Green Notebook from Daifuku – joeblogsf1

Daifuku is a place with a name that suggests that Guenther Steiner would fit right in. I won’t go into too much detail in case the parochial church council at the FIA gets upset and demands that Japan expunge the name from its map.

Beyond the nomenclature, there is really nothing very special about Daifuku. It looks like every other small town in Japan, with neat streets, tidy houses and the wonderfully boxy cars that the Japanese adore so much: the Honda N-Box, the Suzuki Space, the Nissan Dayz and the Daihatsu Tanto being the big players in the tiny car market.

At the moment Daifuku is aglow with cherry blossom (sakura). We are close to Yamato-Yagi, where a lot of my fellow travellers on the Kintetsu Line Limited Express “Urban Liner” to Osaka-Namba will be alighting. They will then take trains north to Kyoto, which is 45 minutes away. When they get to the picturesque former imperial capital they will indulge in a little hanami, watching the flowers, while holding elaborate picnics: eating, drinking and singing. It is all to do with the Buddhist concept that perfection can only ever be fleeting and quickly disappears.

Whatever the case, each year the Japanese publish cherry blossom forecasts, predicting where to go to catch these blooming sakura. The hotel prices duly go bananas, along similar lines to cities which host Grands Prix.

I am not into flower worship, although I do like a nice wisteria, so I intend to stay on the Urban Liner until we rattle into Namba and I will then wander through the endless miles of underground shopping malls attached to the wildly-complicated station. The plan is to find somewhere to have a nice lunch and then nose around a few shops to see if there are any brilliant inventions that we haven’t yet seen in Europe. I am quite happy to stick with the tunnels as it was quite cold when I was walking to the station in Shiroko. After that I will jump on the Nankai Railway’s rapi:t express (the purple train that shares some of Darth Vader’s DNA) and will be taken to the airport at Kansai from where Qatar Airways will whisk me overnight to Doha.

From there it’s a hop, a skip and a jump to Bahrain, and round four of the World Championship. The air miles are stacking up although it is hard to spend them because every flight I take has a business class section packed with F1 engineers, which rather negates the purpose of being loyal to one airline. If there are no perks for frequent flyers, there’s not a lot of point in giving them all my money.

With five races in six weekends, it has been pretty difficult to avoid F1, even when I was (briefly) at home.

I was on my way to the airport to fly to Japan, in a rather clichéd French moment, with beautiful sunlight in the countryside and Jacques Dutronc singing “J’aime les filles” on the radio. I came around a corner and saw a Mercedes AMG Petronas racing transporter, which briefly caused me to think that I was losing my marbles, as racing teams don’t generally get out to my remote part of the world. I was so surprised that I stopped to investigate and discovered that it was a very clever branding trick by Mercedes as the shiny truck was not F1-related but rather belonged to a French rallycross team, but tarted up to look like its more famous cousins.

Anyway, the trip to Japan was perfect for sakura, but a week too early for the opening of Osaka’s Expo 2025. I was in Shanghai when the Expo in 2010 opened (but I didn’t go) but I was in Milan in 2015 and in Dubai in 2021. Sadly I won’t be back in the Far East before Osaka closes. Still, I might get to visit the Expo site at some point in the future as the Japanese Grand Prix might end up there.

I hope not. Suzuka may be a little pokey and cramped these days, but it is Suzuka and should have a place in the heart of every F1 enthusiast. It is a place of legend and heroes and last weekend Max Verstappen added to that heritage with a stunning victory in a car that shouldn’t have achieved the success. The greats can still win races in cars that are not good enough, and this was a textbook example of that.

You cannot help but wonder whether Oscar Piastri might have beaten Verstappen if he hadn’t been stuck behind his teammate in the closing part of the race, but Oscar cheerfully said that it was his own fault for not qualifying better on Saturday. The gap, by the way, from Max to Oscar in the Q3 session was a colossal 0.044s and Lando was between them. It shows, I suppose, just how close things are in F1 these days, and how the tiniest detail can be the difference between success and failure.

(At this point, the writing is paused and the author does all the things mentioned about, adding a lounge visit which provides a much-needed gin & tonic and some unexpectedly excellent clam chowder, which makes the lack of an upgrade more bearable.)

