The Chaussée Jules César is an old Roman road that runs from Paris to Rouen and then on to Harfleur. On the Monday evening after the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, I was driving home on this route, having flown in from the UAE. The F1 season was over. Doing 24 Grands Prix had been challenging and I wanted just to go home, shut the gate on the world and enjoy some R&R. People think the F1 lifestyle is glamorous – and in some ways I suppose it is – but stopping off at McDonald, because it is the only place open, is probably not what people think the magic carpet of F1 is all about… but a man has to eat. In the end I missed the turn-off because I was tired and I couldn’t be bothered to drive a few kilometres to get back to the entrance I had just missed and so I drove on. At a place called Saint-Clair-sur-Epte there is a Viking longboat (the French call it a drakkar) sitting on the hillside beside the road. It probably seems slightly incongruous if you do not know the history. When you cross the River Epte you leave the Ile de France and enter Normandy and the longboat is there because in 911 AD, a Viking called Rollo signed a treaty with the King of West Francia, known as Charles the Simple, in Saint-Clair. This granted Rollo control of all territory between the Epte and the sea. In exchange he agreed to stop further raping and pillaging up river on the Seine. This deal gave birth to Normandy, the name derived from North Men. One hundred and fifty years later, Rollo’s descendant William the Conqueror became King of England. Vikings, pirates and the like have been troublesome throughout human history and the reason I am telling you about Normandy is that the history of the United Arab Emirates is not so very different. In the old days the entire area was known as “The Pirate Coast” and it was only when the locals agreed to sign the splendidly-named “General Treaty for the Cessation of Plunder and Piracy by Land and Sea” in 1820 that they agreed to stop being troublesome on the understanding that the British would protect their pearling trade from other nasty nations (and also stop shelling them).
Thus, over time, the emirates became known as the Trucial States and the British played a big role in developing the oil and gas industries, although not perhaps for entirely altruistic reasons. But by 1971 the British Empire was effectively gone and the Trucial States were granted their independence. Since then, of course, the emirates have become insanely wealthy. Down there in the Gulf they dream big dreams. The desert islands and mangrove swamps where the pirates used to hang out are today being transformed into a global “tourist destination”. Yas Island was once part of a dull sandy peninsular, but the locals decided to make it an island by digging a canal. Since then they have built theme parks, hotels, golf courses, marinas, events facilities, museums and all the rest of it. The Formula 1 circuit is a key element in this strategy. One day it will all be linked to the city by metro and by high-speed trains that will zip in from Dubai. This is good news because Abu Dhabi hotel prices at Grand Prix time are just plain silly. It is probably impolite to ask what they have spent on all of this, but it is well north of $40 billion. Still, if your only natural resources, other than oil and gas, are sea, sand and sunshine, it is logical to build holiday resorts. The last 50 years have seen many an Emirati make a colossal fortune. Ahmed bin Sulayem is a good example. He developed a company called DP World, which is now the world’s third biggest port operator. The company had annual revenues last year of $18.25 billion and operates around 10 percent of all global container traffic through its 82 terminals. In 2021 Dubai Ports acquired the US supply chain company Syncreon for $1.2 billion. This firm specialises in automotive supply chains and had worked with General Motors since 1963 to develop global export programmes. In 2009 it even took over GM’s distribution of parts and vehicle kits for multiple models for shipping to assembly plants all over the world. In October last year Dubai Ports acquired another company called CFR Rinkens, to develop its services for containerised vehicle shipments from automobile factories in Mexico into the United States. This began operating this year, shipping cars into US for GM and others. GM is obviously important to the Bin Sulayem family. The boss’s brother Mohammed, who uses the name “ben Sulayem” rather then the original which he used to use when he was competing in local rallies. Why he changed “bin” to a “ben” is not clear, but it may have simply been to avoid nasty Western people like me who think that bins are related to rubbish. Ben Sulayem parlayed his success in desert rallies into becoming a big blazer in the local automobile club and subsequently to being elected president of the FIA. His family connections with GM are not inherently a problem. His brother does his thing and Mohammed runs the FIA in his own inimitable style. It would only ever be a problem if there was some indication that the selection process for a new F1 team linked with GM was in some way unfair. “We never favoured anyone, and it is only because this application ticked all the boxes that the FIA approved it,” Ben Sulayem said recently. “It was only a matter of time before General Motors was going to be approved. I wanted GM in F1 because it is good for business.” We will see if this turns out to be the case, because on paper the new team is definitely more sports investor Mark Walter than it is GM. One presumes that if things one day go well, GM might make it a proper factory team, even if it might still be structured like Mercedes, with the car company owning 33 percent and two other partners each having equal shares. This way Mercedes gets an F1 programme at no real cost. Audi, as mentioned in the last green notebook, is trying to fashion its team in the same way – because it makes sense. Anyway, the only real question about the selection process that took place is what the confidential arbitration case with Hitech Grand Prix is all about. When its bid was rejected, Hitech challenged the FIA and it was agreed to go to arbitration. It is now clear that the FIA has not fared well in this process. I did have the totally bizarre experience not long ago when an FIA man, who best remain nameless, came up and said: ‘Your story is wrong!’