Green Notebook from Juffair

They play cricket in Juffair. Bahrain is a funny place like that. It has loads of high-rise buildings but between them there are sandy patches of ground, where presumably one day another skyscraper will be built. But for the moment these are used as parking lots – and cricket grounds.

You may be scratching your head about Arabs playing cricket but I read a wonderful story the other day about the late King Hussein of Jordan, who adored playing the game. The story was told by Mordechai Beyan, who was an Israeli spy, who was out in the desert one day, in Jordan.

“All at once,” he wrote, “a glittering bevy of camel-riders appeared from nowhere and surrounded me. I was resigning myself to a bullet in the head or at very least 20 years in an Amman jail, when the leader, who was none other than King Hussein, revealed that they were about to play a game of cricket and were one man short. ‘Tell me, O traveller,’ he asked, in the courteous tones for which he was world famous, ‘would you care to join us to make up one of our number whose camel has gone lame some miles back. Do you bowl or bat?’

“It so happened that when I joined Mossad I had undergone an intensive period of cricket training, prior to being posted to Britain, so I willingly joined him as a fast medium utility seam bowler. It was a most enjoyable game, and we won by three wickets. ‘Well played, sir,’ said the King to me afterwards. ‘I had no idea the Jews had a talent for ball games.’

“You know that I am…?” I gasped.

“‘We Arabs have some talent for intelligence-gathering too,’ he smiled. ‘Perhaps we should play again soon. An Arab-Israeli cricket match might make breakthroughs unattainable in other ways.’”

Anyway, in Bahrain it is not the King, nor even the Crown Prince who play cricket (although I suspect the latter knows how to), but rather the vast numbers of Indians, who live and work in Bahrain, as traders and construction workers. You will regularly see them playing cricket on the dust patches of Juffair.

The Bahrain International Circuit is a sports ground on a rather bigger dust patch, out in the desert, about halfway down the island. Out there one can make lots of noise and no-one cares.

We’ve spent a lot of time in Bahrain in recent months and, if you stop to think about it, three of the last four Grands Prix, and the only winter test, have all taken place in Bahrain, which is a record that is unlikely to ever be beaten. You would think that a season when the teams agreed to use the same chassis as the previous season would mean that the the pecking order would be largely the same, as around 60 percent of the parts were unchanged. However, some teams worked harder than others on development because of the strange situation in which we find the sport.

Some teams are focussing on the future, because they think that the 2022 rules changes offer a better chance to move up the F1 ladder, while other teams have more pressing needs and so are focussing on impressing in 2021. Both Williams and Haas have said that they are going to put their efforts into 2022 because they don’t see anything to be gained by spending money this year. One can see that Alfa Romeo, for example, has a different focus. This is the last year of the Alfa Romeo sponsorship (at the moment) and so the team wants to look good. But is there logic in spending tens of millions to develop a car if one only gains one place in the Constructors’ Championship – which might mean another $7 million in prize money? The answer is yes, if a big sponsorship is at risk…

And then there is the Ferrari situation. The team was horrible last year for reasons that we have been into before. They really had to do a better job and so a lot was spent to get a better engine, however without any troublesome grey areas. There is no question that the car is now quicker and having Charles Leclerc fourth on the grid and Carlos Sainz eighth looked quite decent. However, it must be said that this may have had a touch more PR value than racing logic. Getting through Q2 using softs meant that the team looked good on the grid and people who analyse gaps and things will say nice things, but they did so at the expense of a good performance in the race. Starting on soft tyres was definitely not the best strategy, particularly at a track where overtaking is relatively easy. Thus Leclerc went from fourth to sixth in the race. The key point I think was that Charles still finished 59 secs behind the winner, which is one second a lap off the pace in terms of race pace… And they weren’t the only ones to try the Q2 soft trick…

And, of course, you have Honda. They are leaving at the end of the year and they want to go out on a high because the Honda F1 programme up to now has been wildly average (at best). Going out on a high is important from a pride point of view…

Anyway, we don’t really know the full picture as yet but what we do know is that the racing is going to be good because the midfield is really tight.

