Green Notebook from the Borromean islands

The geese are flying south, a new school year is beginning and the trees are beginning to look autumnal.

Now is the time of the grey tourists, so-called because of the hair colour of those involved, elderly folk who still like to travel. Some French have taken to calling it “blue tourism” because it involves ladies who like to rinse their hair slightly blue in order to avoid it looking grey.

Whatever the name, the rush of the summer is over and so the hotels and airlines are now relying on more mature travellers.

Formula 1 is up and running again, but the summer break did not seem to change very much, although at Monza (of course) some genie rubs a lamp somewhere and Ferrari magically becomes fast. Most magicians use sleight of hand to make impossible things happen, but in F1 all the other teams are watching closely to make sure that no aces appear from sleeves.

Some argue that Ferrari builds its cars with Monza in mind, which is very clever, but then a rational person might say: ‘If they can build cars that work at Monza, why can they not do it for other circuits?’. It is a fair point, but let’s not let logic get in the way. Fast Ferraris make lots of people happy. In the end, of course, Max trampled on the dreams and by doing so broke another F1 record. The two Ferrari drivers tried hard to take one another out, which added to crowd’s jollity, and people went home happy. It was a typical Monza, except that the Autodromo Nazionale was not its usual self. The famous Monza Parco is 1,700 acres in size, with beautiful old woodland, which caused a lot of problems when they needed to revamped safety a few years ago. Late in July, a wild storm hit the area, knocking down 10,000 trees. There were tree stumps everywhere and hastily-repaired gaps in fences where trees had fallen. It did not feel like Monza should.

The weather is a subject that the English love to discuss but until the last few days Europe has not been having “lovely weather”. Now it is baking hot after months of very average conditions.

After Zandvoort I was at home for just 18 hours. Not much point, you might think, but it is good to go home and show one’s face occasionally. Still, it is also good to have additional time when journeying because you never know what will happen.

As the Dutch fans were celebrating Max’s win at Zandvoort on Sunday evening (with more than a little beer involved), down in the Cottian Alps there was a substantial landslide close to the Fréjus Tunnel. This blocked the autoroute and the railway line and meant that all freight traffic that usually goes through the tunnel towards Turin had to divert, either south to the Côte d’Azur or north to the Mont-Blanc tunnel.

This meant that the roads to Mont-Blanc were rapidly saturated with trucks – on both sides of the mountain. Fortunately for the F1 circus, their trucks thundered south from Zandvoort through Germany to Basel and then through Switzerland to the Saint Gotthard tunnel to Italy. They began arriving at Monza on schedule. The movement of F1 freight is an amazing thing, but the jugglers who pull it off every week can only do so much… That’s the trouble with magic. Each new trick leads to a demand for more. Initially I headed to Mont Blanc but one look at the approach road took me into Chamonix instead, and then up to the Col des Montets and across the Swiss border and down to Martigny.

Having descended into the valley, it was then time to climb up another to reach the Col du Grand-Saint-Bernard, the pass rather than the tunnel. This was like going back in time about 60 years when one drove over the Alps on insanely twisting roads. There’s a lake at the top and a couple of places to stop for lunch and so I stopped and had a lovely time (as Max would say), even if it was rather cool up there. 

There followed a leisurely afternoon descent to Aosta and down to the plain of the Po, which runs 250 miles east to west across the north of Italy from Turin to Venice. By the evening I was in Monza.

It was a busy weekend but come Monday morning it was off again on a more leisurely return trip, starting out by heading north-west to the glorious Lake Maggiore, with a lakeside lunch near the elegant resort of Stresa, with its famous Isola Bella, the best known of the Borromean Islands. From there it was up the valley towards the Simplon Pass.

You can take a train under the mountains from Iselle to Brig, which takes about 20 minutes, but it is no fun at all and so it was up and over the Alps again into beautiful bright sunshine at the top of the pass, guarded by a huge stone eagle.

Then it is downhill into the upper Rhone valley and a pleasant run down to Martigny (again), before turning north to Montreux and then along the north shore of Lake Geneva, passing Lausanne and Geneva itself (passing the FIA on the way) before getting back into France and heading through the Jura and down to the plain of the Bresse and across to the Saône at Macon and then through the hills to Cluny, a medieval city famous for an ancient abbey.

A little rural France works wonders with the soul and I went west to Montluçon and then north to Bourges and the Sologne, a peaceful land of sandy game-filled forests where there are, so they say, 2,800 lakes. I made a brief stop at the medieval town of Beaugency, where a 24-arch bridge, dating to the 14th Century, spans the Loire. This was a miracle when it was built.

Then a baking hot afternoon and the desire to go home overcame the joy of discovering new places and old favourites and I headed on through forests with cobbled streets and a village called Dead Horse (Cheval Mort). We passed Thoiry, the French version of Longleat, where lions, tigers and leopards wander around the grounds of an elegant old chateau. Travelling is always educational and this trip provided a fascinating story at a place called Goupillieres, which means foxholes. This is odd when one considers that the word fox in French is renard. It seems that back in the Middle Ages French foxes were called goupils, but folk tales about them had created a famous goupil by the name of Renart, with the many different versions of the stories being collected together.

