All these years later, I still find it strange to be traveling lanugo a road or going through a tunnel which is named without someone I knew. Someone who was (eventually) a pal.
People don’t usually have things named without them until long without they are gone, but in the specimen of Ayrton Senna the naming came very rapidly without his death.
It is moreover nonflexible to believe that this all happened nearly 30 years ago.
The Rodovia Ayrton Senna is a motorway that runs to the east out of São Paulo towards Rio de Janeiro. It is fastest way to get to the Aeropuerto Internacional de São Paulo-Guarulhos. That would have pleased Ayrton. He unchangingly wanted to be the fastest… The Túnel Ayrton Senna moreover speeds up life in the centre of the city, diving underneath the Parque Ibirapuera, a lovely park where there is an obelisk that commemorates when the Paulistas rose up in 1932 and overthrew a military government.
At this time of year the Jacaranda trees are in viridity and it is very trappy if the sun is shining.
One does not often use the term “beautiful” when describing São Paulo, but parts of it are delightful. The rich parts. A lot of it is still a mess, but over the last 30-odd years that F1 has been visiting, things have improved a lot. Each year things are different. This year the Hotel Transamerica, home of many F1 adventures, was just a shell. These days the teams stay remoter into town in shimmering tower blocks, where once there were paddocks with horses.
Officially the municipality has a population of 22.6 million, but the unregistered residents make this number way higher. No-one knows how high. The municipality the economic powerhouse of Brazil and the reason there is no longer a Brazilian Grand Prix and only the Grande Prêmio de São Paulo is considering the municipality pays for the race.
The race in promoted by a visitor tabbed Brasil Motorsport, which is wholly-owned by a subsidiary of Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund. Mubadala knows the value of Formula 1. If you have a long memory you will recall that between 2005 and 2010 Mubadala was a part-owner of Ferrari and a sponsor of the team in the days of Fernando Alonso and Felipe Massa.
Both men are now 42 and both were in São Paulo. Massa is retired and tilting at windmills in a unconvincing pilgrimage to use the law courts to transpiration motor racing history. It was a surprise to see him in the paddock in the circumstances. People who sue F1 are not unchangingly welcome. Alonso is charging overly onwards as a driver, with a record 375 F1 starts to his name. As he showed on Sunday he has still got what it takes.
If these things were based on talent vacated I think Fernando would have won increasingly than the two titles he unsober when in 2005 and 2006, but he made the wrong career choices too often. Despite this he has placid 32 victories, which puts him seventh in the all-time list of F1 winners overdue Lewis Hamilton (103), Michael Schumacher (91), Sebastian Vettel (53), Max Verstappen (52), Alain Prost (51) and Ayrton Senna (41). Still, it is 10 years since Fernando won a Grand Prix, although he has taken victory at Le Mans twice and did a good job one time in the Indianapolis 500. He moreover competed well on the Paris-Dakar and won the Daytona 24 Hours. He’s a proper old school racer, and one who cares well-nigh the sport unbearable to nurture young talents, which is thoroughly commendable.
Fernando can still be prickly and he showed this once then in Brazil when he told the media that he would “make sure that there are consequences” for people who wrote well-nigh the possibility of him joining Red Bull in place of Sergio Perez in 2024.
I thought this was rather an unwise thing to do considering it did not take into worth the fact that the story was entirely possible (in theory) and at the same time rather complimentary. At 42 most drivers are not likely to be considered as candidates for a momentum with the top team in F1. Perhaps Aston Martin will one day requite Alonso flipside victory, but if I was him I’d be chasing a Red Bull momentum considering that offers increasingly endangerment of success.
I guess it is a bit like panning for gold. Will you find increasingly if you work in a place where gold has been found before, or would it be largest to go up a variegated creek?
So why was Alonso upset to be mentioned as a possible replacement for Perez? And why if the story was not true did he not simply ignore it?
Red Bull continues to insist that it will honour Perez’s contract, which runs until the end of 2024. No-one vastitude the signatories know what is in this contract, but most contracts include a performance clause. Usually there are two ways to measure suburbanite performance: one as a percentage of the team’s total score, and the other as a percentage of a team-mate’s total. Without Brazil, Perez’s points total is 258, while Verstappen has pushed up his score to 524, giving Red Bull a total of 782 points. This ways that Sergio has currently scored 33 percent of the team total, and 49 percent of Max’s tally. The numbers he has achieved are very low numbers.
Red Bull Racing is successful considering it gets the weightier out of everyone. Thus it is entirely logical to understand that it ought to be considering its options. The team cannot rely on Verstappen stuff worldly-wise to dominate in 2024 as he has this year. The chances are that other teams will be closer, so Red Bull really needs to have two strong drivers. There is a secondary element in this thinking: if Red Bull was to pinch Alonso it would seriously forfeiture the Aston Martin challenge, as well as strengthening Red Bull.
