Green Notebook from The Devil’s Pond

You would think that The Devil’s Pond (also called La Mare au Diable, given that everything has two names in Quebec) would have a brilliant back story, something that Edgar Allan Poe would have dreamed up on a dark stormy night out with Mary Shelley, which Alfred Hitchcock would have turned into scary movie, scripted by Stephen King.

But it doesn’t…

The Devil’s Pond is just a “purification plant” on the Ile de Notre Dame, built for Expo 67. Well, the whole island was built for the Expo, so the pond was simply part of the infrastructure, named in an exotic fashion by some bored bureaucrat with nothing better to do than to dream up exciting names for dull things.

Not that the Ile de Notre Dame is a dull story. To give you a quick précis: the city was once an Iroquois village, called Hochelaga (pronounced as in “hock a loogie”) which Jacques Cartier, a mariner from Saint-Malo discovered, while on a voyage commissioned by France’s King Francois I to discover the New World. His orders were to discover lands where “it is said that a great quantity of gold and other precious things are to be found” and to claim it all for France. Cartier was under the mistaken impression that he had actually discovered China (we all make mistakes) and if you don’t believe me, look at a map and next to Dorval Airport (otherwise known as Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport) you will find the oddly-named industrial suburb of Lachine, which is the French for China. Strange, but true. Cartier named it thus because he could go no further up the river we call the St Lawrence because of rapids. He christened the big local hill Mont Real (Royal Mountain), and went home to tell the king the good news.

The river is complicated in these parts because of the maze of around 350 islands, known as the Hochelaga Archipelago. Not satisfied with this, presumably suffering from an inferiority complex compared to the Thousand Island region, down the river towards Toronto (famed for its salad dressing), the burghers of Montreal decided in the 1960s to build a new island. They needed some space to house the international Expo and at the same time they needed somewhere to dump the millions of tons of rock that were being removed to create the Montreal Metro. The local mayor, Jacques Drapeau, had a Eureka moment and decided to use the rock to create the new island. There was some space between the natural Ile Sainte-Helene and the dyke that had been built 10 years earlier to create the St Lawrence Seaway ship canal and so the Ile de Notre Dame rose from the waters and there were soon loads of look-at-me pavilions built by foreign nations for the Expo. After that Drapeau and his followers had the idea of hosting the Olympic Games in 1976 and so the island was repurposed and part of it was fashioned into a rowing basin 1.3-miles in length. And then, Quebec discovered that the world’s most exciting racing driver was one of its own and so the island was reformatted to create a racing circuit so that Gilles Villeneuve would have a place to race in front of his home crowd.

The Ferrari star duly wrote a beautiful (if rather chilly) chapter in F1 history in October 1978 by winning his first F1 victory on the island. In 1982 it was decided to switch the event to a nicer time of year and so it moved to mid-June, but that year when the F1 circus arrived, Villeneuve was no longer with them, having been killed in a crash in Belgium a few weeks earlier. The locals renamed the Circuit Île Notre-Dame in his honour.

The race went on and eventually, Gilles’s son Jacques became Canada’s first (and only) F1 World Champion. The islands were renamed Le Parc Jean Drapeau and the French Expo pavilion was converted into a casino, which is a nice little earner for the province. But the history has left complications. Bits of land around the track, notably access roads, are owned by different entities, which in Canada always struggle to work together. The dyke of the St Lawrence Seaway is owned by the Federal Government and the rest of the island is part of the Parc Jean Drapeau, but in order to use the huge Pont Victoria railway bridge (which has roadways as well) for race traffic, the cars must cross a piece of federal land a few metres wide… and, well, you can guess the rest.

And, of course, then one has the bureaucrats who do not care about the Canadian Grand Prix and so schedule roadworks at the worst possible moment.

Canada is a weird place in this respect. To give you an idea each year on the last Monday before May 25 there is a national holiday. It is called Victoria Day and is a celebration of Queen Victoria’s birthday. In Quebec province, however, the holiday is known as the Journée Nationale des Patriotes and celebrates a rebellion in 1837 which was crushed by the colonial government, which represented Queen Victoria. They never seem to agree on much but they remain together, with 8.4 million of Canada’s 38 million people thinking of themselves as French.

