Green Notebook from a blank space

You know you’ve travelled a long way in my car, when you disappear off the end of the map and find your satnav icon moving across a blank screen. There is a destination flag in a place I do not remember, but I assume it is Budapest and so I follow the road in that general direction across the Little Hungarian Plain, which the locals call the Kisalföld, until one arrives at the Gerecse range of hills, behind which Budapest in hidden. It is about 80 miles and you know you are doing it right if you pass by places called Mosonmagyaróvár, Gyor and Tatabánya. To the north, the south and the west, the satnav map ends with water and one does not expect to see anything but blue space, but to the east, where there is no water boundary, one is always surprised that suddenly one has reached the end of the known world, and beyond that, you are on your own.

I discovered this alarming feature years ago at Jędrzychowice which, as the name suggests, is in Poland. I was there in search of Tom, Dick and Harry, three tunnels which once departed from Stalag Luft III near Żagań, best known as the venue of “The Great Escape”, my son being at that time keen to visit wartime locations on a summer holiday. It was interesting, but not uplifting.

I guess that the folk who designed the satnav system in Japan years ago did not think that Westerners would go to the old Eastern Bloc. I have read that there are now updates, but I cannot be bothered to spend money to grow the world to include Russia, Turkey and Ukraine, as I do not expect to drive to any of them any time soon. And so, for me the world turns white at Nickelsdorf, an Austrian town around which the A4 motorway loops, through a forest of wind turbines (right).

This is famous, so they say, for Austria’s biggest musical festival, a sort of Mitteleuropa version of Glastonbury, although they specialise in heavy metal, which explains why it is held out in the middle of nowhere, so the sound waves go to ground before hitting any major settlements. 

So, on a golden afternoon, I entered this strange alternative world, where very little makes sense. I felt like Alice after she went down a rabbit hole into Wonderland. I have a habit of switching to the local radio station when I cross a border and listening to what is said. In most countries one can understand the gist of it – and exposure to the chatter makes it easier over time, but when one crosses into Hungary the border is far more than political, it is also a giant lap into linguistics. Hungarian is a member of the Finno-Ugric group of the Uralic languages, which roughly translated means it is incomprehensible to everyone, except for people from Finland. The only words one can understand are those adopted from other languages when the Hungarians don’t have a word for something, so one hears lots of excited chatter with occasional mentions of “online”, “telephone” and “cool” in the mix.

The trip to Hungary and back is the longest road trip of the F1 year from my house. It is 250 miles further than the journey to Imola. In the COVID days we went twice to Portugal, which was 250 miles further than Budapest, but we don’t do that any longer.

In any case, it is about 1,000 miles each way and most people think I am mad to do it, particularly as it comes after the Austrian GP which covered much the same ground, thanks to the crazy idea of holding the two race with the British Grand Prix between them. I won’t go into the emissions that are created by the F1 fleet going backwards and forwards like yo-yos, but if F1 is going to get green, it is going to need more than green paint to solve this problem. A sensible calendar is the obvious answer. It is a bit like the Montreal-Miami situation. Something needs to change.

If I am totally honest, I will admit that it is a very long drive and one cannot hang about because it takes so long to get there and to return. The costs are not very different to flying and renting a car but because of the pleasure of being on the road, coupled with the lack of aviation hassles, the distance is just about bearable. My trip ended up being 2,140 miles in total. Having said that, many European drivers at this time of year seem to have forgotten that one drives on the right and not in the outside lane, which makes the journey longer and more hazardous for everyone when the highways are only two-lane. It is easy to understand why they do this, because of the never-ending convoys of trucks encouraging the slower drivers to move out and stay there. But it was a real pleasure to get back to French roads, where the phenomenon is less troublesome because a lot of folk don’t want to pay road tolls, the predominance of three-lane highways and (perhaps) a less bloody-minded approach.

I am incredibly impressed when I do these long journeys with the number of Max Verstappen fans on the road (ie cars with Max stickers and “Joop’s F1 tour” signs), but sadly some of them are lacking in Max’s ability, some of their machinery should not have been allowed out of the junkyards and others have a stubborn streak which means that they sit in the fast lane and do not care about the queues which form behind them. 

To be fair, they are not the only nation who do this, but one seems to notice them more, because of their yellow number plates and  probably because we share the same roads to and from each Grands Prix. I was with some of them for the best part of 600 miles on the way home, across Hungary, through Austria and right across Germany. Some turned off at Nuremberg and went home by way of Wurzburg and Frankfurt, but others continued until they reached the Kreuz Frankenthal, a cloverleaf motorway junction near Mannheim, where they went north and I curled away to the west, up through the vineyards, singing happily that the road ahead would be free. My route goes through the Pfälzerwald, the upland forested area between France and Germany. This is where one meet the American military in places like Kaiserslautern.