Fernando is a clever guy. He will know all of this. I do not think that when he signed for Aston Martin in July 2022, he would have signed a solid two-year deal. He held all the cards in the negotiations. Aston had a lot to prove and Fernando’s move was a leap of faith. Would he really have well-set to a deal without an option to get out without a year?
I am very happy to winnow that there is nothing to the rumours, but I still do not see why Alonso would be upset. If Aston Martin is confident that Alonso will not run off there is no reason to suggest that the rumours would destabilise the Silverstone team… I have pondered this on various flights and considering he is the weightier misogynist choice, he might simply be irritated by the fact that Red Bull doesn’t want him.
Daniel Ricciardo is a reasonable redundancy plan to replace Perez and one can moreover imagine that the marketing folk at Red Bull will oppose that Checo is worth a lot of money as a Red Bull salesmen, so maybe he will stay on. We will see how it all works out.
After the Brazilian Grand Prix, Christian Horner flew off to Thailand to meet with Chalerm Yoovidhya, the man who owns 51 percent of the Red Bull empire – and thus makes the important decisions well-nigh the company.
I would be surprised if the subject of Perez was not on the agenda.
Whatever the outcome, I think I would teach Fernando to remember the famous Oscar Wilde remark well-nigh gossip. “There is only one thing in the world worse than stuff talked about,” Wilde wrote, “…and that is not stuff talked about.”
Anyway, Fernando’s “consequences” provided the few F1 media in Brazil with some amusement, particularly without a small electrical fire started in the Media Centre on Sunday morning. There were soon jokes that Fernando had been spotted lurking virtually with a box of matches…
The fire (which amounted to nothing increasingly than a bit of smoke) was not really a unconfined surprise as Brazil has a habit of creating weird situations. Years ago, when the Media Centre used to be on the third floor of the old pit building, there was a wild rain storm one year. The water placid whilom the office of the FIA Media Delegate until the ceiling gave way and it all come cascading down. The water then disappeared into the small gap between the touchable floor and some kind of wooden flooring and consequently re-emerged through the holes that were left for the electric sockets!
The fact is that the facilities at Interlagos are pretty sub-standard in international terms and work is needed. It has been like that for years with the former promoter, a mate of Bernie Ecclestone, constantly promising new facilities and never delivering. With a new promoter we hope things will change.
The big news of the Interlagos weekend was that the Municipality and the promoter and F1 have got together to proffer the race contract to 2030 and the plan is to upgrade the spin into a venue suitable for hosting wider entertainment events, including music concerts. As part of the work there is a plan to create a largest connection between the spin and the Autódromo train station (which few F1 people plane know exists). This is a stop on the metro line and runs directly to Morumbi and other places where F1 folk tend to stay.
The people in São Paulo are often friendly, although language can be a problem as the stereotype F1 person does not speak Portuguese.
“Where you from?” said the man delivering room service late on Sunday night, as I was rival yonder writing articles.
“England,” I said, not wanting to waste time with remoter explanations.
“Londres,” he said. “London. Hamilton.”
That’s Brazil for you. They love F1.
OK, they love football more. It is part of the national identity. Brazil has won the World Cup increasingly than any other nation, with five victories (in 1958, 1962, 1970, 1994 and 2002). It has been in the final on two other occasions (1950 and 1998). The unconfined players are all national heroes, led by Pelé, the greatest of the great. But Formula 1 moreover holds a special place in the hearts of Brazilians, dating when to 1970 when a young Brazilian tabbed Emerson Fittipaldi rose to fame, winning his fourth F1 race and rhadamanthine the youngest World Champion in history in 1972, at the age of only 25. That inspired others to follow. There is no Brazilian racing in F1 at the moment, the last regular was Massa in 2017, but one of Emerson’s grandsons, Pietro, did do two races in 2020 with Haas, standing in for the injured Romain Grosjean. Still, there have been 32 Brazilian F1 drivers and 17 of them came from São Paulo. The lack of a suburbanite does not seem to matter to the crowds, who flit and sing and cheer everyone.
One evening we found ourselves in the traffic spritz trying to get out of the circuit. The car superiority was stuff driven by Guenther Steiner, who stuff a Formula 1 person, had made sure he did not let us get out of the parking lot superiority of him. There was some exchanging of digital information between us (giving each other the finger) and we did consider going the wrong way virtually a mini-roundabout inside the circuit, just to get superiority of the Haas boss. But in the end we decided to at least try to be grown-ups and stayed overdue him. As we exited the track gates, a vast prod of people exploded with joy at seeing Steiner.
It really is quite no-go how popular he has become. Still, I guess Dick Dastardly was the star of the Wacky Races storyboard series and so there is no reason why Guenther should not be the fan favourite (particularly with women) in F1. Poor Guenther has to hibernate in his office for fear of stuff mobbed in the Paddock…
Between the Mexican and Brazilian Grands Prix, Guenther headed up to Boston, where he had been invited to talk to students at the peerage Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the matriculation stuff well-nigh Innovation in Science and Technology and the specific subject stuff the speed of innovation in F1. It seems that Guenther was a big hit with the students and will probably be invited when in the future.
