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"If you don't come walking back to the pits every once in a while holding a steering wheel in your hands, you're not trying hard enough."

- Mario Andretti

 

[alberto.ascari]

- Mario Andretti
 

To ja kažem za skijanje, ko ne pada, skija ispod svojih mogućnosti. :-D

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Fascinating F1 Facts: 1


Yes folks, it's that time of year again, and with 100 Fascinating Facts to get through and only 103 days before we all board our planes to Australia, there is no time to dawdle. So, here we go with a story that illustrates that some new developments in F1 do really go with a bang...

In 2004, Williams was a team that needed to win Formula 1 races. It's last World Championship had been in 1997 with Jacques Villeneuve but then the team's partnership with Renault ended and the 1998 and 1999 seasons were done with old Renault V10s badged as Mecachromes and Supertecs. In 2000 a new partnership began with BMW and things began to improve and in 2001 the team started winning again, thanks to Ralf Schumacher and Juan Pablo Montoya. BMW was pushing for success in 2002 but there was only one win that season, although the team still maneged to finish second in the Constructors' Championship. The 2003 season produced four victories but Williams was still second in the Constructors' and the folks at BMW were beginning to get a little tetchy.

Hoping to leapfrog the opposition the team decided to make a radical change with the new FW26, which was designed by a team led by Patrick Head, with chief designer Gavin Fisher and the Italian aerodynamicist Antonia Terzi, who had joined Williams in 2002 from Ferrari. Terzi's aerodynamic development programmes had led her and her team to try a completely new concept for the nose of the FW26, with a short and rather stubby nosecone which connected to the front wings using vertical spars, designed to allow the maximum amount of air to flow to the underside of the car. When it was unveiled, it was quickly dubbed "the walrus nose" as it resembled the tusks on a walrus. The car seemed to be fast in the pre-season testing and Juan Pablo Montoya was talked about as a possible World Champion, but as the season progressed the FW26 proved to be very difficult to set up and very inconsistent. Both Montoya and Ralf Schumacher struggled to master the handling and get the most from the car. The opposition that year was strong with Ferrari's F2004 being dominant, but strong performances also from Renault and BAR-Honda. This all meant that Williams's dreams of a title challenge evaporated and then Schumacher crashed at Indianapolis and put himself out for three months, leaving Marc Gene and Antonio Pizzonia to stand in for him.

The team decided that the front end of the car needed to be redesigned and was aiming to have the car with a more conventional nose for the Hungarian GP in mid-August, but the team wanted to make sure that all was well before it ran the new version and so a test was organized at the BMW testing facility at Miramas, near Marseilles. The team sent a car to the track while the engineers flew down from Britain to the Aéroport de Marseille Provence at Marignane, about 30 miles from Miramas. They brought with them all the new parts carefully protected inside metal boxes. They picked up their hire cars, loaded in the equipment and set off, keen to see what the new nose would produce. Unfortunately, in their haste, one of the boxes was left sitting in the hire car parking. This had the new nose inside.

The police were notified that there was a suspicious package sitting the parking area and as no-one claimed the strange metal box, the police decided to call in the bomb squad and it was decided that the best course of action would be to blow it up in a controlled explosion. This blew the metal box apart and destroyed the new nose…

It is said that there was a slightly less controlled explosion back in England when Patrick Head heard what had happened…

Despite this setback the team did manage to have the new nose ready for the Hungarian Grand Prix. It was a big success and Montoya used the new configuration at Monza a few weeks later to set the fastest ever F1 lap around the Autodromo, at an impressive 162.9 mph average speed, which was not beaten until 2018. And at the end of the year Montoya won in Brazil… the last Williams victory until the Spanish GP in 2012.

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Fascinating F1 Facts: 2

 

Did you know that there was once a Formula 1 driver from Liechtenstein, the tiny mountainous Principality, wedged between Switzerland and Austria, to the south of the Bodensee (Lake Constance). It is a complicated story, but it all started out with sewing machines in the German town of Rüsselsheim am Main, near Frankfurt. Apprentice locksmith Adam Opel had learned his trade from his father and in the 1850s went travelling around Europe to see what exciting innovations there were. While in Paris he saw a sewing machine and was impressed. He joined a company that manufactured them and after a couple of years returned home to start a business manufacturing sewing machines for the German market. It was a slow process which began in his uncle's unused cowshed. His wife Sophie and her sisters invested in the business, allowing it to expand and by the 1880s the company was booming. In 1886 Opel began looking at bicycles and all five of his sons raced the company products with great success, advertising the firm, and then becoming involved in running it. Opel would go on to produce 2.6 million bicycles and to win the Tour de France three times thanks to Belgian rider Philippe Thys.

