Green Notebook from Sotteville-lès-Rouen

I am sure this cannot be true but the word “sotte” in French means stupid and so a place called Sotteville-lès-Rouen is presumably a place where stupid people live – or have lived in the past. Place names tend to be very old, except for airports which are usually named after politicians, presumably because they are loud, irritating and cause disruption in life. I suppose one day soon we will be able to fly in and out of Trumpton International Airport…

Anyway, the suburb of Rouen I am discussing is nowhere near Renault headquarters in Boulogne-Billancourt, but if one threw a Renault executive into the river at global headquarters, the body would eventually float past Sotteville.

Still, the company is big in these parts… There’s a walloping great factory just down the road in Cleon and a secret test track at CTA (secrets are always better with acronyms). This actually stands for Centre Technique Aubevoye which, to quote a company website, is “a secret Renault Group base” which is “hidden in Normandy’s forests and skirting the meandering Seine”.

This is “classified as confidential” which obviously explains why there is  web page about it…

What is it about the French and secrets? When he was FIA President, Jean Todt once put out a press release announcing “a secret settlement” with Ferrari. This was a painful and expensive punishment for Ferrari, which had been caught… (um, what’s another word?). Ah yes, “pushing into the grey areas” of the rules. It was a secret because the sport would have been embarrassed if its most famous team had been revealed, so the crime and the punishment were both classified, although Todt wanted the world to know that something had been done. I still laugh about the “secret settlement” whenever I think of it. Jean had a sense of humour…

Anyway, the company boss Louis Renault used to live not far from Sotteville, in a place called Herqueville, where he built a magnificent estate, before the company was taken off his hands by the French government, which argued that he let the nasty invading Germans use his factories. He himself said that “it is better to give them the butter, or they’ll take the cows” but then, according to his family, he was murdered by the government so that he’d be out of the way…

Where is this leading? Well, the point I am making is that Renault has secrets and one day I am sure we will find out why someone thought it was a good idea to rehire Flavio Briatore, the man who did Renault almost as much harm as Carlos Ghosn (the former Renault boss who had to escape from Japan in a packing case).

Personally, I think they should move Renault headquarters to Sotteville…

Just to finish off, Sotteville’s only real claim to fame is that it was the site (or rather the target) of the first combat raid of the US Eighth Air Force and thus the first place in Europe to be pummelled by B17s. They were after the extensive rail yards located there…

I am sure you are now asking what this has to do with the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona. This is a fair question. Any normal person going from Barcelona to the Red Bull Ring in Austria, does not go by way of Sotteville. The normal route is along the coast to the Cote d’Azur, then across Italy to Venice and over the Alps to Villach in Austria. This is just short of 1,000 miles, but  I didn’t do any of that. Instead I drove 700 miles home to Normandy and then 800 to get to the Red Bull Ring, so around 1,500, which is about 500 miles more than logical. I did get to hang out briefly with my nearest and dearest during the triple-header, but that was not the real explanation. The truth is that since the British deserted their European citizens and deprived us of the right to vote (which has since been returned once Brexit was over), many people like me are disillusioned with their country and so I am in the process of becoming a French national, or at least dual nationality, which makes life easier.

Part of this process requires applicants to do a French exam, to see if they can speak and write French to a sensible degree. I think this is a good idea but in my region they have only a handful of such exams each year and the only one I could make (thanks to the F1 calendar) was the Tuesday after Spain. So the reason I have been quiet in the last few days is that I have been driving and taking exams…

The Green Notebook from Montmelo is largely filled with scrawls about drivers, aside from some notes of astonishment regarding a Mr Briatore’s new job and the fact that the two parties do not even agree about what his role will be. Briatore sent out a message saying he will be “executive director” of Alpine F1, but the official announcement refers to him as “executive advisor”. My conclusion is that he is there to sell Alpine (the whole car division) within a couple of years, after he has tried to increase its value. Hopefully, he won’t be telling drivers to crash this time.

