The death of Ferrari president and CEO Sergio Marchionne on Wednesday made for a sombre mood in the Hungaroring paddock on Thursday, where Ferrari flags flew at half-mast.
7:30am
A relatively easy start today as flight from Brussels to Budapest departs at 9:30. It’s summer holiday time so traffic flows freely. Take-off delayed, then we circle above Budapest, eventually landing at noon, 35 minutes late – allegedly due to air traffic control issues.
12pm
Collect rental car and head for circuit, 20-odd miles away. En route I reflect on how much I enjoy the Hungarian Grand Prix despite its reputation for occasional tedium and the infrastructural challenges owing to its emergence from decades under communist rule. In recent years the Hungaroring has tended to deliver the unexpected, and hopefully we’ll see more of the same on Sunday.By rights I should be ‘anti’ the race, for it replaced South Africa’s grand prix in 1986. The country of my birth was then under full apartheid rule and the F1 community (understandably) did not wish to be linked with this oppressive regime – yet happily travelled to a communist state then under Moscow rule, one where only the ruling elite drove cars, and smoky Trabants at that. The expedient ways of one B Ecclestone…
Still, fate works in mysterious ways: the withdrawal symptoms I suffered post-1986 – when South Africa held two further grand prix in 1992-3 during its transition period, at which point I had left the country – made me determined to pursue a life in F1 in whatever capacity, and here I am penning my diary from Budapest. So, thank you Hungary!
2pm
At Ferrari’s motorhome the flags are at half-mast out of respect for Sergio Marchionne, who died on Wednesday. Tributes will run on all the Ferrari-powered cars this weekend.
I head for Sauber to start the interview process with Charles Leclerc. Before he speaks the media is told he will not answer questions about Marchionne’s passing and any possible effect on his future.
The Monegasque is always good value, being both bright and lucid in his answers despite being just 20 (until 16th October). He tells us he hasn’t yet had enough air travel, so has booked a summer break in Bali “21 hours away”.
An abiding memory of Charles: having last year interviewed him, per chance in Budapest, the following day he approached me and thanked me for the interview. Not many young drivers do that, and such manners will stand him in good stead in future.
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3pm
In the conference, I’m amused by the evasive answers Esteban Ocon and Carlos Sainz Jnr to questions about their futures. They seem to be intertwined, what with the former said to top Renault’s wish list despite being a Mercedes-contracted driver, and Sainz having no clear options if the Frenchman displaces him at the yellow team, for Carlos, is under option to Red Bull, where Daniel Ricciardo is expected to retain his seat.
According to sources the option on Carlos must be taken up by 31 August or he is a free agent for the first time in his professional career, yet Red Bull may decide to hold on until that date even if Ricciardo is confirmed before that date as cover against unforeseen circumstances, while Force India sources are adamant that any call Mercedes has on Ocon is conditional on his going to Mercedes. He refuses to elaborate on that.
4pm
Toro Rosso time, and both drivers plead ignorance about McLaren’s confirmation that it has signed James Key as technical director, save that Pierre Gasly suggests that Key is under “long-term contract”, a comment met by a semi-committal nod by the team’s media officer. Thus, it seems, a legal tug-of-love looms.
Will it be sorted in time for McLaren to have a fully functional engineering structure in place for 2019 or even 2020? In short succession the team has lost three senior personnel members, whether by choice or not, and so far has appointed only one newcomer, namely Gil de Ferran – an IndyCar winner whose sum total of F1 experience runs to a brief spell as sporting director with BAR Honda a decade ago.
The omens ain’t good for this once-great team.
6pm
Back in the media centre I look down at pit lane, and am heartened by the massive pit lane walk attendance. Not only has the Hungarian Grand Prix really grown in stature over the past 30 years, but proven to be a true “gateway grand prix” through straddling eastern and western Europe, and attracting fans seeking a cost-effective “foreign” experience in a major destination city.
Hotels are cheap(ish), tickets affordable, flights plentiful, food delectable and the folk most hospitable – even if the taxi drivers are rip-off merchants de luxe, whose antics tarnish this otherwise great event.
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BlackJackFan
27th July 2018, 9:57
No lunch today…?? lol.
Glenn (@glennb)
27th July 2018, 10:16
Over to McLaren today for lunch where I enjoyed a lamb kebab and a scrumpy.
Dieter Rencken (@dieterrencken)
27th July 2018, 10:54
Actually, it was a fast food burger and fries as I wasn’t sure I’d make the circuit in time and have lunch somewhere. But I sure aint going to advertise the brand :)
NYCf1fan
27th July 2018, 16:00
McDonald’s?!
Keith Collantine (@keithcollantine)
27th July 2018, 11:49
We’re going to spin that off as a new column called ‘Dieter’s diet’.
Glenn (@glennb)
27th July 2018, 13:08
Lovin’ it :)
Robbie (@robbie)
27th July 2018, 13:49
Isn’t all the food offered by the teams at the circuits ‘fast food’ too? It would be a bad omen if a team offered up grub from a slow cooker.
NYCf1fan
27th July 2018, 16:02
You are suspended for a week. That’s a terrible joke. We can be happy that at red bull they don’t cook in a DITCH oven. Get it?, Max farts?
Martin (@ardy)
28th July 2018, 8:04
Alt: “Rencken Rates the Rations”
Keith Collantine (@keithcollantine)
28th July 2018, 11:18
@ardy And always alliterates.
frood19 (@frood19)
27th July 2018, 10:22
another one to add to my wish list of races to visit. I always thought it was odd that the finns claimed this as their event (in terms of the larger number of hakkinen fans) but looking at the map hungary was actually closer to finland than the majority of races on the calendar, with the possible exception of the UK.
JimG (@jimg)
27th July 2018, 13:04
@frood19: Hungarian is one of the only other two European languages which is related to Finnish (the other is Estonian), so there is some affinity between the countries.
UNeedAFinn2Win (@uneedafinn2win)
27th July 2018, 13:29
That language link is pretty tenuous, mainly the way words are stressed and the fact that vowels are pronounced the same regardless where they are positioned. In Finnish, A is always A (in english, pronounced closely like the letter “R “) and any Magyar speaker would recognize the sound as A
Hungary has just been the cheapest,closest track to get to. There’s been package holidays to Hungary for the past 50 years, so it’s been a common destination for generations.
nase
28th July 2018, 15:39
@uneedafinn2win
Woah, you almost triggered me there … You weren’t saying that language link is questionable or even unproven, were you? Just stating that there are hardly any noticeable similarities from a speaker’s perspective?
nase
28th July 2018, 16:27
@jimg
I’d like to add that this is true if you only consider national languages, i.e. languages with a predominant official status. In this case, Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian are indeed the only European languages in that family.
However, there are quite a lot of other languages of the same family that are spoken on European soil, just not by large groups, and mostly without any kind of official status.
There are the Sámi (or ‘Lappish’) languages of northern Scandinavia, of which 9 are still in use, 6 further close relatives of Finnish and Estonian in the greater Baltic area, the small ‘Finno-Volgaic’ and ‘Finno-Permic’ groups of Western Russia, which add a further 5 languages to the count, as well as the Hungarians’ distant cousins, the Khanty and the Mansi, who partly live to the west of the Ural mountains, as do the Samyedic Nenets, i.e. in a region that is traditionally considered to be a part of Europe.
All in all, there are as many as 25 extant languages of that family that are still spoken in Europe, albeit mostly by small groups that lack any political weight.