F1 fans voted Sergio Perez as the driver of the day (the Dutch fans were presumably asleep) but I must say that I thought it should have gone to Yuki Tsunoda, who became the first driver in five years to score points on his F1 debut and the first Japanese driver to score points in nearly a decade, the last being Kamui Kobayashi in 2012. There was no luck involved in this performance. He was caught out in Q2 by the soft users and so ended up qualifying only 13th on the grid. He made a bit of a slow start and dropped to 16th but then passed George Russell, Sebastian Vettel (twice), Esteban Ocon, Fernando Alonso and then Kimi Raikkonen to get into the top 10 with 20 laps to go. He then hunted down Lance Stroll and took ninth on the last lap. Afterwards, he said that he felt a bit sorry when he overtook Alonso and admitted it was quite emotional for him.

Ross Brawn was impressed too although he did point out that “his language in the car can be a bit fruity”, which just goes to show that children and nuns should not watch F1 and certainly not indulge in “Drive to Survive” with Guenther F**king Steiner and others…

Japanese fans are excited with Tsunoda making a good impression and in China there is a lot of excitement as well as Guanyu Zhou is beginning to look like an F1 driver of the future.

The Alpine young driver did an impressive job in the three Formula 2 races in Bahrain and has a big lead in the championship. There is already talk that he might be seen next year at Williams and there are even suggestions that the team could switch to Renault power as part of that deal. I don’t know if that is a good idea or not but being the second Renault team might be better than being the fourth Mercedes team…

Aston Martin’s return to F1 was a little bit in the tradition of the company in F1. It was not good. Lance Stroll was 11^th and if one thinks that Sergio Perez won in Bahrain just a few months ago, this was not a good sign. Sebastian Vettel’s weekend was awful, qualifying 18th and then getting a penalty for ignoring yellow flags and so started he started the race from the back of the grid. And he finished 15th, behind the Williams of George Russell, after ruining Esteban Ocon’s race and getting a 10-second penalty for it. The only points that Seb scored all weekend were penalty points – and he got an armful of them. Maybe it is just me, but in the darkness in Bahrain I kept mistaking the Aston Martin for the Mercedes as the liveries seem very similar when there isn’t much light. I hope that the green looks better in bright sunlight…

The media did get some chance to mix with the F1 folk at the weekend, although we were confined to a sort of cage with a gap of two metres being policed by the FIA guard dogs and the COVID delegate in his watch tower. Some felt it was rather insulting to be caged up, but my view is that some access is better than no access and I had a number of useful chats, although people can still see who you are talking to. Still, it’s a move in the right direction and I hope that before too long these charades will end and we will be back as normal F1 citizens…

One of the things that I learned while chatting over the wall was that Mercedes is cleverer than some of the other teams as they craftily arrived offering drinks to the imprisoned pressmen. I am told that one could also order a coffee from Sauber (although it is a long walk from the end of the paddock to the media centre) so it might have been cold by the time it arrived…

Still, one cannot complain.

I’ve always been a fan of Carlos Sainz (senior and junior) and I find the younger version to be smart, intelligent and charming. One gets the impression that he is actually interested in other people, which makes him not unique but relatively unusual amongst F1 drivers. Anyway, Carlos understands that teamwork is all about people and so rather than flying in to Maranello from time to time from a tax haven, he has taken an apartment in a nearby town and is spending his life there, visiting the factory all the time and getting to know everyone. I cannot remember who it was but one driver said to me one time that it was important to buy your mechanics a pizza and some beer and they’d love you forever. I think Carlos is working on a similar theme.

In the course of the weekend I bumped into several old pals, notably Gerhard Berger and Jean Alesi, who were both in Bahrain to watch the action. It is always fun to catch up with the old campaigners and chew the cud a bit, even if one had to do it with face masks.

Travelling to and from the race proved to be quite a challenge when it came to paperwork, but the biggest problems were not COVID-19 related, but rather the result of the complexities of being a Brit living in France in the post-Brexit age and trying to explain to Arabs that a resident’s card is not required until October… although one would certainly be useful.

Next stop Imola.