Green Notebook from deep in the Doubs

I thought it must be an accident of some sort, but in the end I discovered it was just the volume of frontaliers earning their extra money. I was not happy to gain this knowledge, although I guess it served as a warning to never use the same road again.

I was having one of those days when nothing goes to plan. Driving yourself around Europe, you are not at the mercy of airlines, striking air traffic controllers, irritating security folk or lost luggage, but sometimes things just conspire to make life complicated.

Monza was the last road trip of the year, as driving to Baku, while potentially interesting, is not such a great idea. I looked it up, just for fun, and discovered that it would be just short of 3,000 miles and around 55 hours of driving.  However, when I looked more closely, I discovered that, according to Google Maps: “this route has tolls”; “this route may cross country/region borders” and “your destination is in a different time zone”.  Yes, that’s all right, but perhaps one should mention that you need to go through a war zone and cross the front line between Russian and Ukrainian forces, somewhere near Kupiansk. This is one of the drawbacks of artificial intelligence…

I had a similar, but less dramatic, illustration of the same thing on my home from Monza. All went well to Iselle di Trasquera, where one drives onto a train which takes you under the Simplon Pass to Brig, in the Rhone Valley in Switzerland. You then drive down the valley for a while before climbing the northern side to get to Goppenstein, where another train awaits to take you through the Lötschberg tunnel to the picturesque Kandersteg in the Bernese Oberland. Lovely.

For reasons that I don’t understand, as I did the same trip last year and again in the spring, there was a huge queue to get the train and I wasted more than an hour waiting for a space. When finally we popped out of the tunnel, it was pouring with rain, the roads were clogged with tractors and it took forever to get down to the shores of Lake Thun and the motorway to Bern. In search of the fastest route home, I told my car to find me the best route, which involved going west to Yverdon-les-Bains and across the border to Besançon. It isn’t my usual route but I trusted the artificial intelligence. This failed to take into account pouring rain, more tractors, school buses and the frontalier rush hour. So it was 6pm before I reached Besançon and the car was cheerfully telling me that I would be home by midnight.

The Doubs is famous for cars (primarily Peugeots) and cheese (Comté) with some famous sausages from Morteau, and the citadel of Besançon, which is a masterpiece of fortress design by the great Vauban, but I didn’t give a toss about any of that as I fought my way through to the motorway. Getting home at midnight was not an option given the limited sleep I had had in the two previous two nights and so I figured I would try to go half the distance and then stop for the night. It is at times like this that I think of an old F1 journalist colleague who someone managed to buy himself a light aircraft and had enough cash to pay for fuel, landing fees and maintenance and so flew to all the European races, cruising along at 250mph. Brilliant. Flying around Europe is great on a sunny day, but a few of the people who fly these machines end up buying farms in the mountains. In case this reference has flown over your head, I am talking about what the Americans these days call “passing” because I guess that the word “die” is too harsh for some to accept, without getting wobbly lower lips.

I hate the expression almost as much a detest “reaching out” or “circling back”. What the world needs nowadays is Ernest Hemingway as the chief of a global language police (he’d love it) to stop such verbal aberrations, with lengthy jail sentences for those who use jargonised gobbledygook and insurance-like terminology. I fear that this would result in most of the F1 public relations people being sent to Alcatraz for producing drivel every week. Two teams (you can guess) have the appalling habit of capitalizing Team at every mention, which is a clear sign that a lawyer has been involved and has not been told to get lost. Public relations folks don’t seem to understand that their job is to make people like the team (with a small T). The thing they like to do is NOT tell people what is happening, while pretending to be transparent. This is not new, but I guess it is better than lying outright. What no-one ever seems to ask is why things need to be kept secret.

There was a good example of this was an announcement that McLaren has bought out its minority shareholders. There is no such thing as a full list of these people and the value of the deal was not announced and so the media had to guess how much more was involved and the re-allotment of the shares was not explained. So there were a wide variety of stories about valuations between $4 billion and $5 billion. Given that the shares bought were about 30 percent of the equity in the team, which were acquired for around $250 back in 2020, it was safe to say that those involved have left F1 with at least four times the money they invested. Good for them, but why does it have to be secret?