Renart was an anthropomorphic character, a human fox who was a bit of a scoundrel, but he was popular nonetheless and in time his name transformed into Renard – and the name took over as the French word for fox.

It is a bit like changing the name duck into donald…

It struck me that this was not unlike the idea that some folks have about that old fox Guenther Steiner trying to take over the Haas team and changing the name to Steiner Racing. Rumours emerged before Monza that Guenther is suing Gene Hass for some daft sum of money because he is the one who has built the team. Guenther laughed about it.

“I told Gene that I was supposed to be suing him for $900 million,” Steiner explained. “And he said: ‘Good luck with that!’. Where do these stories com from? Who makes them up?”

It is, I suppose, a bit like all these people who insist that Haas will sell his team to Michael Andretti, even if he consistently says that he has no intention of doing any such thing and enjoys being a team owner. He can afford it, it promotes his business so why would he sell? It might be an expensive hobby, but it is Gene’s train set and he likes playing with it.

Steiner had a busy weekend doing endless selfies but had fun doing a Pirelli Hot lap in an Alfa Romeo, driven by none other than Pirelli motorsport boss Mario Isola. If you think that meant a sedate trip around the park, think again. Before rising through the ranks, Mario was a Pirelli test driver and knows how to drive fast cars very rapidly.

Steiner had former Ferrari boss Mattia Binotto as a guest over the weekend (which set tongues wagging) but few noticed that former Philip Morris and Ferrari chairman Louis Camilleri was also hanging out at Haas. I spotted Alfa Romeo CEO Jean-Philippe Imparato wandering around in Alfa team gear, but he did not seem to spend any time at Haas, which suggests that Alfa Romeo has still got to decide whether to stay in F1 next year, as the firm has no choice to sponsor a team apart from Haas.

Weirdly, the one bloke wandering around on Sunday who was not in Ferrari gear was its CEO Benedetto Vigna, who obviously wanted to keep a low profile. At one point F1 TV had him in shot in the Ferrari garage but only captioned the man standing next to him: one Gerhard Berger. There was no sign of Ferrari chairman John Elkann, but perhaps he was there somewhere.

The other visitor of note, albeit briefly was the new Australian Grand Prix Corporation CEO Travis Auld, who recently joined the corporation after a career in the Australian Football League (AFL).

One very noticeable absentee was Renault CEO Luca de Meo, who did not show up at Monza, presumably because he did not want to answer questions about the recent shenanigans at Alpine.

There was much talk about cost caps, with the spin doctors of some of the big teams trying to keep the story in the news. Still, it might not be a great idea as I did hear of a ruse that one team has which allows them to get tax breaks from their government for five years of reduced taxation for super skilled foreign workers, which means that the team can offer (and declare) a lower salary than its rivals while the employee gets more money because there is no tax to pay… Sneaky, huh? Anyway, the FIA declared that everyone was fine and so the story is dead, although I am sure some will have a whinge about things in Singapore.

The driver market did much as expected with Mercedes and Haas retaining their drivers and Aston Martin not surprising anyone by re-signing Lance Stroll. This is bad news for the team’s reserve driver Felipe Drugovich, who has sat out this year hoping for a chance. He cannot sit out another year and so is expected to move to Formula E to keep racing, while staying on as the Aston reserve. There was talk of him joining Sauber but he does not want to be viewed as a pay-driver and does not have the kind of money the Swiss team wants and so the team needs to go on searching. Guanyu Zhou is doing a very decent job and is likely to get better next year, but he does not pay – so he is exposed. The only real option as far as I can see is for the team to try to get some money from Germany for Mick Schumacher, as it is clear that he has no future at Mercedes beyond being a smiling face with a famous name. This probably explains why the usually reserved Mick gave an interview slagging off Steiner, after his two lacklustre seasons at Haas. That seemed a little graceless. Using Schumacher might appeal to the team’s future owner Audi, but one presumes that when the firm does finally arrive in F1 in 2026, it wants to have someone better than Mick. The Sauber drive is Schumacher’s only chance in F1, but he might be able to parlay his name into a driver elsewhere in the motorsport world. Williams may not have announced it yet but the team has no plans to replace Logan Sargeant.

The one rumour of interest concerned Lando Norris’s future as Red Bull seem rather keen for him to join Max Verstappen. Helmut Marko mentioned it and Lando said he was open to the idea as well. The problem is that he has a McLaren deal until the end of 2025, unless he wants to buy his way out of the contract.

The really interesting story of the Monza weekend was that Andrea Kimi Antonelli, the 17-year-old Mercedes young driver, will jump straight in Formula 2 next year, bypassing the conventional route to F1 through Formula 3. Mercedes appears to be confident that the Italian will be able to handle the move, which will position him as the driver most likely to replace Lewis Hamilton in 2026. It is expected that Antonelli will stay with Prema and it is logical that he would replace Frederik Vesti. This will probably mean that Antonelli will team up with Oliver Bearman, the 18-year-old Ferrari youngster, who is sixth in the series.

Perhaps in 2026, Italians will have someone in F1 to cheer about, other than Ferrari…