![]() The last couple of weeks have seen me driving nearly 5,000 km, with another 4,000 in the fortnight before that. Having a better calendar would also help F1 in its desire to reduce emissions, which is one of the goals that the sport has set itself, in order to stay out of trouble with activist environmental groups. Race promoters have their own ideas about what they want and they do not much care about other races – except to avoid them, if they consider another Grand Prix will take away some of their spectators. This was commendable, but the desire for more dates means that things are much more complicated. In a normal year in Formula 1 there would be a draft of next season’s calendar before the summer break and the folks at Liberty Media, while still wet behind the ears, talked of producing calendars earlier and more regionalised than used to be the case in the Ecclestone Era. I also discovered that Veszprém will be the European Capital of Culture in 2023, which means that they are digging up all the roads at the moment and their signposting is so poor that I ended up in a place called Marko and wondered if the family of the good doctor of Red Bull fame might have hailed from these parts.Īnyway, all of this gave me plenty of time to think about the F1 calendar and what a difficult beast it is to tame. I guess it lies in ruins because of battles between the feuding clans of Hungary in another age, but in truth I was more interested in the fact that the town of Papa is about 50 miles from the village of Dad, by way of a lot of villages that would score very highly when playing Scrabble. It was not long before I encountered a horse and cart… then the magnificent castle of Csesznek, or at least the ruins of it. I was impressed by the road signs that screamed “Tartson Jobbra!” – which sounded vaguely rude – but I learned that it means “Keep right”.Īfter a while I realised I had some time to spare and decided to have a bit of a wander around and headed down Route 82, which goes from Györ to Veszprem, over the Bakony mountains, which run diagonally across the western part of the country, splitting the Great Hungarian Plain from the Little Hungarian Plain. I am convinced, however, that I will never understand a single word of Hungarian. You learn a lot just by listening to a language and these days I can understand far more languages than used to be the case, thanks to listening to traffic reports and news bulletins. When I crossed the Austro-Hungarian border on the way out to Budapest, I did what I always do and switched the radio to a local station. Stress, as the old F1 doctor Sid Watkins always used to say, kills more people than other things – and so I take Sid’s advice and make new discoveries every day. That sense of freedom and the lack of stress makes it worthwhile. At every race I hear the tales of travel horrors from those who are condemned to fly everywhere, of missing bags and queues as far as the eye can see.ĭriving may not always be easy, but at least you are in control of your own destiny – and you can leave a jam and find another way to get home. I drive because I no longer want the stress of airports and planes at a time when everything is up the creek following the COVID pandemic. The Formula 1 summer holiday has begun and the idea of spending time at home is most appealing, particularly after four races in five weekends. If I drive all day, I should be home before the sun sets. The journey will take me by way of Linz, Munich, Stuttgart, Metz and Reims. I’ve already covered a couple of hundred kilometres, but home is still 1,400kms away. It’s my wife’s birthday and it’s never nice to celebrate alone, so I’m heading home to start the summer break a day earlier than planned – and I haven’t told her and I have cursed the calendar-makers of F1 for putting the race on the wrong weekend, so that it will all be a big surprise for her. I am used to long drives when I am tired. I know it doesn’t sound very sensible to set off to drive 1,600 km after a night without sleep (Hey kids, don’t try this at home) but there are times in F1 when you do what you have to do, no matter what it takes. I am glad that I am not driving east, but I know that by evening I will be heading straight into the setting sun, which will make things a bit more complicated in the final few miles, when I will be closer to home, in country lanes, with a million dead bugs on the windscreen. By then I hope to be across the Austrian border and wiggling through the Wienerwald, where Johann Strauss wrote waltzes and where today the Vienna ring road helps one avoid traffic jams in the city. ![]() You can tell already that it is going to be a blisteringly hot day across Europe, but the sun will not make an appearance until about five thirty. The sun is coming up in Mosonmagyaróvár, or perhaps it is better to say that the skies are lightening across the Pannonian Plain. ![]()
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