Green Notebook from Heaven – joeblogsf1

I know the column is a bit late but I haven’t died, although one or two folk in the sport might wish that this was the case. In any case, getting to heaven is not really my ambition…

In Arabic, Al Safwa means “elite” and so I was curious to see the Al Safwa Lounge in Doha. It is reckoned to be the best airport lounge in the world and normally I wouldn’t be allowed in, but I had upgraded from Economy to Business and if one is in Business and a Platinum car holder, they seem to think you to be sufficiently non-riff-raff to mix with their beautiful people.

I was a little frayed at the edges, after too much work at night and a gin & tonic was the first destination I was keen to visit after the prohibitions of Saudi Arabia. I am one of those people who find it is best to “live and let live” and I try to adhere to the philosophy of “When in Rome… do as the Romans do” but quite often I stumble on things which make very little sense. There are weird things everywhere but each nation has their own logic to justify things and it is best to let them get on with it. I was chatting with someone in Jeddah and he was relating an adventure he had had with customs. His girlfriend, he explained, had been whisked away for questioning as they were going through the formalities. It transpired that the airport x-rays machines (some countries have them on arrival, as well as on departure), has discovered the presence of “a sex toy” and it seems  that the locals deem this immoral and so it is prohibited. The said “intimate product” was confiscated and the lady got off with a warning (if you see what I mean). In this part of the world you need to be married to share a hotel room and so a little buzzing device might be quite useful. It raised a few questions in my mind. If one can only sleep with one’s wife, what happens when polygamy is the in thing? Do you get bunk beds for the extra wives.  I must ask when I am back in the Middle East again.

In truth, there was one stress that even the Al Safwa Lounge could not remove. I tend to travel hand luggage, even for triple-headers, and I had not one single cubic centimetre to spare in my bag and back pack. The zips were straining and I knew that if I had to open anything I would not be able to put it all back together again.

One of the joys of being an F1 journalist is that some races and sponsors give you things to remember them by. I have dozens of drinks bottles, bags, hats, and goodness knows what else.  Often I end up leaving them behind because I do not have space. But there are a couple of items that I do like to have.  Each year Bahrain hands out numberplates (right) to commemorate the race, while in Saudi Arabia they give us 1/12th scale racing helmets. The problem is fitting these into the luggage. 

The numberplate is flat and so that can go with paperwork but I knew I needed to make space for the 2025 Saudi helmet. It was all looking very good until a colleague informed me on Sunday night, as he departed for the airport, that he had left a couple of bits of clothing in his hotel room and could I pick them up and take them to Miami for him because he did not have time to go back to the hotel. I was not very keen on the idea, but you never know when you might need help. After the best part of an hour packing and repacking the suitcase on Monday, I finally managed to get it all shut… I just couldn’t afford an explosion…

These weighty matters were forgotten as I downed my “recovery G&T”, with some marvellous black truffle crisps to titillate the taste buds. The staff were attentive without being invasive. The lounge was devoid of the usual Middle Eastern bling. This  lounge had artefacts from the local museum. I didn’t explore the whole place but I did enough to know that I will return whenever I can in the future.

Would I like another glass? Or perhaps a tiramisu? I even heard someone asking for a hot chocolate but the staff didn’t mind, odd though it was.  The daft thing was that I wasn’t really hungry and so did not think the lobster was a good idea, but I went for a starter of wagu beef carpaccio with fennel shavings. I felt like a glass of Sauvignon Blanc… even if the wine snobs out there would be appalled by the choice. If I was designing heaven for frequent flyers there would certainly be similar elements. The customer gets what the customer wants.

In the end, I floated out of the lounge and went down the escalators with a smile – and found myself back to the real world, which was a far less heavenly place.

The trip to Saudi is always a little odd as one encounters pilgrims on their way to Mecca. The rules say that they must wear white shrouds with nothing sewn and as the men tend to be an excitable lot there can often be wardrobe malfunctions, which do not really appeal to us non-believers.

Still, when it comes to excitement in Saudi Arabia there is nothing quite like the driving. There are marks on the road but there are no lanes, no priorities, no speed limits and it seems like everyone is on the phone when they drive. Surprisingly, they obey red lights but that is the only nod they have to road safety. The irony is that Saudis seem to love cars and the roads are clogged much of the time because there are so many accidents.