Adam died in 1895, leaving Sophie in control of the business with his five sons all involved in running the business. Sewing machine production hit half a million in 1899 and a million 12 years later. In 1898 Wilhelm and Fritz decided to get into automobile production and purchased the Lutzmann company in Dessau. Opel was in the car business. It was a huge success and various family members were ennobled, adding Von to the Opel name. Money was not a problem. In 1929 (a few months before the Wall Street Crash) they sold 80 percent of the car business to General Motors. The remaining 20 percent was handed over to GM two years later, with the family getting $33 million (around $500 million at today's prices) from the two transactions.

It was left to the next generation to spend the money… By the 1920s Wilhelm's son Fritz was in charge of testing and publicity for the business and thought that rockets might provide some good publicity for the business and sought the advice of Austrian pioneer Max Valier and others to create the world's first rocket-powered car in 1928 this was followed by other experiments, including a rocket-powered glider and a rocket-powered rail vehicle and ultimately a rocket-powered motorcycle. He earned the nickname "Rocket Fritz" with his adventures, but as soon as the family sold the business to GM he moved to Switzerland where he settled and married a celebrated aviatrice. He became a citizen of Liechtenstein, but as such was allowed to reside in Switzerland, while the family money stayed in the banks of Vaduz. In 1940 he decided to go to the United States but ended up being interned there interned as an enemy alien, because of his German roots. After the war he went through a divorce and then married Emita Herran-Olozaga, the daughter of a Columbian diplomat. Soon afterwards the couple had a son who was christened Frederick, although he was known from childhood as "Rikky". Born in the US, to a German father and a Columbian mother, he was legally a Liechtensteiner but grew up mostly in Switzerland, before going to school in England. He and his friends in St Moritz were a relatively wild bunch, going down the bobsleigh run at night and other such adventures. He then turned his attention to motor racing, beginning in Formula Ford 2000 in 1970, using the pseudonym "Antonio Bronco". He moved up to Formula 3 in 1971 and for 1972 joined Mo Nunn’s new Ensign team, which he had funded. He won one of the British F3 titles and joined the F1 circus with Ensign at the French GP that year. He did six races but his best result was 13th. The following year he planned to race with Ensign again but after the first race he was offered the chance to drive for Brabham (by Bernie Ecclestone), alongside Carlos Reutemann. He finished ninth in Spain and Holland but failed to qualify in France and was replaced by Carlos Pace. He continued to inhabit the jet set in the years that followed but then had a falling out with his sister Putzi, who had fallen in with a group of drug smugglers. This resulted in the gang being arrested and Putzi being sent to jail. He then moved to Thailand, looking for a quieter life.

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Fascinating F1 Facts: 3


The European Grand Prix of 1997 is a race that most Formula 1 fans remember. It was the World Championship showdown and took place at the Jerez de la Frontera circuit, in Spain's celebrated sherry-producing region. It was late October (the seasons finished earlier in those days) and going into the event Ferrari's Michael Schumacher had 78 points while Williams's Jacques Villeneuve had 77. The slow twisty Spanish track looked likely to give Ferrari the advantage and Schumacher's manager Willi Weber was sufficiently confident that Michael would win that he ordered a number of items of merchandise to be printed declaring Schumacher to be a three-time World Champion.

Everyone was well aware that Schumacher might try to win the title by crashing into Villeneuve, as he had done three years earlier in Adelaide when he took out Damon Hill to win the title. Would he dare do the same thing again if the Canadian tried to overtake him?