They converse in a language that they call French but a lot of French people cannot understand. Many words have been adopted from English but then conjugated in the French way.

You may have read stories about the Canadian Grand Prix moving to Toronto. These should not be taken seriously as they have almost certainly been fed out to suggest to Quebec that F1 is not happy because Montreal insists on its June date. This makes sense, of course, because the city is at its best in June (apart from the dubious weather and endless roadworks that must be crammed into the short summer).

F1 wants the race to be twinned with Miami in May (to save money and reduce F1 emissions figures). It makes little sense to fly back and forth across the Atlantic twice in five weeks, but Montreal knows that pushing back into May could lead to the race being frosted with snow. Miami cannot move to meet Montreal because of a tennis tournament held in the stadium and that cannot go later because of the NFL season. Thus F1 is stuck with the mad calendar (which it agreed to… but now wishes to change).

This problem aside, the 2024 calendar is beginning to come together, although it will be a few more weeks before we get any official confirmation. The big thing that no-one has talked about yet is that the first two races of the year will be held on Saturday nights, rather than on the Sunday afternoons. This makes a lot of sense for the local organisers as in the Islamic world the “weekend” usually means Friday and Saturday, rather than the Western Saturday-Sunday. In the Arab world Sunday is a working day. The change is not due to this, however, but rather because of Ramadan, which is the period of religious devotion that makes it incompatible with Formula 1 racing. Ramadan begins on Sunday March 10 and so the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix has to be on the evening of Saturday March 9, and in order to get everything moved in the limited time available, the Bahrain GP will move forward a day to Saturday March 2. This will follow the pre-season tests at the Bahrain International Circuit over the last weekend of February.

The F1 freight will need extra time to get out of Saudi Arabia, as customs is already a problem there and Ramadan will not help, and so the Australian GP will be the third race of the year on Sunday March 24. There will then follow a rather troublesome two races in Asia, which will not be back-to-back. Logically, Japan and China should work on consecutive weekends, but they do not, because of Chinese customs being unpredictable, so there will need to be a Japanese GP on April 7 and the Shanghai race on April 21. This works for freight but not for human beings and so the F1 troops will probably have to do three out-and-backs to Australia, Japan and China, which is both expensive and wasteful. After a weekend at home it will be off to Miami on May 5.  F1 would love to twin Miami with Montreal, as mentioned, but currently has not found a way to do that.

Having races on Saturdays is not a new idea as the British GP, for example, was held on a Saturday until 1983 because religious types thought God would be offended by racing cars. I cannot say I understand why this would be the case and nowhere in the Bible (that I know of) says racing cars are a bad thing… Still, religion often moves in mysterious ways.

The dates mentioned above do not, as one may have noted, include Baku and the impression I get is that this race will be off to explore the autumn months, probably on the way to Singapore, as there is a gap now with Japan jumping to the spring. I noticed the Belgian GP organisers were in evidence in Montreal and I think they will be back on the calendar in 2024 at least, because South Africa (or anywhere in Africa) cannot get things organised in the time available. My feeling is that in the longer term, F1 would want an African race and that Belgium and the Netherlands will begin to share a date because, despite the Verstappen fervour, the Dutch struggle to pay for the Zandvoort race. Dutch fans, of course, will travel far and wide to wear orange clothing despite the fact that no-one looks good in orange – except pumpkins. As to the rest of the 2024 calendar, I am afraid that there is no definitive word. The dates may not be very different to this year, but the order is probably not the same.

The sport still has a lot to learn, despite its 73 years of existence and Liberty Media is doing its best to turn the F1 teams into more enlightened organisations which better balance what the engineers, fans and investors want. To this end, Stefano Domenicali and Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei were accompanied in Montreal by a chap called Roger Goodell (left). If you are European you may never have heard the name, but Americans will tell you that Goodell is the most powerful man in professional sports in the world, and has been for the last 17 years. How so? Well, he is the Commissioner of the National Football League (NFL) and he tells the 800lb gorilla of global sport (although it is not actually a global sport) what to do. Given that the 32 NFL franchises are now each worth an average of $4.14 billion, he is a man worth listening to, as the best F1 team is not worth more than half that figure. As there are only 10 of them and F1 is a global sport, it is safe to argue that they should be more valuable than NFL teams… and they are not.