There was not much gossip in Suzuka. It is too early for the driver market, although Cadillac’s representative had set up shop in a corner of the FIA hospitality area and talked to the Drugovichs and Bottases of the world. Given that backmarker teams are rarely good for drivers, I expect Valtteri to remain as a reserve with Mercedes and McLaren and to wander the paddock in 2026 eating bananas and throwing the skins everywhere in the hope that George, Kimi, Lando or Oscar will slip on one of them, opening the way for the Finnish bogan to remind everyone that he has won a load of Grands Prix.

There was another Grand Prix winner from Finland kicking around the paddock in Suzuka, as Heikki Kovalainan showed up to commentate with DAZN (pronounced “da zone” for some reason), a job that Mika Hakkinen was doing last year. One forgets sometimes that Heikki won a Grand Prix back in the day (the Hungarian Grand Prix of 2008) but he did tell a good story of how Bernie sent him a silver telegram and told him that “it is all down here from now on…”

I don’t wish to dwell too much on the subject of high points, but the adventures of Donald Trump had led some in F1 to ponder whether the sport’s boom years may soon be over. I tend to feel that F1 will go on and the bright and clever people will find ways to get around the problems Trump has created but it is such a mess that it’s hard to know.

I’ll not waste more energy on him (for now) suffice to quote The Economist which described the President’s explanation of his tariffs as “complete drivel”, called him “delusional” and said he was committing “the most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era”.  The article went on to add that Trump’s “mindless vandalism” was “a catalogue of foolishness” made up of  “flat-out nonsense” and that his grasp of the technicalities was “pathetic”.

OK, it wasn’t written in capital letters, a la Trump, but it was a wrecking ball demolition of the US President by a serious and sober publication with a sensible view of the world.

“There is no avoiding the havoc Mr Trump has wrought,” it concluded, “but that does not mean his foolishness is destined to triumph.”

Ouch!

I guess that if you do something that wipes $10 trillion off the value of the global economy in less than a week, you probably deserve to be remembered in history…

Even his ardent supporters are beginning to realise that the tariffs could quickly become a major electoral problem when the American public wakes up to the painful realities. F1 is certainly going to get hurt by the economic uncertainty that Trump has triggered. It cannot be avoided.

American Ferrari buyers will have to pay the cost of the car tariffs plus 10 percent which the Italian firm has slapped on its US cars to make sure that it doesn’t lose out. The logic is that America’s very rich (mainly Republicans) can afford the extra cash. Given that the top one percent of Americans control 27 percent of the country’s wealth and the top 10 percent holds 60 percent, it is not a very healthy place for the average American consumer. Still, in adversity there is always opportunity and as 60 percent of Americans carry credit card debt from month to month, despite paying high levels of interest, F1 should focus getting sponsorship from credit card companies. This is why Mastercard, Visa, American Express and the like can all afford to sponsor F1.

I have been wondering whether Trump will try to ride on F1’s popularity again this year in Miami and whether if he does the FIA should not look at its statutes and “refrain from manifesting racial, political or religious discrimination in the course of its activities” and refuse to give him a pass. I doubt this will happen as the FIA President loves to be around famous people and in the spotlight.

Mohammed Ben Sulayem’s plans for a V10 engine in F1 in the future are likely to be torpedoed in Bahrain by the automobile manufacturers. In my opinion it was always a bad idea because not only are V10s 30 years out of date (F1 gave them up in 2005), but they are not used in many road cars.

The idea shows that there is still too much backward-looking thinking going on in the sport. Times have changed and F1 is is now a sport with women and children, not to mention corporate VIPs who don’t want their weekends spoiled by brain-rattling noise. Perhaps the old folks (like me) who remember those days think it was a good thing, but I see it as a terrible idea. Things were not better in the good old days and, as Trump will soon find out, you cannot turn back the clock, but then he probably thinks the flux capacitor in Back to the Future was a real American invention.

Motor racing should always be looking forward, seeing what it can do to help shape the future, not making itself an irrelevant entertainment circus. It is best to try to balance entertainment and technology so that F1 still has cars exotic enough that make rocket engineers go “Wow!” and interesting racing that gets normal people wanting to go see for themselves.

Interestingly, while Suzuka was heaving with fans, this seemed to be more to do with Yuki Tsunoda than with the Netflix effect – because you cannot get Drive to Survive in Japanese… I guess they are too polite a nation. One of Japan’s biggest F1 fans is a chap called Akio Toyoda, but he didn’t make it to Suzuka this year because he caught a cold when visiting China’s President Xi Jinping in Beijing.

