Notebook from nowhere in particular

My apologies, but the last few days have been very busy, writing 18 hours a day and, of course, flying home from Brazil. Then I had to try to get the hotel in Sao Paulo to give back money to which it helped itself without my permission – and without telling me. The justification for this was so obtuse that they needed an hour to work it all out, which meant that I was a bit later getting into the traffic jams and thus the check-in queues. I found myself behind a group of people who could only have been a band on tour, what with the black leather, tattoos, piercings and pigtails. I discovered that yes, they were a band on tour. Yes, they were heavy metal. Yes, they had been talking some funny languages, identified as Norwegian and Hungarian, and, yes, they were rushing back to Europe to play this week with the Oslo Philharmonic,(Yes, really). Not being an expert in Norwegian black metal, I asked the name of the group and was told Satyricon. I was none the wiser, but had an interesting chat comparing the lifestyles of F1 and Norwegian black metal.

“Where did you play in Rio?” I asked.

The guy shrugged. “I dunno. When you are on tour, you get to a hotel, you get in a van, you do a concert…”

Ah yes, that I understood…

It is true that when one is on the road, things tend to blur into each other. Every street in Sao Paulo looks pretty much the same, we agreed, when lost on the way to the circuit one day. In many ways Brazil is a great country, and in others it is incredibly sad. The other day, when discussing the future of the Grand Prix, someone suggested a street race in Rio. I am still giggling about that one. If you read the newspapers, you will know that last summer the Brazilian government sent 10,000 security people, including 8,500 soldiers into the city to try to stop a wave of crime, following a sharp increase in gun battles between the police and drugs gangs. A few weeks ago there were days of intense fighting between different drug gangs, trying to win control of one of the city’s favelas. In comparison, Sao Paulo is a positive utopia, even if politics has become something of an Ealing Comedy (Carry on Corruption?) with suitcases filled with money being handed over to go-betweens in pizzerias, before being delivered to the top level officials. This is why the country is undergoing Lava Jato, otherwise known as Operation Car Wash, a scandal surrounding industrial scale bribery and corruption concerning Petrobras, the national oil company and a celebrated F1 sponsor. This is serious stuff when one considers that a Supreme Court Justice handling the trials died in January when a plane he was on, crashed into the sea for no apparent reason… Of course, when your society is corrupt from top to bottom, it is hard to fight against criminality at all levels. And this is what F1 walked into last weekend.

Brazilians are generally a pretty friendly bunch and Interlagos is a great race track, steeped in history. Just up the Avenida Senador Teotonio Vilela from the main gates of the circuit there is a purple store called Stoc-Car Bar e Lanches, which was once old man Barrichello’s hardware store. A few doors further up from that, next to the China Box takeaway, is the original headquarters of the Fittipaldi Formula 1 team, where they built all the cars from 1974 to 1979, up to and including the F6. However between Interlagos and the inner suburbs of Sao Paulo, where the F1 folk stay (it takes too long to get to the centre of town), there is a road that heads downhill towards the smelly Jurubatuba river. It is a dodgy area and people with guns regularly pop out and try to steal things by pointing their weapons at the unfortunate passers-by. F1 people have been attacked in this neighbourhood for years and one would think that the race promoter and the city would want this to stop as the purpose of the Grand Prix is to create publicity for the city, not tell the world that it is a home of hoodlums. But no, nothing is ever done in advance, if someone is attacked more police appear, but they don’t always stay very long.