Goodell met with all the team bosses on Sunday morning in Canada and explained the NFL business model, with its annual revenues of more than $18 billion, nine times more than F1 turns over in a year. I guess that Goodell did this because he is not worried about F1 taking over his world. However it will probably help if the teams stopped fighting among themselves and worked together in order to drive up profits, while keeping costs under control, preserving the traditions of the sport and exploiting all of its potential. At the moment we have two discussions that are causing friction: levelling performance and whether to increase the number of entrants.

For me it is daft not to let the poorer teams invest more, but the bigger teams are obviously frightened that they will be beaten. As to new teams, there are various arguments for and against. The sport does not need two new weaklings to hold it back, but it can always use more manufacturer clout so I would argue that if a new team can prove it is representing a manufacturer (in a serious way and not just a branding exercise) then they should be allowed in. If not, what value do they bring? They must also have sensible financial guarantees and practical business plans. How many of the aspirants can claim that? Um… well, Andretti says that GM might one day build an F1 engine…

Is that enough? I am not sure the Wall Street folks are convinced, although if Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, was to stick her moniker on a piece of paper saying that GM will build an F1 engine for 2027, I think the big kahunas (and lawyers) at Liberty Media might join together in a rousing rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah – and the world would be a beautiful place.

If not, I don’t see anything happening. It’s just one little signature, which would cost less than the recently-announced $1.3 billion plans to invest in the next-generation GM V8 powered monster SUVs which still sell well, even if they are hardly saving the planet…

At least with an F1 power unit, running on sustainable fuel, one is moving in the right direction…

The Americanization of Formula 1 is something that old-fashioned F1 fans (ie grumpy old men) think is bad, but I do not agree (even if some think me a grumpy old man). I think we should learn from our transatlantic cousins and use the good things, but walk a careful line to avoid descending into flag-waving schmaltz and race day manipulation in pursuit of a better show, which characterises so much of American motorsport. There is a happy balance somewhere which maintains F1’s traditions and competitive urges whilst along playing to the fans. The wizard Ecclestone understood much about the sport, but he never figured out the American market and the bottom line suffered as a result. Now there is a chance to get it right.

The word in the paddock is that there have been two bids for the F1 tyre supply deal for 2025 and beyond. The FIA will only say that Pirelli is one of them, while the jungle telegraph says that the other is Bridgestone, the world’s biggest tyre company until overtaken last year by Michelin. I honestly don’t care which one supplies F1 as long as the tyres do what they are supposed to do, which is to provide decent strategic options (and thus some coverage for the tyre provider) with safe tyres.

I was wondering why Bridgestone would want to come back and discovered that the Japanese firm’s biggest market by a considerable margin is North America and that the reason one does not immediately realise this is because Bridgestone owns Firestone. I think it would help F1 if Firestone was to be named as the sport’s new tyre supplier. Those who follow these things closely might also point out that Firestone has recently been experimenting with some green tyres in IndyCar racing (literally) as the sidewalls are green. These are manufactured from guayule (why-OO-lee) rubber, which is extracted from a desert shrub (parthenium argentatum), much more sustainable than the traditional hevea brasiliensis rubber plants which tend to need rain forest conditions and thus a lot of transportation costs (both financial and environmental). Having green tyres in F1 would be a helpful thing and if they were American as well, F1 would be banging the drum, without waving the flag.

Pirelli, of course, wants to continue.

In recent days Pirelli has been in the news in Europe because its largest shareholder is Chinese. The Italian government has used what is known as its “Golden Power” law to stop the Chinese state firm SinoChem from taking over the administrative control of the business, on the grounds that this includes technology systems which broadcast information about tyre usage, maintenance requirements and geolocation data, which is considered a threat to Italian national security. Thus the Chinese can own the shares but not influence the management or choose the future leaders of the tyre company. Whether they choose to keep the shares or sell them remains to be seen, but it is another example of how international trade between China and the rest of the world is gradually changing, making China less of a target for Western firms than once it was. This will be important when it comes to extending the Chinese GP which ends in 2025 and explains why F1 is keen on Korea at the moment, because staying involved with China is not a great idea given the way the world is developing, particularly given China’s recent support of Russian activities.