He was there to discuss how his family business – called Toyota – can keep on profiting by selling cars, even if the US is making his life difficult. Back in 2021 Toyota sold 1.94 million cars in China. Last year that had shrunk to 1.77 million (as opposed to 2.3 million in the US) but Toyota is currently doing some interesting stuff in China, such as creating its own dedicated Chinese R&D division – and appointing Li Hui as the first Chinese to be general manager of Toyota China.

Esteban Ocon and Oliver Bearman were rather blown away by a visit to the Toyota Technical Center Shimoyama, which opened last year. This is a 1,600-acre facility near Nagoya where 3,000 engineers now work. It includes a “country road”, which looks a lot like a scaled-down version of the old Nurburgring. Nearby there is a high-speed test track and test courses which simulate different types of highways from around the world.  The facility cost the company around $1.6 billion to build (yes, you did read that right) and is now the development headquarters for both Lexus and Gazoo Racing.  Toyota takes its motorsport programmes very seriously – and enjoys much success in the World Rally, World Endurance Championships plus many other campaigns in national series (such as NASCAR) but there are some things that even Toyota has never done – notably winning in Formula 1. Just to put things into perspective, Toyota made a profit of $29.5 billion last year on a turnover of just under $300 billion. One can only wonder what the company will do with its developing alliance with Haas.  The word is that Gene Haas has no intention of ever selling his F1 team, but I guess that if you cover a car in Toyota stickers, it really doesn’t matter who owns the shares…

This theory is currently being applied at Aston Martin where the car company Aston Martin Lagonda has just announced it is selling its shares in the F1 team, not that it owned many. The company hopes to raise $74 million by selling around five percent of the F1 team, which would value it at close to $1.5 billion. The key to this deal is that Aston Martin Lagonda has committed to being the title sponsor of the team until 2045, and in 2023 paid the team £27 million to use its name for the year. This assumes, of course, that the car company can survive that long, which won’t be easy given it has about £1.1 billion of debts and is facing the Trump tariffs in addition to slowing demand in the US and China…

McLaren has already separated the racing team from the car company, although it has recently sold some of the shares in the racing business to the new owner for the car company, presumably to sweeten the deal, as McLaren Automotive is accelerating into considerable financial headwinds… 

It is hard to imagine that Alpine will now launch in America as planned because the tariffs will make the French cars wildly expensive for what they are.

I am interested in what Audi is doing because while the F1 programme is not perfect and the car company faces some real challenges in the US markets, it does have 37,000 pre-tariff cars in the US at the moment and has now suspended any further imports until the trade wars calm down. So if you’re an American and want an Audi before tariff prices arrive, you are probably going to have to pay over the odds to get one…

Having said that I hear that Audi’s parent Volkswagen is considering selling the entire Audi division and it is unlikely that anyone other than a Chinese firm would buy it. What’s really fascinating is that Audi did a very clever thing some months ago by launching a joint venture with China’s SAIC Motor (which is owned by the Chinese government) to sell cars called AUDI.

The difference between an Audi and an AUDI is that the German firm’s famous logo will not appear in China, but things are rather confused by the fact that there is no such thing as “capital letters” in the Chinese language… Chinese AUDIs will likely sell well…  so we will see how all this impacts the business. Volkswagen, by the way, is expected to turn over three of its factories to the German defence firm Rheinmetall AG, which is currently booming thanks to Trump turning on Ukraine – and Europe needing military equipment to help them out. If you want a share tip, I suggest dumping US stocks and buying European defence shares instead.

The only other “news” is that the F1 calendar for next year is currently on hold because the planned race in Madrid is still not certain.  The Spaniards have been slow to get things moving and although they insist that all is well and that everything will be done in the time available, there is still no sign of any construction work beginning – and that is worrying Formula 1. It is not a massive problem because F1 can always go ahead without Madrid and it can probably find another race willing to step up and fill the gap in the calendar, but the uncertainty means that everything is currently on hold.

Uncertainty was the word on the lips of F1 marketing types in Japan. F1 may have never been as healthy as it is today, but the financial turmoil means that few companies are making any serious decisions about longterm sponsorships at the moment – and that is not good news when now is the time when sponsorship deals for 2026 should be finalised. It is all a bit depressing – but there was one interesting note from a US businessman I know who said that in American business circles, there is a saying that everything Trump touches ends up in failure.

“It’s bad news for Lando Norris,” he said. “He should never have shaken hands with Trump in Miami last year…”