So, I suppose that being robbed by a hotel is a little more subtle than having someone stick a gun in your face, but it is probably not the way to win stars of excellence from worthy bodies who judge these things. By Monday F1 was pretty fed up with this and Pirelli and McLaren announced that they were cancelling a planned test and going home early. And here’s the funny thing, Brazil is paying Formula 1 for this kind of publicity…

Still, the word on the street for some time has been that the relationship between the race promoter and Formula 1 is right up there with the joyous love-in between Israel and Palestine. I am told the whole thing has been getting very silly with the promoter refusing to allow a Rolex clock into the paddock unless someone paid for it. It all sounds like it is building up to a right messy divorce, which probably explains why F1 seems to be very keen to get a race going in Buenos Aires, as quickly as is possible. For the record, it seems that the no-one wants to promote the Brazilian race beyond 2020 when the current contract runs out. The word is that Tamas Rohonyi Kertesz, the man who heads the promotion company, is leaving Brazil to return to his native Hungary. Rohonyi is, of course, a major ally of one BC Ecclestone, not to mention being a neighbour as Rohonyi owns (or owned) a coffee plantation near Amparo, to the north of Sao Paulo. Ecclestone visited the farm some years ago, liked what he saw and duly bought a 200-acre coffee plantation (as you do…) called the Fazenda Ycatu, and he has since started marketing its products as “Celebrity Coffee”. The word recently has been that Rohonyi has sold his plantation to Ecclestone and is getting out of Brazil. I don’t know if that is true, but they are close, Rohonyi being the man who introduced Mr E to his wife-to-be Fabiana Flosi, who used to be on the staff of the race promotion company at Interlagos.

But maybe the time has come for F1 to think again about Brazil. It is the sport’s biggest current TV audience (by a long way) but there are no guarantees for the future. The retirement of Felipe Massa at the end of this year will mean that there will be no Brazilian driver on the grid for the first time since the Dutch Grand Prix of 1971 when Emerson Fittipaldi was missing having been injured when a French driver on the Cote d’Azur did an unexpected u-turn and Emerson was smacked-up in the ensuing shunt.

Actually, upon reflection that is not true, because I don’t believe that there were any Brazilians present at the San Marino Grand Prix of 1982, when only half the field turned up because of a boycott, which was part of the infamous FISA-FOCA War, a battle over commercial control of the sport between the federation and the F1 teams. Later, of course, FOCA’s leader Bernie Ecclestone separated the teams from the rights they had won and made them all his own…

The world has moved on and those who think we are going back 35 years to the same kind of fight are dreaming. The sport is now so big that no-one can consider breaking it up. It would be suicidal and would cost a fortune and the offers that will be on the table from Liberty will be sensible, if not generous. They are in the game to make money, but their idea is to do it in a logical way, working with the team and the other stakeholders. The days of divide-and-conquer are over and, as a listed company, their ability to have special deals with the likes of Ferrari is pretty minimal. If they do that, what is to stop a Williams shareholder suing Liberty because his team does not have a fair share of the revenues?

Ferrari has taken a fair beating for suggesting that it might quit the sport if it doesn’t get what it wants. The response inside the sport has been fairly clear. Off you go folks… The manufacturers want to preserve their advantages, but they are not going to throw themselves on the Ferrari bonfire unless it really makes sense. And it doesn’t. On top of all this I seriously doubt Sergio Marchionne is going to pull Ferrari out of F1. He is up to his neck in things that are much more important. He’s trying to keep Fiat Chrysler Automobiles on the right path. Thus far he has managed to hit all his targets and has collected vast (some might say obscene) bonuses as a result. Recent revelations indicate that by the time he leaves FCA in 2019 Marchionne will own shares in the company worth $325 million. He wants to keep the share price high as a result of this and is looking for a partner with which to merge the business, but there is a nasty little scandal brewing over labour deals struck by Chrysler with the powerful United Automobile Workers. These, it seems, were achieved by bribing the union representatives and the FBI wants to know whether Marchionne knew about it. It certainly helped the company enormously. Faced with such things, the F1 problems of Ferrari are really not that important…

