Notebook from DXB

It’s prayer time and the muezzin is singing his adhan out there somewhere in the darkness. The shoe shine boys are busy, but the lounge is still quiet. It’s 04-something and although they have started serving breakfast, the body clock says it’s time for a glass of wine, and so the two thoughts are combined. It’s Sauvignon Blanc and scrambled eggs, and it’s not outrageous. We’ve been living on dubious 7-Eleven egg sandwiches for the last few days, with some of Japan’s wonderful chocolate, known as Crunky, which comes in useful shiny sheep-dropping sized balls, which do not melt. They are probably rice-based but I’ve never investigated. Crunky is Crunky.

There are six of us in this quiet corner of the lounge. Some of us here left Shiroko this morning, heading north to Nagoya, then took the Shinkansen super expresses (otherwise known as Bullet Trains) up to Tokyo and flew out of Narita. Others stood on the opposite platform at Shiroko and went south, on the Kintetsu Line to Osaka Namba and from there to Renzo Piano’s Kansai International Airport. And now here we all are, back together in Dubai International Airport (known as DXB), changing planes and all bound for different destinations. Next week we will all meet up again in Austin, Texas.

The flight attendant on the plane in Osaka Kansai asked me how it was that I knew so many of the other passengers. It’s Formula 1, I said, we go to the same places. We use the same planes. This was Monday night, and the planes were filled with those who work Sunday nights and cannot just run off to the nearest airport as soon as the chequered flag has fallen. I’ve always wanted to write an article to show where F1 people are 12 hours after a race. Quite often, we are still in the media centres, long after the drivers and team bosses are home. We all do different things and meet in different time zones and different places. I rarely go through Dubai without meeting someone I know.

The Japanese green notebook pages begin with two notes: “This is a pen test,” it says. “This pen works fine”. There is also a note about avoiding green KitKat because it is flavoured with tea, rather than something interesting like wasabi, the wonderful Japanese horseradish that can blow the back of your head clean off, if you eat too much of it.

There is another note that says “Halloween”. The Japanese, being heavily into things spiritual, enjoy Halloween much more than some other nations, and the build-up to the Eve of All Hallows (which is October 31) begins earlier. The symbols are the same, with orange pumpkins and witchy women with pointy hats and broomsticks. On Saturday in Suzuka, a pumpkin the size of a pillbox (military rather than medical), appeared in front of the gate between the circuit and the Circuit Hotel. The rooms in this establishment are allotted to the F1 teams and most of the media stay in hotels in Shiroko and ride the five kilometres to the track on buses provided for them, at set hours of the day (and night).

The Japanese have been in F1 longer than all the other Asians and they “get it” much more than the others. The fans are enthusiastic, polite and they know a lot. They want to see a successful Japanese F1 driver, and they want Honda to do well, but any driver can earn mythical status if he (or she, come to that) can capture the imagination of the fans. It is hard to explain the passion that exists in Japan for Ayrton Senna, one just has to accept it. The Japanese of today love heroes, be they characters from manga or anime, or the knights of medieval Japan, but in among them is Senna. No other F1 driver has ever enjoyed the same status. It is a little odd, but we can always hope that we will one day find another like him.

F1 and Asia remains a love affair that always seems just about to happen, but something holds back the two parties. We have visited many Asian countries, but the results have been very different from one place to the next. It’s rather odd, trying to figure out why one works and another does not.

It looks like the next adventure for F1 in Asia is going to be a race in Hanoi, the capital city of Vietnam, in order to help the country on its mission to develop a stronger tourist industry. The word in that the Vietnamese government, under President Tran Dai Quang is willing to invest whatever it takes in a race to try to change the image of the country and develop new revenues from international visitors. What does Hanoi mean to the average Westerner? The Vietnam War? Jane Fonda? The infamous Hoa Lo Prison, known as The Hanoi Hilton? It is all pretty negative. And yet, Hanoi, so they say, is a great place with a lot of advantages that spring from its days under French colonial rule. In 1903, for example, the city suffered an outbreak of bubonic plague (never a good idea) and the French decided that the whole place needed to be cleaned up and fixed. So they built new drainage systems and wide avenues were cut through the town to make it a little healthier. Colonial architecture is still widespread, although the city was heavily bombed by the US in the early 1970s.