I am not sure I’d want to work there, but apparently Renault boss Luca de Meo thinks Briatore will be a magnet for talent. Honestly, if I was an Alpine employee I’d be sending out my CV to Aston Martin, Williams or Visa Cash App, all of which are in the F1 cluster and all of which are hiring. I write this in the knowledge that dozens of CVs are arriving each week at the aforementioned places, so Briatore’s first task is to stop the rot.

Good luck with that…

Officially there are still nine of the 20 Formula 1 seats available for 2025 – but the reality is that the silly season is effectively over with only one seat really still up for grabs. The Visa Cash App RB Team recently took up its option on Yuki Tsunoda for 2025, after he got an offer from Audi. This means that the team will now choose between Daniel Ricciardo and Liam Lawson. In recent days, the ever-indiscreet Helmut Marko has said that the choice will be Lawson and the logical thing to do now is to try to give him as much seat time in the car as possible, so if you’re a Danny Ric fan think twice about buying tickets to races after the summer break…

We know that Red Bull, Ferrari and McLaren are all settled and, although there is yet to be an announcement, it is clear that Mercedes has decided that it will replace Lewis Hamilton with 17-year-old youngster Andrea Kimi Antonelli. He turns 18 in August but Mercedes is not pushing it and he will start racing for Merc next year. There were discussions about putting him into the second Williams for the rest of this year but that might be a bit much and he is thus focussing on trying to have more success in Formula 2.  He has been more than a match for his Prema Racing team-mate Oliver Bearman, who is going to Haas in 2025 so that Ferrari will have  youngster in training for the post-Hamilton (or post Leclerc era). The problem is that this year neither has done that well. Formula 2 introduced a new car and no-one seems to have mastered it yet. The championship is scrappy, with no dominant driver and eight of the 11 teams having won either reverse-grid Sprint races (which are basically irrelevant) or the more important Feature races, but that does not include Prema nor Hitech. The latter runs championship leader Paul Aron, but he is yet to win a race and owes his lead in the title race to six podium finishes in the 12 races.

If the Mercedes drive was still available we would not be writing about Carlos Sainz considering the choice between Williams and Sauber-Audi, and Alpine (if one believes the post-Briatore rumours). Both teams think that they have a good chance of signing Carlos and both are willing to pay the same kind of money, so it really is  choice of which team Carlos thinks will best for him in the next couple of years.  Williams might not be looking very good right now, but things are on the move. They have more CVs arriving than do Sauber. The secret to modern F1 (which Renault has yet to understand) is that everything takes longer to achieve than you think.

The market is dependent on Sainz’s decision, which should come this week. It was meant to be last week but it did not happen. We will see where he ends up, but logic says Williams is his best choice for 2025 and 2026. But logic and F1 are not always best buddies.

Aston Martin has yet to confirm Lance Stroll in its second car, but no-one has any doubt that the owner’s son will still be in a car alongside Fernando Alonso next year. He will probably have a two-year deal to get him to the end of 2026.

The most reliable sources say that Alpine has already taken up an option it had on Pierre Gasly and Jack Doohan, the team’s reserve driver, is clearly being lined up for the second seat. The team’s biggest problem is not the drivers.

Esteban Ocon decided a while ago that he would depart (one wonders if he knew about Briatore’s arrival before or after the decision was made) but he was on the shopping list of various teams. He is going to end up with Bearman at Haas.

So this means that the one seat open in 2025 is the second Audi, unless they have convinced Sainz to go there. It seems like both Audi and Williams have Valtteri Bottas as their Plan B. If Danny Ric is on the market, will it make a difference? No-one is showing much interest in Kevin Magnussen and while one can make good arguments for Guanyu Zhou or Aston Martin reserve driver Felipe Drugovich as being much-needed representatives of big markets, I doubt anyone will be swayed by that, unless (a lot of) money is involved. Most teams are now financially sound and the logic of pay-drivers is weak as scoring points brings more dosh than simply being given it by someone’s daddy or their sponsor.

The one other thing to watch for is the mid-season market because once the 2025 deals are sorted out, some of the teams might want to get rid of a current driver…

Right, I must stop now. I need to sleep and drive (but not at the same time)…