Villeneuve and the Williams team spent the run-up to the race reminding everyone that Michael was capable of being underhand, hoping to create an atmosphere in which it would be impossible to do the same again and things were tense when the F1 circus gathered. it was clear it was going to be a very close battle. Qualifying was unbelievable. Villeneuve took pole with a lap of 1m21.072s. Schumacher matched it exactly. And then Villeneuve's team-mate Heinz-Harald Frentzen set exactly the same time again. So the top three had an identical lap time. No-one believed it was possible. There were suspicions that someone had played with the computers to get a better story… People began trying to work out the probability of such an event happening.

Come the race, Schumacher made the best start, chased by Frentzen but Heinz-Harald soon handed the place back to Villeneuve. The two leaders both pitted twice being on similar strategies but the order remained the same and then Villeneuve began to hunt down Schumacher. On lap 48, Villeneuve made his move, braking later than the Ferrari and going down the inside. Schumacher turned into him and the two cars collided but. Schumacher's right front wheel hit the left sidepod of the Williams and the Ferrari slid into the gravel trap and retirement. Villeneuve's car was damaged but in order to win the title he had to finish the final 22 laps of the race. As long as he scored a point, the title was his. There was much drama as the two McLarens closed in but Villeneuve had no intention of fighting them. What no-one knew until after the race was that inside the Williams sidepod a battery was dangling in the air, having been knocked loose in the impact. It was not even wires, but strands of wire that were keeping Jacques's title alive. Meanwhile no-one was paying much attention to Frentzen, who made a complete pig's ear on his pit stop. The TV cameras missed the whole thing, but he arrived in the Benetton pit by accident, realized his mistake and so accelerated away, passing front of the McLaren pit and arrived at Williams, trailing all manner of McLaren pit equipment behind him. As this was being sorted out, Frentzen was asked on the radio what on earth he had been thinking and replied, cool as a cucumber: "The fuel is cheaper down the road"…

Villeneuve finally made it to the finish and as the celebrations began there was a mess going on with the podium as the mayor of Jerez Pedro Pacheco presented the trophies when that ought to have been done by Mercedes boss Jurgen Schrempp. This caused FIA President Max Mosley to completely lose his cool and he was spotted screaming at Pacheco, telling him that Jerez would never host another race. There never was.

As a follow up, strange but true, the winning Williams was put into the team museum in exactly the state it finished the race, with dents and tyre marks. Time passed and one day a relatively new member of staff spotted that the car on display was rather less glistening than one would expect and so went to work to remove the ugly tyre marks from the sidepod… Normally this would have been a commendable act, but in doing so, he wiped away part of the team's history…

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Heidfeld on his Goodwood run: “I wasn’t doing anything special”
Next year marks 20 years since Nick Heidfeld set a record at FoS that stands to this day

Vijay Pattni
30 Nov 2018


Nick Heidfeld is quick. Indeed, his nickname is Quick Nick. He’s raced in every major motorsport discipline worth mentioning. Formula One. Le Mans. The Nürburgring. V8 Supercars. Porsche Supercup. Formula E.

And yet, one of his greatest achievements involved none of those things. Indeed, Google ‘Nick Heidfeld’ and one of the top suggestions is ‘Goodwood’. Because in 1999, Quick Nick climbed into a McLaren MP4/13, did a thing, and climbed out a hero.

“The feedback from the people watching afterwards was amazing,” he tells TopGear.com.

“Those that saw it live were later telling me ‘Nick, I was there, I stood on that corner’,” he fondly remembers, “it was so emotional. That it gave the people so much.

“Without the feedback from them after, it would not be so unique to me,” he says. What? Setting a course record of 41.6s which remains undefeated (Goodwood hasn’t run F1 cars for years because of safety reasons, but still) wouldn’t be a big deal without the people? Didn’t he feel like he was onto something special in those 41.6 seconds?

He laughs. “Not at all. I didn’t think I was doing anything special on that lap,” he tells us. “It was not on the limit. It looked aggressive, because the car was moving and following each camber, but the main thing was the time of the week and when it was run – it was the first time over the weekend that it was dry.”

So, he wasn’t even trying to go for a record. He was just trying to beat another racer. “The previous outing before mine was Bernd Maylander in a Le Mans car, and he was quicker than us, so we said ‘that’s not possible, we need to be quicker’.
 
“That was the mindset. To just be quicker than Bernd,” he laughs.