Since the late 1980s the Vietnamese authorities have tried to liberalise the country’s economy and to reform and modernize its government. The country wants to be more competitive. There is still tight control over political expression and problems with inefficiency and corruption, but what drives Vietnam is money and so they want more tourists to drive business. The country currently has around four million international tourists a year, although many of these are backpackers, and Vietnam wants to pull in the high-spending tourists who tend to be people who attend Grands Prix. It is probably worth noting that south east Asia, and specifically Vietnam, are key target markets for F1’s partner Heineken.

Drinks companies are still big sponsors in F1, but they have learned from tobacco and have been very careful not to upset regulators. This is why there has been so much discussion about who will drive the second Williams in 2018. This is now the best drive up for grabs, although McLaren has not yet confirmed Fernando Alonso. This will probably happen next week, in the run-up to Austin. The Williams decision may take longer, but the team is planning to run a test with Paul di Resta and Robert Kubica, although Felipe Massa remains a candidate unless Williams can extract a very good deal from Mercedes to take on Pascal Wehrlein who, to be fair, seems to be the best youngster on the market at the moment. The problem is that Wehrlein is too young. Martini, the team’s primary sponsor, is bound by a voluntary agreement amongst alcohol companies not to use models or ambassadors under 25 to sell their drink. The team already has Lance Stroll and so with Wehrlein it would mean two youngsters and the team might have to employ a third to do the promotional work, in much the same way that Mika Hakkinen has done over the years with Johnnie Walker. The Williams cars in Japan ran in full Martini livery, but those who watch for these things will see that Stroll was unbranded when he was not in the car.

However, the advantages of having Wehrlein are important. He is quick and what the team needs more than anything is a youngster to inspire and motivate the staff, he would come with financial support from Mercedes (probably in the form of a reduced engine bill) or perhaps with the factory engine and transmission being used, rather than Williams doing its own. We will have to see how it all turns out in the end, but clearly Williams needs to do better in the future. It is not alone in this respect, because the level of competition in F1 is very high at the moment. It is not as easy as once it was and even big name teams have to fight hard for good results. At the moment we have Williams, McLaren and Renault, all of which should be doing better. Others have been trying to argue that Red Bull is going to run into trouble as Renault develops with no contract in place between the two parties for 2019 and 2020. On the face of it, this means that Red Bull could be in trouble and might have to use Honda engines, but the truth is that, in the finest tradition of F1, the devil of understanding the game is in the detail. It is possible for Renault and Red Bull not to have a contract and yet for Renault to have to supply the team… How, you might ask; well, if Renault had committed to supply Red Bull in a deal it signed in 2015 with the Formula One group, which runs until the end of 2020, then the apparently contradictory situation could be explained, couldn’t it? Renault agreed to the terms on offer because it wanted to get a commercial deal in place that would allow it to borrow against future contracted revenues in order to put together a team, without having to get the shareholders to pay. It is all very clever stuff and it means that Red Bull can actually choose between Renault and Honda engines in 2019 and 2020. There is a fairly widespread feeling in F1 that Red Bull is winding down its F1 involvement after 2020, but in recent says there has been one discordant note in this theory: Red Bull just signed up a quartet of young kart racers for the future, including Jack Doohan, the son of motorcycle legend Mick, plus three others. There is no doubt that Red Bull would love to have Aston Martin engines in the future, but that does not mean that the drinks firm will leave. It might sell Scuderia Toro Rosso at some point, but then it has been trying to do that for a long time.

There are lots of new ideas being bandied around at the moment, my favourite being a Dutch Grand Prix. Given the popularity of Max Verstappen, this should not be difficult, particularly if it was to be a street race.

There is still much talk of cost-cutting, but increasingly it seems that reducing the spend and balancing revenues for all the teams may require some creative solutions rather han simply declaring that only x amount of money can be spent. One way that this can be done is for there to be changes to the structure of the F1 driver market, for example. At the moment this is all left unstructured. The big teams hire the big drivers and pay what they need to pay them. But what if they couldn’t do that? What if the rules gave the first choice of drivers each year to the least successful teams? Thus Sauber would get the first choice of drivers and could pick Lewis Hamilton. He would not want to stay, but Sauber could then put him on the market and would then reap the benefits of the money required to release him. This would raise money for the little teams and things would get interesting in the midfield. This could be fairly similar to the National Football League “Draft” in the United States, an event at the best college players are signed up by the teams in the professional leagues. Today The Draft is a three-day televised event in which the players are selected and traded. This year it attracted an astonishing 250,000 spectators at the venue, with millions more watching on TV, with the show producing solid advertising revenues – and the whole event acting as free promotion for the sport. The big teams would still be allowed to spend money but it would serve a purpose!