I was pondering this when bang on cue, a mighty C-17 Globemaster transport plane appeared in the sky above me and gradually sank down into the trees at what I hoped would be the Ramstein air base, home of the Third Air Force. After that it was downhill to the Saar Basin before a run across the plains of eastern France, where the fields of gold are dotted with hay bales (left) and the combines are still busy dusting off the remaining wheat.

I did stop off on the way and spent an hour to two discovering the delightful city of Regensburg, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as the biggest surviving medieval city in northern Europe, largely because when the Allied bombers did pass they were aiming not for the city, as happened elsewhere, but rather at the substantial Messerschmidt factories that were blown to bits by a thousand falling bombs. But the city was unscathed…

It was there that I spotted an interesting phenomenon called “das Hörhaus”, which it seems is something to do with hearing aids, rather than what English folks might think it means… Logic is often lost (and confusion gained) in translation. One needs only to look at Alpine F1 to see that things can get lost in translation, particularly between Britain and France, which have plenty of previous history.

The recent news that CEO Laurent Rossi has left his role suggested that he has failed to master the balancing act. Having said that, although F1 people tend to think the world revolves around the sport (and not vice versa), it is possible the change had nothing to do with F1 and was because of the need to realign Alpine’s management with the strategic plans for the future. Rossi was there to revive the brand and spread the word (which F1 is doing quite successfully) but now the firm needs someone who knows how to build new cars and Philippe Krief is good at that. Krief is an engineer but he has never been involved in competition activities and while that may make hearts sink in the F1 world, there is little sign that he will make the mistake of getting involved. Krief worked with Renault boss Luca de Meo years ago at Fiat and they enjoyed success with the Fiat 500. After that de Meo went to Volkswagen and Krief did exciting things like creating the Ferrari 458 Speciale and then the Alfa Romeo Giulia and so he is no slouch in the road car world. At the same time as Rossi was being moved on, Bruno Famin was being named as the head of Alpine motorsports, but the cynics in F1 think that this may have been a way to create space to hand the entire F1 project to Mattia Binotto.

This might sound odd but Binotto, like de Meo and Krief is a protege of Sergio Marchionne and knows them both from the old days. Binotto was slung out of Ferrari at the end of last year and it was probably significant that six months and a week after he left Maranello, he popped up at the British GP, not saying why he was there…

Running Alpine’s F1 programme seems like a good idea on paper. He is one very few racing executives who has overseen both chassis and engine divisions at the same time, even if his success was limited at Ferrari and there were some controversial moments in 2019 relating to fuel-flow activities. If anyone knows how to get Enstone and Viry Chatillon singing from the same songsheet it might be Binotto. Or, at least, one can understand why de Meo might see it that way. Viry-Chatillon and Enstone have worked together in the past when under Italian management, on the basis that a neutral leader is not favouring one side or the other. We will see if this happens, but that was the rumour in Budapest.

Rossi launched a less then diplomatic attack on Enstone a few weeks, calling it disappointing, amateurish and various other things which did not impress the staff. Ask them and they will quietly say that the engine is not good enough. This is a cause of friction. One should note also that some at Enstone may have had enough and one cannot help but wonder whether Williams saying that it has secured a chief technical officer is not unrelated to Alpine as the perfect man for the job at Grove would be Alpine’s CTO Pat Fry, a man who keeps a low profile but does an effective job, as was seen not only at Alpine but prior to that at McLaren. The former rocket engineer has been in F1 for an impressive 35 years and know what it takes to put together the right group of people.

It is all about people and all the teams are busy trying to lure the good guys. It is harder for some than others. Ferrari has to find people willing to live in Italy and happy to be part of the percolator than is Ferrari. The word is that they have recently landed a decent-sized fish in Loic Serra – Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1’s performance director – who is rumoured to have agreed to move to Ferrari. The Frenchman has been with the Brackley team for more than 13 years, starting out a vehicle dynamicist in 2010 after three years working with BMW Sauber. Prior to that he spent 10 years as tyre vehicle interaction engineer with Michelin. He will probably have to sit around for six months before joining Maranello and one must wonder what fancy title he will be given. Whatever the case, the team needs all the help it can get as many engineers turn down approaches.

