficient, but not very sporting. So what really happened? Was Kimi screwed? For me the answer is clearly no, not at all. If you look at the numbers you see that Raikkonen pitted when his lead was 1.1 secs. When Vettel came out after his stop, a few laps later, he was 2.0 secs ahead. So the question is what happened to the 3.1 secs involved. This is easy to find. In the pits Vettel was half a second faster than Raikkonen. So the pit crew was not to blame. The secret is in the IN and OUT laps. Going into the pits Vettel gained 1.4 secs on his IN lap, and exiting on his OUT lap he clawed back another  0.9 secs. Add those two numbers and the half a second mentioned and you get to 2.8 secs. And there is no mystery.