One should also consider one other thing that may have an impact. In Italy there are two sports that the nation follows: football and Formula 1. As we were flying home from Brazil on Monday, Italy failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, being knocked out by Sweden. It was the first time in 60 years that the nation did not make it to the competition, which it has won four times and been runner-up twice. For many Italians it was a complete disaster. The manager was sacked (of course) and the media spoke of it being the darkest moment in the country’s sporting history. Now, imagine how well Marchionne would fare if he pulled Ferrari out of F1…

One of the goals of the new engine rules is to attract new manufacturers and while we are fairly sure that Aston Martin and McLaren will have their own engines in 2021, we are waiting to see who else may appear. There are rumours of Alfa Romeo and there is still much talk of the Volkswagen group, with its portfolio of brands. For a long time the word has been that Porsche will come to F1, but in recent days there has been a big switcharound in the management of the various brands and the suggestion that the brand strategies will change. Wolfgang Durheimer, who has played a big role in the company’s motorsport strategies has stood down from his role as boss of Bentley and Bugatti. The latter brand will now be led by Stephan Winkelmann, who was previously in charge of Audi Sport GmbH and Volkswagen Group boss Matthias Mueller is looking for ways to give the company’s brands more individual identities. At the same time Ferdinand Piëch, the architect of Volkswagen in its current form, has given up his influence in the company, passing on his shares to his relatives. An era has ended. It is interesting to hear that Bentley may soon have a new model called the Barnato, named after Woolf Barnato, the celebrated Le Mans winner back in the 1920s. Bugatti is planning a new model called the Atlantic, after the famous sports cars of the 1930s but the brand is now going to move down-market a little, to reach a wider audience. Could motorsport be part of that strategy? Logically it should be, Bugatti was always about the sport…

Elsewhere Lamborgini boss, former Ferrari F1 chief Stefano Domenicali, is planning a hybrid supercar for his brand. He’s keen to take Lamborghini back into F1. Could that also happen? Technology sharing is all the rage this days…

In the paddock in Brazil, the word was that Williams is going to go for Robert Kubica next year, as team-mate to Lance Stroll. We will have to see if that is true, but the one thing we know is that Robert has the passion to do it. This means that Pascal Wehrlein and Daniil Kvyat are going to be out of F1 because it looks like Sauber will announce Marcus Ericsson and Charles Leclerc as its drivers for 2018, leaving Ferrari protégé Antonio Giovinazzi out of a job. Sweden will once again beat Italy…

It’s not confirmed yet but it makes no sense at all. Ericsson has been overshadowed this year by Wehrlein, but the team’s anonymous Swedish owner seems keen to make the same mistake many have made before him. While a team owner is entirely entitled to spend his money as he wishes, employing a driver on the basis of his nationality, rather than on his ability is a bad idea. It demotivates the staff, who want to be excited by the drivers and it impacts on the team’s potential earnings.

Passion was evident at Scuderia Toro Rosso as well over the Interlagos weekend, with Franz Tost getting rather hot under his collar and saying unwise things about Renault’s engine supply, suggesting that the poor reliability is deliberate and that Renault is trying to nick Toro Rosso’s sixth place in the Constructors’ Championship. Renault was less than impressed by this and Red Bull’s Helmut Marko later made a statement saying that there has never been a question about Renault being unfair. It was slap down for Tost and one wonders whether there might be longer term implications because Franz’s black-and-white way of seeing things may not help if he is dealing with Honda next year. Franz has always been passionate and enthusiastic, but this can get you into trouble in F1. For the last three years at least he has confidently predicted that the team will finish fifth in the Constructors… The real story has been 7th, 7th and 7th. Following that logic, the team should be seventh this year as well – behind Renault. We’ll see in Abu Dhabi.

Finally, there is a note in the green book about Netflix having some people in the paddock in Brazil, taking a look at F1, with a view to future streaming deals… interestingly this week there has also come word that Amazon has grabbed the British rights to the US Open tennis competition, to add to its earlier deal to stream coverage of the ATP Tour, following on from an deal to show NFL games in the US. It looks like Amazon is on the prowl for sporting content and has money to spend…