It felt like the summer was over as I made my way into Zandvoort early on Friday morning. It was very early because my distaste for traffic jams is gradually becoming pathological. The Dutch were still asleep, their bicycles parked. There was the chill of autumn in the air. There had been rain and a gentle mist was rising from the polders. Overhead a v formation of geese was flying south, coming in off the North Sea, showing that you don’t always need F1 boffins to understand (and benefit from) aerodynamics and that Mother Nature dreamed up her own form of GPS long ago.
Humans tend to call geese silly animals, but perhaps we are the silly ones… I wondered what geese would think of people dressing up in orange clothing and getting soaked in pouring rain while listening to jolly DJs playing speeded-up John Denver songs with thumping disco beats.
It was a fairly quiet weekend for Formula 1 news, as the summer break has really become a break as the number of races has increased. The moneyed, hoity-toity F1 types might have been off on yachts in Sardinia, but they did not seem to have spent much time talking to one another this year. Some of them had other priorities, of course, some having a staycation at home, paying attention to small children, while Aoyo Komatsu of Haas said that his plans to spend the holiday climbing cliffs in Spain went wrong because of forest fires, and so he spent a lot of his time being a fireman.
Strange, but true.
FIA Presidential candidate Tim Mayer jetted in to Schipol after a tour of nine African countries, where he tried to convince FIA club presidents that he is the most sensible candidate to be the next FIA Presidents and was busy sending out zingers about what the job should entail. The thing about this is that it is very hard to argue against his logic, particularly when it comes to the style of management at the FIA. “The drivers are our stars, not the head of the FIA,” he said. “Nobody ever bought a ticket to watch officials work…”
There was no sign of Mohammed Ben Sulayem, who was away pressing flesh in Paraguay. This week, I hear, Mayer will be in Asia and the FIA President will direct his motorcade to Monza.
Mayer talked about how Zandvoort was a brilliantly sustainable race, with almost everyone who attends travelling by train or bicycle. This is true although being sustainable in Formula 1 requires having a great deal of money. Zandvoort will drop off the calendar after next year because it cannot balance its books, despite the fact that the cult of Verstappen is as big as ever.
The trains and bicycles are largely left to the fans, as F1 folk pay whatever it takes to stay at hotels within walking distance of the track (to avoid wasting time with minibuses to distant car parks) although the fans are so fervent that all the stars have to drive from the Paddock gates to the hotel, to avoid being mobbed, who even cheer golf buggies with maintenance men aboard.
The glamour of waiting for buses and being ordered about by people in fluorescent jackets was wearing thin by the end of the weekend and I am ashamed to say that I was happy to leave on Sunday night. The race had been interesting enough, but I was ready to get on the road. Originally I was going to go straight to Monza, but the juggling of passports and visas (which we do silently most of the time) made life rather complicated and so I went to Holland without any passport and then rushed back to Paris to pick it up, complete with a new visa inserted.
It was cloudy and showery on Monday morning as I headed off down the Autosnelweg (which literally means “fast car road”) from the land of Schipol towards Leiden and The Hague. The Dutch capital is known by the locals as Den Haag, as they cannot be bothered to use its full name ‘s-Gravenhage, which translates as “The Count’s Hedge”, presumably because at some point an aristocrat planted a hedge so that people could not see into his garden. As I was musing on this, the sun came out and it felt as though summer had returned and by the time I reached the decidedly unglamorous industrial world of Rotterdam I had decided to take a more leisurely path home, rather than dodging trucks through similarly industrial areas of Belgium and northern France. Instead I zipped beneath the Scheldt estuary and headed across Oost-Vlaanderen to Bruges and then West-Vlaanderen to Ostend and the French border near Dunkirk.
And thus was that I arrived at Loon-Plage. Now you might think that Loon-Plage is some sort of reference to the Dutch fans at Zandvoort, but the place actually exists and does not appear to be in any way related to lunacy or lunatics. One needs to be careful these days using words like this because there is always some worthy person who thinks that it is politically incorrect to use such expressions and that we should use phrases like “people of unsound mind” and “mental hospital. I guess that they also never found cartoons called Looney Tunes amusing.
Still, Loon-Plage is not about mental illness, even if it is next door to a river called the Aa… (which really should have an exclamation mark). The thing about Loon-Plage is that no-one knows for sure where the name came from. There are Loon birds, for example, and in Scotland a loon is a sort of lout, although neither of these explanations seem to fit in this case. Some say that it derives from the Flemish for “wood” or “duck”. We do know that Loon added -Plage in 1889 to avoid confusion with the city of Laon and for a time the people of Loon (called Loonois, not Loonies) decided that they should build a seaside resort and developed a casino and a hotel at Clipon beach (really!). Sadly, the wealthy people preferred to go to Knokke-Heist and Ostend, which somehow appeared to be more glamorous than Clipon.