It is a similar story with Sauber, as not everyone wants to move to Switzerland. Some like the lifestyle in Switzerland and the money is probably better, but the word in Budapest was that the Swiss team is looking at selling a seat next yer, to help make up for drops in revenue. The primary problem is that the team ended last year sixth in the Constructors’ Championship and this year is ninth. The difference between the two positions is upward of $20 million and with the Alfa Romeo sponsorship of $15 million, one can how there might be  hole in the budget in 2024. The team’s good showing in qualifying in Budapest might have been a case of throwing all the eggs into one basket because the car was suited to the track and the team may have pushed the engines to the limit in order to try to get a big score before the upcoming races where scoring points is unlikely. Does this explain what happened in Hungary? Possibly.

The other things worth looking out for is the ongoing “tyre war” because Bridgestone and Pirelli are fighting to become the exclusive Formula 1 tyre supplier for the next contract, which will run from 2025 to 2027. The deal will cover three seasons, with an option for a fourth and will include tyre supply to F1, F2 and F3. 

The latest word is that both tyre companies have been accepted by the FIA to become candidates for the role, and it is now down to the Formula 1 group to negotiate the best commercial contract with one or the other. On paper there is only one likely winner because Bridgestone is a far bigger company with revenues of $24.1 billion per year (the second biggest behind Michelin at $26.37 billion). Pirelli is only the sixth biggest player in the market with revenues of $5.9 billon. Pirelli has all the technology needed to produce the tyres F1 requires in 2025. Bridgestone has been out of the game for  long time, and so would need to get a proper test programme as the cars are bigger and heavier than they used to be. But how will that work? The teams will all want to be involved in any test programme but there are restrictions, which means that Bridgestone might need to build its own car to ensure parity of experience and then there is the question of whether choosing Pirelli would drive Bridgestone away if Pirelli decided it only wanted a final deal, as it has achieved most of what it wanted in F1, so signing up Pirelli for a last deal might not be wise. The one thing that F1 does not want is to be left without a tyre supplier in the future, so the choice is complicated.

There is  lot of talk about 2022 cost cap breaches, even if the FIA says it is still collating the numbers. This is not what F1 needs. There remain questions about what can and cannot be done and the process of creating solid boundaries is still hit and miss. Some teams will make a fuss about how this will impact performance, others will stay quiet if they re the ones pushing the boundaries. F1 says the best way to sort the problem is to have points deductions rather than financial penalties, which makes sense, but none of this tweaking of the rules is good for the sport. If only it were easy… The latest problems seem to be related to creative use of sub-contractors and subsidiaries. Time will tell if we have to have another period of controversy.

It is similar story with the scandal in Singapore involving the race promoter and the government minister involved in F1.  There re folks saying that this is no big deal and involved only a few VIP hospitality passes but if that is the case, is arresting those involved he right way to handle it? Singapore has zero tolerance for such things and this is one of the reasons the city state has enjoyed such success. There is a strong argument that no matter what has been done, it is mad to stop the Grand Prix, given the benefits it brings to both sides. So it may just be a case of those involved getting into suitable trouble and the race going ahead as usual. We can but hope. F1 needs the Singapore ice as its activities in Asia have been pretty poor of late, as the way that people do business in Asia is very different to how business is done elsewhere. Perhaps F1 might benefit from local expertise?

The movie crowd were in Hungary although not with any stars his time. This is because the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) union is saying its members should not work until  a deal is worked out with the rest of the industry. The film production people was filming at the Hungaroring and the racing cars were lapping (right), driven by race drivers who are not actors, but the stars stay away.  This will likely impact on the film’s budget and the timetable, but for now everyone says it is all fine.

There are similar noises coming out of Las Vegas where some of the folk with venues on the race track are unhappy at being told that they have to pay $1,500 per head if they wish to have their clients viewing the track. The promoters argue that the venues will be profiting from the event and contributing nothing, which is fair comment. The good news is that a lot of the venues are owned by companies involved in the promotion but others are trying to stir up trouble. Anything is possible with the litigious world of the United States of America, but it is going to be hard for a venue to prove that the race will hurt their business, so legal challenges will be difficult. They might be able to show that it will impact their profits, but without the race there will not be any extra money and so any sensible judge will throw out any law suits. But are all the judges sensible?

Right, having been home for 24 hours, it s now time to get ready to go again… and this time it looks like we will need to have gumboots and umbrellas in the car. The bad news is that there will be an amount of autobahn driving involved as the only sensible hotel accommodation is not within easy reach of Spa. It’s across the border in Germany… Still, the Dutch fans will not be coming from the direction of Germany, so things should be fine… well, except that the local authorities have decided to dig up some key highways over the period of the F1 race… as previously mentioned, there are some folk who think that the world revolves around the sport and not vice versa.