I like the folk at Liberty Media because they make no bones about the money they are making and publish quarterly figures to show how good they are at doing business. And they are straight when you ask questions. The other day someone asked Liberty Media chairman John Malone if he is going to sell F1. He replied that if there is a deal that offers his shareholders better value than he thinks F1 can generate, then a bid would be considered. “If somebody gets carried away and they want to buy it and they’re willing to pay more for it than the board thinks that they can deliver to the shareholders, then we would sell it,” he explained.

It is the bottom line of capitalism: something is worth what someone is willing to pay for it, no matter how dumb that person may be. These days, F1 teams have valuations that are colossal because private equity folk think that the value of owning a team will continue to climb, no matter what the value of the assets and earning potential might be. The people behind the Cadillac F1 team (whoever that may be) are happy to invest $1 billion to create a team, on the basis that this will have a value of double that once the job is done, even if the team does not win. Aston Martin F1 was valued the other day at $3.3 billion – although the team has never won a race in its current form.

The rampant valuations are the reason that most people in F1 think that Renault will sell Alpine F1 at some point soon. The team is last in the Constructors’ Championship and quite embarrassing for a major car manufacturer. The new boss of Renault, François Provost, was one of several car manufacturer bosses who appeared in Monza and he had a most unusual meet-and-greet with all the other team principals to reassure everyone that Renault was not about to quit and that Flavio Briatore is still the flavour of the month. Whether he is still that in three months remains to be seen. I am sure that some of the F1 team principals rejoiced at this news, as the team has progressed backwards  since Briatore took on his role in May last year. Some still think that the Italian is only there to prepare the team to be sold for as much money as possible in the shortest period of time possible. We shall see. I still don’t understand why Renault believes that winning races with a Mercedes engine will add value to the Alpine brand.

It is not so long ago that the now-departed Luca de Meo (he left rather than passed) talked of developing Alpine into a $8 billion car company by 2030 with huge success in the US and Chinese markets, trading on Alpine’s motorsport credentials and state-of-the-art technology etc etc. Soon Alpine will be building only electric cars because the French government has introduced a malus for new car registrations – a penalty to be paid for manufacturing polluting vehicles. This means that high-performance sports cars registered in France will cost tens of thousands more than those registered elsewhere. And Trump’s troublesome tariffs will mean that the US market is going to be difficult and no-one can compete with the Chinese car companies when it comes to the price and technology of their electric cars.

Car buyers of the world are, in any case, buying hybrids, and the sales of electric cars are far slower than the dreamers imagined. One can see that perhaps Renault might take its hybrid-engined “Esprit Alpine” versions of its mainstream cars and turn them into full Alpines, to tide the sub-brand over until the world is ready for electric cars, but having deconstructed Renault’s F1 engine department at Viry-Chatillon, means that any success that Alpine can have in the future will be undermined by the fact that anyone with half a clue will know that the F1 car will have very little to do with Renault technology. I guess that they can hope that a white knight will come and pay some stupid amount for the F1 team – which could happen. Still, they are going to need some very good PR men to convince the world that Alpine is waving the flag for French industry, using Mercedes engines, relying on a British team, headed by a 75-year-old Italian. I see the word “cosmopolitan” being used quite a lot.

The one thing that F1 has got right is that it is in the right place in terms of its regulations. The industry wants hybrid and F1 is providing that, which takes us to latest odd behaviour from the FIA President, who is pushing for a future formula featuring 2.4-litre V8s, with a teeny-weeny bit of hybrid and no turbochargers, but some sustainable fuel, rather than moving forward with the current 1.6-litre turbos with even more hybrid power. What would be really useful for the industry would be to have a weight limit for batteries, thus forcing them all the make lighter and smaller units, which would help both hybrids and electrics and have a very real relevance to the world. He may think that F1 should be about burning fuel and making noise, but his latest proposals were thrown out even before a meeting was held when he realised that he was going to be defeated again. It was a classic shotgun-to-foot situation. The rules do not need to be decided now and the future has to be hybrid if F1 wants to keep the manufacturers involved. At Monza, by the way, there was an minibus full of automobile CEOs, with Provost, Ford’s Jim Farley, Audi’s Gernot Dollner and Ferrari’s Benedetto Vigna.