There is no real silly season this year, despite the best efforts of the keyboard warriors to drum up clicks. George Russell will soon sign again and Red Bull looks likely to promote Isack Hadjar alongside Max Verstappen, with Arvid Lindblad coming in to partner Liam Lawson. This means that Yuki Tsunoda will be in the bin unless Honda can place him somewhere, and this is difficult because there will be only two Honda-powered drivers in 2026: Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll. One might argue that Tsunoda would be a better choice than Stroll, but when you Dad owns the racing team, it is unlikely that the engine supplier has much leverage and I cannot imagine that Honda is going to offer the Strolls so much money that they will go away. Lawrence Stroll likes money and has a talent for collecting it, but the kind of money he would be talking would be eye-watering, even for a major car manufacturer. Honda could pay for Yuki to race somewhere else, but the only real choice is Alpine, which will have Mercedes engines next year, Renault having thrown its own engine project into a large skip. Most of the teams have their drivers under contract. Worse still, Honda’s chances of getting another team in 2027 are slim, although if the new power unit is competitive, that could happen.
One rumour I did pick up is that Alpine may be considering Paul Aron for the second seat because Franco Colapinto has not done enough to warrant another year, despite money. Aron has no money behind him but might be able to help Pierre Gasly lift the team from the bottom of the Constructors’ Championship. They really need to do that because the team has been promising much better results in 2027 and if that does not happen, one might see an executive advisor being advised to go and do something else. F1 is all about performance and Alpine has not been delivering it. We will see what the new Renault boss CEO François Provost decides to do. Last week he announced a shake up of management which saw a number of execs leaving and others having their roles redefined: Including a new CEO at Dacia, while Alpine’s CEO Philippe Krief, who was chief technology officer as well losing that role so he can focus on “shaping Alpine’s future range and brand development”. With Alpine F1’s new CEO Steve Nielsen having started on Monday, one can expect some changes to be made in the months ahead.
There were lots of rumours about Christian Horner’s future over the summer break, but all of this is dependent on Christian reaching a settlement with Red Bull over how much he should be paid to forget him long-term and expensive contract. It is interesting to note that according to the records at Britain’s Companies House.Christian officially resigned from his role as a director of Red Bull on August 12. This might suggest that a deal has been struck so that Horner can start making plans for the future. It is clear that Horner would prefer a situation in which he has a shareholding in the team and that will cost a lot of money. However, Horner has a great record, great connections and might be able to either find money to buy out shareholders, or convince shareholders to push to take him on. The team with the most shareholders is Aston Martin and there were some stories floating about in Zandvoort that Christian could be going there to join the party and manage the team and perhaps take an option to acquire it in the future. The Strolls will not stick around forever, even if they say they are going to do so. Stroll senior is a man who knows how to make money and so once his son’s ambitions in F1 wear out, one can imagine that he would cash in. There have been rumours for months about the Aston Martin car company being sold and the team has been separated from the car business, even if the latter has contractual arrangements that mean it has to provide sponsorship for the team until 2045. It was interesting to see that Lance Stroll decided over the summer break to try his hand at rallying, driving a Citroen C3 Rally2 car run by the Sports & You team in Portugal. Some suggest that Lance might be considering a move into rallying after nine years without much success in Formula 1, but that is unlikely to happen any time soon as the entire Aston Martin F1 programme has been built to make a breakthrough in 2026 – and he is not going to miss out on that…
If the team is still not competitive next year, it might be a different story in 2027. Some of the shareholders in the Aston are companies that might want to cash in. Arctos has recently been sold to the BlackRock private equity mammoth, while HPS Investment Partners deals largely in debt and so will take a deal if it looks good.
In the last couple of days, we have seen that some investors are now ready to cash out, with all of McLaren Racing’s shares having been required by Bahrain and Abu Dhabi. This may also mean that Zak Brown is no longer a shareholder in the team, but then it is hard to know these things if they are well-hidden.
Aside from that Audi has been raiding Ferrari, taking engine men and a top aerodynamicist. The word is that Audi will also soon announce a deal with Adidas.
Things will start to ramp up at Monza, with the news that Colton Herta has given up his IndyCar career to join the Cadillac team getting a lot of coverage. It’s a brave thing to do. He has very limited experience of European racing and there are no guarantees that the Cadillac team will be a success. We shall see.
I am already on my way to Monza.
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