During the Klondike Gold Rush in Alaska in 1899, the White Pass Trail was a terrible challenge for the overloaded and unprepared prospectors, who were keen to get to the goldfields of the Yukon. It is said that more than 3,000 horses died in a place they called Dead Horse Gulch. Supposedly, many of the bones are still there, but I am not about to visit any time soon, unless Stefano Domenicali declares that there should be a Grand Prix in nearby Teepee.
Hopefully that will not happen and we will continue to only go to vaguely sensible places.
Driving home from Barcelona, however, I did find myself in Dead Horse (Le Cheval Mort), which seemed rather a strange name for a place in the stockbroker belt of Paris.
Next morning, with just under 200 miles to run to get home, I enjoyed an early morning drive across the Sologne, a land of trees and lakes which seems devoid of humankind, and then suddenly one is in Orleans and then across the Loire. One then crosses the plains of the Beauce, heading for Rambouillet and then I took to the forests again and stumbled across Le Cheval Mort.
I had started late from Spain, having finished a long night of work in the pleasant place I stay in the hills to the north of Barcelona. By the time I had done all the necessary and driven across the hills to Girona and up to the border, it was already midday. From there I whizzed past Perpignan and up to Beziers where one cuts inland, through the Pézenas vineyards to the valley of the River Lergues. You then climb up the dramatic Pas de l’Escalette, the gateway to the great limestone plateaux of the Causses. From there one scoots along to the Viaduc de Millau, one of the wonders on the modern world, soaring 1,000 ft above the River Tarn, and from there it is a run across the Massif Central until you dive down into the valley of the Allier. There was a vast traffic jam because they are trying to widen the wiggly road there, and by the time I reached Clermont Ferrand it was rush hour and raining and so I set my sights on getting only far as Vierzon before calling it a day. Five hundred miles for the day is enough after a busy weekend.
It had been a weekend of dead horses (figuratively speaking). When we all turned up in Barcelona, the gibbering classes were all going on and on about flexible front wings, but after the first practice session, when there was no obvious difference, all there was to talk about was the fact that some teams had fewer excuses than before. McLaren was still flogging everyone.
The resurgent Lando Norris was no longer resurgent and Oscar Piastri triumphed, although Max Verstappen’s plucky attempt at a three-stop strategy looked like a good idea until the Safety Car left him with nothing but hard tyres in the sprint to the flag. He deserved better than that, but these are the risks one takes with such a strategy and although one cannot condone his driving into George Russell (which Max himself later admitted) one could understand his frustration with the Safety Car. These days, health and safety has invaded race control to such an extent that one feels some of the caution is really not necessary.
I am not one of those people who yearn for racing as it was in days gone by, but I do think that sometimes the caution is excessive and all a bit “nanny state”. I understand that there are people who work in risk assessment who think one must have no risk at all, for everyone (including passing bunny rabbits), but motor racing has never been about playing it safe. Six laps of Safety Car to recover one broken down car is not really what is required when you have a battle developing in the last few laps of a race.
Another dead horse was the story that Christian Horner had been sounded out by Ferrari. This story was true about three years ago when Ferrari chairman John Elkann jetted over the England and dropped in to see Christian and asked him if he would like to move to Maranello. Horner said “Thanks for the offer” and Elkann rang his pilots and told them to spool up the jets.
Horner’s response is unlikely to change if Ferrari does come calling again, but he said that they had not. For many in F1 joining Ferrari is considered a career move akin to throwing oneself on a bonfire (with a flameproof wallet) because the team seems to be unfixable. It is nearly a generation since Ferrari won its last Formula 1 title.
It is probably inevitable that Vasseur’s future is beginning to be questioned. He has been there for a couple of seasons and things have not gone particularly well. The first proper season under his control (2024) saw the team second in the Constructors’ Championship, just 14 points behind McLaren. The second (2025) sees Ferrari with half as many points as McLaren after the first nine races with the likelihood of Maranello winning the championship being somewhere between very slim and impossible. There would need to be a cataclysmic change in the current levels of competitiveness for that to happen.
The team is still popular and the road cars still sell better than ever, but Ferrari seems to be unable to fix the F1 problem. I suspect that Elkann will remain patient until we see what the 2026 cars can do, after which the Italian media will get out the really sharp knives, machetes and chainsaws and go after Fred. The problem with changing people all the time (as Alpine boss Luca de Meo is finding out) is that after a while people conclude that the problem is not the folk being hired and fired, but rather the person making the decisions. To give Elkann credit, he has been in charge of Ferrari for seven years and is still trying to fix things, but one day he may decide to focus on other things and hand over control of the racing team to Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna, who gives the impression that he would like the job.