Back to MBS. One presumes that his haste to be seen to be doing things is related to the upcoming election in December and that he feels he needs some more victories lest defeats come along… On that question, it seems that the Arbitration Tribunal which will decide on damages in the legal fight between Hitech and the federation will rule on the damages to be paid in November. This is all secret, of course, but there are always ways of finding out and once the final decisions are made, it is likely that it will not be long before the wording in the judgement leaks out. It is, however, safe to say that if there are to be damages, someone at the FIA did something wrong.

The announcement that Monaco has extended its F1 contract for another four years, until 2035, is interesting at a time when the pressure is on European races to step up or drop out. The current nine European events will drop as space needs to be made for races in Asia and Africa. Monaco has done enough to keep F1 happy in the last couple of and now wants to lock itself into the World Championship in the longer term. It is anticipated that there will soon be announcements of renewals for the races in Baku and in Austin, with the logical thing being to announce the new deals during the race weekends.

Much of the paddock chatter in Monza related to the announcement that Colton Herta is giving up his highly-paid drive in a top IndyCar team to become the test driver for Cadillac, with the suggestion being that he will race in Formula 2 to get the necessary Superlicence points. I know this upsets some Americans, who think that the system is skewed against IndyCar, but it should be remembered that of the current IndyCar drivers there are at least four who have Superlicences (and I have not done any exhaustive research to check on the others. Based on results in 2025, 2024 and 2023 (the last three seasons) Alex Palou has 120 points, when he needs only 40, Scott Dixon has 50, Pato O’Ward (but he probably has more because he has done some FP1 sessions) and Scott McLaughlin who has 40. So, it really isn’t about F1 being anti-American (which is illogical given its ownership and ambitions), but rather because the four IndyCar drivers who are qualified for Superlicences happen not to be American, although I think McLaughlin is now a US citizen, having gone through the naturalisation process. Herta’s problem is that while he finished 2024 second in the championship, he has not been consistent and so does not have sufficient points.

Obviously IndyCar is not keen on one of its drivers going back to Formula 2, but that is the logical course of action so that Herta not only gets the Superlicence points he needs, but also learns more about the differences between racing in the US and in the global junior formulae. I have to say that it is impressive that Herta wants to do this and that he is willing to take a risk to get his chance. He is 25, which is old for an F1 new boy these days, but that does not mean it is impossible. However, the thing that I worry about is that McLaren tried him out a few years ago in a test in Portugal – and they did nothing with him after that. If the team had thought it had discovered a major talent, my gut feeling is that they would have done more, as happened with O’Ward and Palou, although the latter relationship ended badly and there are still legal actions going on. Herta did have some European experience in his teenage years, and was even team-mate to Lando Norris with Carlin in the UK’s MSA Formula (now known as British Formula 4) when they were both 15. They won 12 races of the 30, with Lando winning eight and Herta four. In his eight seasons  in IndyCar he has won nine victories in 116 races. For the moment it seems that Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Perez will have to deal with the painful growing years ahead and then Herta can, step in for 2028, although if GM ever does build an engine will be the first year for that – which will be more pain. The problem with Formula 2 is that all the good drives for 2026 are nearly all gone, with Invicta, Campos, Prema, Rodin, AIX Racing and Van Amersfoort all having no seats available, while DAMS, MP and ART all have one seat gone. Trident has two but its current two drivers have just quit because the team is so far off the pace and there will be new drivers in Baku. The best option for Herta would thus be Hitech, as long as Luke Browning moves on. The word is that Williams don’t want to leave him in Formula 2 next year.

We will see.

Anyway, now its off to Baku, by way of Doha. Hopefully the Israelis have stopped bombing Qatar… as F1 folk will be using the place a lot in the next few months…

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