F1 technology is pretty under-rated these days despite the incredible things that the sport has done with its hybrid power units. This was due to pretty poor marketing when the new formula began in 2014 and we have never really caught up.

I was fascinated to see that Alpine’s new Alpine R&D Lab subsidiary, which is using technology derived from the group’s activities to develop commercial opportunities, in the much the same way as several other F1 teams have been doing, has been involved with Aqualines, a French start-up which is developing fast naviplanes designed for low-carbon maritime shipping. The project is being led by the F1 Team Strategic Advisor Bob Bell. The Aqualines vehicle uses ground effect technology to speed along above water which uses aerodynamics to make the machines go faster and thus requires significantly less fuel to operate. I cannot say I understand this stuff, but it is fascinating to see what may come from this. F1 teams are, as we know, involved with several of the America’s Cup yacht racing challenges but it seems that Alpine might sponsor the French team, which is called Orient Express, as it is being funded by the hotel group that runs the celebrated luxury trains.

Although F1 is now getting the hang of its money supply (and demand) the motorsport world remains ever dominated by the requirement to find money and thus it is a shame to have to report  that the W Series company has finally gone into administration, having failed to find the required investment to be revived and having failed to find a buyer. The F1 group has taken up the task of trying to develop female racing drivers with its F1 Academy and other associated schemes but it is clear that the project is going to be a long-term one before we start seeing women turning up in F1 with all the right things required to be successful. Still, at least F1 is trying and next year it will be trying a little harder as the F1 Academy will be on the bill at F1 races.

The business of F1 is continuing to develop and I spotted a film crew in action in Canada interviewing folks who are usually hidden away from the cameras. I was informed that this was CNBC, formerly Consumer News and Business Channel, which provides business content. The filming is for a documentary that will be shown later this year, probably when F1 returns to the Americas for the United States GP in October.

In terms of rumours the paddock is relatively quiet with people still talking about engineers on the move. I have heard all manner of strange stories including Mattia Binotto to McLaren, although it is not clear what role – if any – he would take. Things are even wilder on the driver front with talk of Lando Norris discussing his future with Audi, which will not enter F1 officially until 2026, although Lando is contracted to McLaren until then. Another name that is mentioned from time to time is Alex Palou, who seems to be outgrowing the IndyCar series quite quickly. He will switch to the McLaren IndyCar team next year but still harbours F1 ambitions. There has also been talk of Charles Leclerc and Aston Martin, but organising such a thing would not be the work of a moment.

And then there are the inevitable Sergio Perez rumours. A month ago, the Mexican was seeing himself as a World Championship challenger after Baku, where he won his second victory in four races. At the time he was just six points behind Verstappen in the championship (93-87). Four races later Verstappen has added 102 points, having won all four of them, while Perez has managed only 39 points and so the score is now 195-126. Fernando Alonso is now within striking distance of Perez and Lewis Hamilton is not far behind. Perez is struggling despite having the best car.

In the 52 races since he joined the team, Sergio has won five times and Max Verstappen has won 31 times. The danger for Perez is that Red Bull’s Dr Helmut Marko has plenty of “previous” when it comes to axing drivers who are not delivering to a level he thinks they should do.

At the same time, there are whispers from within the Red Bull empire that Daniel Ricciardo has found his mojo again, after a long time when he appeared to have lost it. Red Bull does not want (nor need) a second number one driver and simply requires a solid number-one-and-a-half who will do enough to act as Verstappen’s rear-gunner. This season Red Bull is dominant so Perez does not matter that much, but if the other teams get closer, each with two drivers firing on all cylinders, that might be a worry.

Shuffling the Red Bull drivers is not that hard to do… nor that hard to imagine.

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Joe Saward is hosting a Virtual Audience tomorrow, if you would like to join in and ask questions. Click here to find out more…