Over at Alpine the search for a team principal continues. De Meo still believes that Flavio Briatore is the answer to his problems, although I think it is fair to say that he is in a pretty small minority of people who hold that opinion. Thus far the decision to replace Jack Doohan with Franco Colapinto is not looking great. We will see how Franco does in his remaining races. Doohan is still around, but seems to have no active role at Alpine. Meanwhile there have been whispers that Sergio Perez may be recruited to help Pierre Gasly. Perez is said to be keen to get back into F1. The Mexican is followed wherever he goes by horse-choking wedges of cash and he is experienced in F1, so Briatore might be interested if, as some French magazines are suggesting, he gets a percentage of all money that comes into the team. I don’t know if he does or he doesn’t, because there are conflicting stories from usually reliable sources, but I am sure that one way or the other he is earning a lot of money. I hope that in the end Renault thinks he is worth it.
Alpine was eighth in the Constructors’ Championship a year ago when Briatore joined the team. At the Spanish GP this year Alpine sank to 10th in the rankings, despite Pierre Gasly’s plucky eighth place. The team probably shouldn’t be that far back, but in F1 the points are always the ultimate reality check.
We will see if this rumour comes true, but it might just be people trying to disrupt the new Cadillac-branded F1 team, which is said to be trying to secure Perez as a driver for 2026.
While the F1 teams were in Barcelona, Haas was running a “Testing of Previous Cars” (TPC) programme for two days at the Paul Ricard circuit. This was a little odd but the reason was very simple: Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe’s team principal Kamui Kobayashi wanted to see how the current F1 cars are, having not driven an F1 car for 11 years. As Haas has considerable support from Toyota, this is probably a very good idea… And I guess that with a functioning TPC programme, the team may now start looking at a young driver programme as well.
Beyond this, the Spanish weekend was quiet, which is not unusual at the end of a triple-header. People are too busy trying to go home to cause much mayhem…
As is currently the vogue with the FIA election campaign (although currently there is only one of them) in full swing, it looked like there were more FIA gold passes on the grid than there were English footballers, which was remarkable given that there were about 25 soccer players wandering about. I am not good at celebrity-spotting these days, given that Andy Warhol’s suggestion that “everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” seems to have now come true and I always seem to be at least a month or two behind the cool kids (Not that I am overly worried by this).
I did see Turkey’s Mümtaz Tahincioğlu. He is no longer head of the Turkish Motorsports Federation, but he seems to spend his time trying to convince F1 that going to Turkey again would be great idea. The circuit is certainly a good one but F1 might (only might) feel it is not terrific as the government is arresting more and more opposition leaders, which is never a good look.
There was much to do when finally I got home (after three weeks away), hence the lateness of this Notebook, but I did waste one evening watching Days Of Thunder, a movie about NASCAR, which dates back 35 years to when Tom Cruise was young. I remember it being OK at the time, but seeing it again I was not impressed, except to say that it was better than Sylvester Stallone’s 2001 effort Driven, which still ranks as the worst motor racing movie ever. With the new F1 movie due to be the talk of the town in the weeks ahead, I can only hope for good things. I hear it is not too bad, but we will have to see…
I don’t know whether Lance Stroll will be back in action in Canada, but the fact that the team has not named a replacement suggests that he wants to be at his home race and his hurried departure in Spain gave him an extra day of recovery time. People forget that when Lance damaged his hand two years ago, he was in Spain and zipped up to Barcelona to get it fixed. There are, of course, lots of theories about how he has had enough and so on, but to have come this far shows that he likes being an F1 driver…
I have to admit that I took some time off to watch a bit of tennis from Roland Garros (on TV) and I was shocked to see the stadium half-empty during the semi-finals. How can that be, I wondered, given that tickets to such things are like gold dust? It was more worthy of an investigation than why Le Cheval Mort is so-named and I discovered that the tickets were sold and the money had been banked, but the folks who bought them couldn’t be bothered to turn up. Thank goodness that is not a problem F1 has…
If I was the organiser at Roland Garros, I think I’d have a reserve crowd, willing to take a risk on a cheap ticket in the hope that they would get one of the best seats – and I would make sure that the original buyers knew that if they did not turn up for matches their seats would be occupied by someone else… I reckon that’s fair. The promoter makes a pile more money and the sport looks a lot better.
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