Saudi Arabia wants to be involved in motorsport, which is why in recent years we have seen Formula E, the Dakar, Formula 1 and later this year the World Rally Championship visiting the kingdom.  The Saudis have plenty of money to spend and that means that motorsport folk are like flies sniffing out fresh meat. The latest idea, according to Prince Khalid, the head of the local automobile club, is that the country will acquire an F1 team. The obvious choice is Aston Martin because the Saudis already own shares in both the car company and the racing team and the title sponsor Aramco is the Saudi Arabia national fuel company. It is also investing huge sums of money to find ways to make traditional internal combustion engine cars less polluting. They have been leading the way in the production of sustainable fuels and are also working on really clever stuff like mobile carbon capture, which takes the CO2 produced by an engine and stops it going off into the world.

It is possible to turn CO2 back into a fuel called syngas, but it is currently not very efficient but if the systems can be improved and it can all be put into an engine, it might be possible to create a carbon-neutral energy cycle. Saudi Arabia is interested in this because it has so much oil and if it can make it all carbon-neutral, it will help save the world etc etc… I think that this is the kind of technology that F1 should be pioneering, rather than going down the route of becoming just an entertainment formula, with outdated noisy engines, which the FIA President has been proposing of late. His idea was rejected recently in a meeting in Bahrain but the teams said that they would go on looking at new ideas, which presumably made the President feel less rejected. The problem for the FIA is that it signed up to a deal with all the manufacturers to create an engine formula for 2026-2030 and they committed to spend tons of money, and now the President wants to change the terms of the deal. Not surprisingly, he has been told to take a hike (in the nicest possible way) because when it comes to such vast sums of money, a commitment should be a commitment.

If the FIA argues that the formula that has been created is not very good, it is more than a little self-harming because the federation’s primary role these days is to make and police the rules and if it does not do that very well, who is to blame? As we know, things at the FIA are anything but joyous at the moment with the recent resignation of the Deputy President of Sport Robert Reid, who departed aiming a large torpedo at the other leadership, on his way out the door. This has raised questions which others have been asking for years.

This is the FIA election year and so the President is busy making everything look neat and shiny, and trying to photographed next to the world’s most powerful people. Oddly, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia – another MBS – was in Jeddah but as there were no pictures of the two together, one must suppose that the FIA version did not get access to Saudi Arabia’s most powerful boss. The chances are that in the FIA election, the incumbent will win. The election rules are stacked against challengers, but that does not really help the FIA because the victory of the old-fashioned system of patronage will simply make the federation look more out-of-sync with reality. In the last election Ben Sulayem said that he would change everything for the better but you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks that this is what happened – and MBS can hardly try the same approach again. Clubs will still vote for him because they want his patronage but I am not sure I know anyone who thinks things are going in the right direction, except for the apologists he has around him. I am pretty sure that there will be at least one challenger because those who seek to modernise the federation are forming up for a battle.

I have to admit that I was slightly astonished when Malcolm Wilson was named as next Deputy President. I cannot really understand why anyone would do this given the things that Reid and others have said about Ben Sulayem – and the scrapes he has got himself into in the last four years. If anything, I think Wilson’s appointment – if confirmed – will lead to questions of conflict of interest and I doubt this will not stop at Malcolm.

Wilson has been associated with the Ford Motor Company for almost all of his career and has been running M-Sport as Ford’s WRC team for 28 years.  With the US company planning to be involved in F1, WEC and the WRC in the future, there are inevitably going to be questions about neutrality. Perhaps Wilson will agree to hand over the business to his son, but that is not really going to help when it comes to perception.

Still, conflicts of interest do not seem to worry Ben Sulayem very much. His family’s Dubai Ports firm is heavily involved with General Motors and one or two folk in F1 have asked the question about whether this might explain why he has been so keen to get GM an F1 entry.  The day after Wilson was announced as the future Deputy President of Sport, the FIA announced that GM has committed to building engines for 2029. This is nonsensical. Why would the US giant invest hundreds of millions to build an F1 power unit which will only be able to race in 2029 and 2030 and is three years behind the other manufacturers. We don’t know what the engine rules in 2031 will be, but we do know that the President wants to change the rules earlier. He keeps talking about 2029. So what will GM be preparing in the next three years? If the FIA changes the engine rules so that everyone can start at the same point with something different that would inevitably raise questions about how and why this has happened… That would be smellier than old prawns.

Donald Trump is now finding that his movements are beginning to be hemmed in by lawsuits being thrown at him by all and sundry and the powers that he has grabbed will likely be rolled back – even if the Supreme Court is stacked in his favour. It may end up being the same for Ben Sulayem.  He is already trying to overturn an FIA agreement with the European Commission about the role of the FIA in the commercial side of the sport. And, of course, there are a string of other legal actions against him which we need not delve into further for the time being. One wonders how long it will before the conflict of interests question pops up.