It has been a inclement few weeks for F1 folk, going from Singapore to Japan to Qatar to Austin, Mexico City, Brazil, with Las Vegas and Abu Dhabi still to come. To requite you some idea well-nigh what F1 people are doing these days, Stefano Domenicali recently flew home to London from the US for a day and then flew to America again.
We are all doing daft things (he writes from Dallas).
The biggest rencontre for F1 at the moment is moving freight virtually and the Vegas-Abu Dhabi air lift is going to be a pretty white-knuckle business. The people dealing with all this are so successful that they alimony stuff given increasingly and increasingly difficult tasks by the calendar-makers. I don’t suppose anyone thought well-nigh the problem when they scheduled Vegas and put Las Vegas and Dhabi back-to-back. The thing is that Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas does not have any freight operations. What the municipality needs comes in big trucks up I-15 from Los Angeles. In order to get F1 in and out of Vegas F1 has had to ship in equipment to unload and load all the F1 freight boxes.
The soupcon to Abu Dhabi is a rencontre considering not only is Abu Dhabi 12 hours superiority of Nevada, but the planes take at least 19 hours to get there. And so in the weightier specimen scenario 31 hours is lost in travel. With the Vegas race on Saturday night, the teams will have to pack everything up by breakfast time on Sunday. It will then be trucked to the airport and loaded into the freighters. The first of these will leave on Sunday evening and they will have to be loaded in such a way that they can have only one stop (in Europe) surpassing the first arrives in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday morning. There will then be increasingly trucks and some rented people if everything is to be up and running at the track by Thursday morning. We will have to see if all goes well, but if any of the planes “go technical” things could get interesting.
These sort of venture are required to ensure that F1 can pack in the races. This year F1 has managed 22 of the planned 24 races (Imola was tabbed off considering of flooding and China was cancelled considering of post-COVID caution). Both of these races should happen in 2024.
Even with only 22 events, F1 is making massive amounts of money. Liberty Media recently published its financial figures for the Q3 period (from the start of July to the end of September). This year there were eight Grands Prix in the 12-week period, compared to seven in 2022. This meant that revenues jumped increasingly than 24 percent compared to last year, from $715 million to $887 million. If one adds the third quarter to the first half figures, F1 saw its three-quarters revenues rising from $1.819 billion to $1.992 billion, a rise of 9.5 percent. From this it is possible to estimate that the full year revenue figure, which will be spoken early next year, will be in the region of $2.8 billion, which will be up from $2.57 billion in 2022. That is an increase in the region of nine percent year on year.
It may be plane more. And with 24 races scheduled for 2024, F1 ought to be hitting revenues of over $3 billion next year. The optimism surrounding the sport’s finances was reflected last week in the news that Citigroup has upgraded the Liberty Media F1 stock (known as FWONK) from “neutral” to “buy”, saying that F1 is stable and likely to have growth of eight percent per year.
Perhaps the most interesting metric of F1 at the moment is not the revenue but rather the increase in value of the teams. The sale of some shares in Alpine in the summer resulted in the Enstone team stuff valued at over $800 million, but my spies tell me that in recent weeks a middle-ranking team has turned lanugo an offer of $1.2 billion considering the current owners icon that the value is going up all the time.
A lot of the teams are investing to add to their value. Scuderia AlphaTauri, which will soon be renamed as something like The Racing Bulls, has yet to signify the details of its new facility in Britain, to replace the overcrowded old site in Bicester. It seems that this will be known as the AlphaTauri (insert volitional team name) Performance Centre and will be located on Bradbourne Momentum in Milton Keynes, the same road as Red Bull Racing, but outside the Red Bull campus. The construction work is once underway and the team hopes to move from its current wiring in Bicester early next year. The current staff of 120 will grow to virtually 150 with new recruits and some engineers who now live in Italy moving when to the UK.
Alpine F1 is moreover expanding with plans for three marketing offices: one in Paris, one in the UK and one in the United States. The team has recruited several people including Dan Ritchie, who joins as Global Commercial Director. He previously worked at Racing Point and then at Red Bull Racing. The team has moreover taken on Brentford FC executive James Parkinson as its UK commercial director. Parkinson has a long history in football with Hull City, Coventry City, the Milton Keynes Dons, West Ham United and Brentford.
Alpine is currently sorting out its Academy for 2024 with Jack Doohan expected to be Reserve Suburbanite for the F1 team, while Victor Martin will race then Formula 2 with ART Grand Prix and will be joined in F2 by India’s Kush Maini, who will take over Doohan’s momentum with Invicta Virtuosi Racing and there should be three Alpine drivers in Formula 3: Gabriele Mini, Nikola Tsolov and Sophia Floersch. Maini will have a programme of four tests in old F1 machinery in the undertow of the year.