. As always if someone says such a thing, I reply: ‘What’s wrong with it?’. In this case, I got the reply: ‘I cannot say.’ So what was the point of complaining if I cannot be told what to fix? Ah, the joys of that famous election promise transparency… Anyway, the word in F1 circles is that the FIA is going to pay out $3 million in legal fees to Hitech and there is a discussion still to be had over damages. I would love to see what the arbitration judgement says (that’s a hint, by the way) because obviously the judge involved cannot have been entirely happy to have reached this situation. Still, it would be good to know why Andretti/Cadillac/GM/Walter (choose whichever name best suits) bid was accepted and why Hitech was rejected. I have tried all manner of means (bribery, blackmail etc) to get someone to slip me the judgement so I can fully understand what happened. I do not expect the FIA to leak it… Clearly, the federation would like to see the whole thing buried in concrete… The big news of the Abu Dhabi weekend was that Chase Carey is returning to be on the board of Liberty Media. This is great news for the sport because Chase, while not being a fan of F1, understands the business and talked everyone into agreeing to a budget cap when he was F1’s CEO. That was an astonishing achievement and some might even call him “The Piranha Whisperer” for somehow managing to tame the team bosses of F1… To be fair, these days, with one or two exceptions, the F1 team bosses are not really slitting throats like they used to do. And then there is Flavio Briatore. The talk in Abu Dhabi was that kicking out Esteban Ocon from Alpine was to give Jack Doohan a chance to race in F1, but that the ultimate plan would be sign up Franco Colapinto and suck in all the sponsorship money that will follow him around and ditch the Australian. It does not matter whether Jack is better than Franco (or vice versa). We will see if this is what happens and until it does I think we should give Briatore the benefit of the doubt and give him the chance to show that he really is a pussycat and not a truly horrid person, as a lot of F1 people seem to think. Who knows? Everyone needs a sense of redemption… The word is that Alpine will soon re-sign its title sponsor BWT and we will see how much blue and how much pink will be seen next season. It isn’t very woke to split things in such a way, but what can you do? The signs are that the driver market continues to be a little short of being finished and even Sergio Perez is finally admitting that he is talking to Red Bull about a settlement. We won’t go over all the old ground again, suffice to say that after the after the first 10 races, of which Max Verstappen won seven, Perez added only 41 points in the remaining 14 Grands Prix, which is none too impressive when one considers that Verstappen added 218 points in the same period, with the same car. If Perez really has a contract for 2025 (as he says) and there is no performance clause, one really needs to ask how on earth Red Bull thought this was a good idea. It would be best, I suppose, if Perez was to retire, but he probably won’t do that. If he ends up being fired and Red Bull has to pay him off, he will not be able to race elsewhere in 2025 (not that there is any interest in him). The indications are that Liam Lawson will get the Red Bull drive and that Isack Hadjar will be promoted to replace the New Zealander at VCARB. On the day after Abu Dhabi a galaxy of crown princes (is there a collective noun for assorted royalty?) gathered to witness the signing over of McLaren shares from Mumtalakat, the sovereign wealth fund of Bahrain, to CYVN Holdings, which is a company owned by the government of Abu Dhabi. This will see CYVN acquire McLaren’s automotive business and a non-controlling stake in McLaren’s racing businesses. Regular readers will know that I believe that F1 teams are still wildly undervalued. It is a sport with a massive global following and a far bigger reach than any other sport, including the National Football League (NFL), the National Basketball Association (NBA) and Major League Baseball (MLB). Each of these has more than 30 teams and in European football there are hundreds of teams. This means that equity in F1 teams is difficult to obtain (which is why Mark Walter has been trying so hard). I believe that F1 will go on growing – and that the valuations will go with that. The NFL, by the way, has just approved the sale of an eight percent stake in the Philadelphia Eagles, which values the team at $8.3 billion, and this is reckoned to be only the ninth most valuable franchise in the NFL. F1 teams are worth around $1 billion at the moment and I see exponential growth because there are sports investors the world over willing to buy. Drivers should take note, by the way, that the New York Mets MLB team just agreed a 15-year, $765 million contract with some player I have never heard of, which is believed to be the biggest ever deal in professional sports. So maybe F1 drivers are worth more than they are being paid… (By writing this I just made some enemies…). I see no negatives in the growth of Formula 1 (and I would merrily buy FWONK shares if I could afford them) apart from the rather haphazard governance, which sees the FIA firing good people for very silly reasons. Given that the FIA relies totally on F1 for its money, it would be wise for the federation to remember that it doesn’t actually own F1’s commercial rights. They are leased so far into the future that it is what one might call a virtual freehold. I will be 149 years old (and still going strong) when the deal ends, and Mohammed Bin-and-Ben Sulayem will be the same, as he is only a few months younger than I am. This is perhaps something that the FIA club presidents should ruminate over they chow down at the FIA Prizegiving in Rwanda on Friday the 13th (unlucky for some). The money they are eating comes from F1 – and if F1 gets bored with the way things are run, the FIA can always be thrown into a Magimix (with onions and carrots) and F1 can sail off on its own… carrying the treasure from F1 away to the land of the shareholder. Just as pirates used to do in the old days…