In the meantime the FIA is busy opening a large new office in Knightsbridge, a wildly overpriced part of London where sheiks, oligarchs and billionaires are able to shop at Harrods and have tea at Harvey Nicholls. The leases in this part of the world run to more than £20,000 per month, depending on the number of square feet, but it is clear that the FIA President does not want a pokey little place to spread his wings. Given the federation has significant offices in Geneva, Paris and Brussels, it is really not clear why this is needed, except perhaps because people in London speak English. I have heard it said that it may just be a nasty case of office envy because the F1 Group has whopping great offices in London and the FIA does not want to be seen to be the poor relative.

The Green Notebook from Jeddah has some scrawls about Max Verstappen’s lack of interest in expressing his views after the Saudi Arabian GP. He was clearly not happy about  his penalty but we don’t know what he might have said about it, if he had felt at ease. He made a very good point, however. Whatever you say can – and often will – be twisted. And with the new FIA restrictions being critical about anything or anyone is a risky game and you do not know how things you say will be twisted by the people who claim to be F1 media.

“I prefer not to talk a lot because sometimes your words can be twisted or people interpret it in a different way,” Max said. “It’s honestly better not to say too much. So that’s what I’m trying to do. You can’t share your opinion because it’s not appreciated apparently, or people can’t handle the full truth. Honestly, it’s better if I don’t say too much. It also saves my time because we already have to do so much. It’s honestly just how everything is becoming. Everyone is super sensitive about everything.”

There have been some rumours of late about Liberty Media selling the Formula One group but these make no sense at all. The sport has been growing strongly in recent years, and there is much more potential for growth to add more value to the company.  John Malone, the man who controls Liberty Media, is not a Formula 1 fan. He is an investor. There is no emotion involved. He has attended only one F1 race since Liberty bought the business eight years ago. Malone is 84 and while he seems to be in good health, he is not looking like handing them over to his children. Malone is famously anti-taxation (and thus a big supporter of Donald Trump). Liberty Media is a C corporation, which means that the shareholders are taxed separately from the entity. This status limits the liability of the investors, so they cannot lose more than they have invested, but selling a C Corporation means that there is a possibility of double taxation – at corporate and at personal level. The conclusion is that Malone will probably not sell, but rather work out some complex form of takeover which avoids tax. 

When the F1 shares were launched in 2017 they cost around $32, today they are worth $86, but they have been as high as $100 before the Trumpist tariff mayhem. Before Saudi Arabia there were some stories suggesting that former CEO Greg Maffei is trying to buy Malone’s voting shares in the business and that he might turn up in Saudi Arabia, where money flows more than water, but there was no sign of him. He was presumably at home enjoying Easter, like any normal person… The other thing that works against a sale is the fact that Liberty Media is close to completing the purchase of MotoGP, which will add great value to the business, so now is not the time to be selling.

Beyond that there was not much F1 chatter. With three races in three weekends there has been little time for people to do things. McLaren is going to quit Formula E but has not not yet announced it and it has hired James Barclay, managing director of JLR Motorsport and team principal of the Jaguar TCS Racing Formula E team, to become the head of the McLaren World Endurance Championship programme  in 2027. The McLaren Formula E team will probably be passed to another owner – as it was when McLaren acquired it. Prior to that it was owned by Mercedes. The interesting thing is who might buy it because there is a lot of manufacturer movement in Formula E at the moment.

The thing about recessions – and everyone is worrying about one because of Trump’s recent moves – is that motor manufacturers use recession as an excuse to get out of motorsport commitments, without needing to admit failure. The economy gets the blame. This was seen in 2008-2009 when Toyota, Honda and BMW all pulled out of Formula 1 within a few months, saying that the economy was to blame and that they needed to invest in other things.  In reality all three programmes were failures. There are lots of manufacturer programmes which could be axed in F1, WEC and Formula E if there is an excuse to get out. Sponsors will think twice as well and the public may buy fewer tickets, which will squeeze race promoters. It is worth noting, by the way, that the Las Vegas Grand Prix is introducing flexible interest-free payment plans for tickets for the 2025 event so that fans will be able to spread the cost.

Right, that’s enough. It’s good to be home for a few days and there is a garden to be tended. In this respect I follow the logic of Voltaire, who concluded the wonderful Candide with the advice that people should “dig their own garden” and be at peace with the world and keep a sensible distance from the mad folk who live in the real world.

Either that, or go to the Al Safwa Lounge.