 

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Fascinating F1 Facts: 4


Some Ferraris are worth a huge amount of money. The most expensive, so they say, was a 1963 Ferrari GTO, sold earlier this year in a private sale for an astonishing (some might say daft) $70 million, while there was a new record at auction this year at $48 million for a 1962 GTO at the RM Sotheby sale in Monterey, during the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance week in August.

One wonders what someone would pay for a Ferrari racing prototype, one of only three built, which was raced only twice and won both events, under the guidance of Ross Brawn. Today, one is believed to be in the Ferrari Museum in Italy, one is owned by Nick Mason, the Pink Floyd drummer and the third belongs to a former American Cub Scout, now aged 23.

It is a story that began in the winter of 2004-2005 when Pack 112 of the Boy Scouts of America were holding their Pinewood Derby in the gymnasium at the American School in Paris. One of the crowd (the mother of one of the Boy Scouts) was the Press Officer of the French Grand Prix, who decided that it would be a great idea to hold a similar competition for Formula 1 teams at that year's French Grand Prix.

The Pinewood Derby was created in 1953 for the boy scouts. It was designed to be a wholesome, constructive activity that would foster a closer father-son relationship and promote craftsmanship and good sportsmanship through competition. Since it was founded tens of millions of cars have been built by generations of Cub Scouts. The rules are very basic with each competitor being presented with a kit consisting of a 7-inch block of wood, four plastic wheels, four nails to serve as axles and a set of rules. All nine parts must be used and there are minimum dimensions and a minimum weight but beyond that any design is acceptable, as long as they are powered only by gravity. They run on a three-lane wooden track which slopes down to the ground.

The F1 teams were all presented with three Pinewood Derby kits at the Monaco GP and with a race track and timing equipment borrowed from the Boy Scouts and volunteers to run the event, the first F1 Pinewood Derby took place in July 2005 in the F1 Paddock Club at Magny Cours. Ferrari arrived with Ross Brawn and two engineers carrying a briefcase containing two race cars and a spare, carefully protected by carefully sculpted foam. The chassis had been designed using CAD-CAM technology and they had been machinerd from solid. They featured carbon composite fins and there were rumours of heavy metal ballast. Red Bull, Minardi and Toyota joined the fun, along with a selection of Boy Scout cars from Paris. The FIA Race Director Charlie Whiting was the official starter and track commentator Bob Constanduros did the commentary. Amid much excitement, Ferrari won the day, edging out the fastest Boy Scout cars, which featured slightly less technology, notably ballast made from coins and fishing weights - and built by 10-year-olds. The Boy Scouts proved to be hard to beat. The car built by Travis Faro had never been beaten. Initially this remained unbeatable but then it came up against the number one Ferrari and was finally defeated by the tiniest margin. Another Boy Scout car, built by Christopher Kulmayer was unbeaten in the heats and so, after a run off which put Faro's car third overall, after it beat the second Ferrari, Kulmayer's car went head-to-head with the leading Ferrari in the Grand Final. Would the mighty Ferrari be humbled by a 10-year-old Boy Scout? There were some worried faces in the Maranello camp…

In the end the Ferrari won by a tiny margin and everyone headed back to work having enjoyed an entertaining soiree. A year later the competition was repeated with Ferrari presenting the same three cars, with a change of livery.  There were new entries from Scuderia Toro Rosso (which had replaced Minardi), MF1 Racing (today Force India), a much-improved Toyota entry and two McLarens: one a simple block of wood on wheels and the other suitably sculpted (the block of wood was quicker). There was also a beautiful entry from Mason who had sculpted a Maserati from his wooden block.

This time some of the Boy Scouts attended and they proved hard to beat once again: This time the lead Ferrari won by a few centimetres from Boy Scout 2, built by a youngster called William Saward, while Kulmayer's Boy Scout 1 finished third overall, beating the second Ferrari in the run-off. In recognition of his achievements the 11-year-old Kulmayer, who was present in full uniform, was gifted the Ferrari spare car as a reward for his efforts over the two years. Ferrari swapped its second car with Mason, to get hold of the gorgeous Maserati.

Sadly, the event was not repeated…

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Fascinating F1 Facts: 5


Formula 1 team bosses come in all shapes and sizes, and from all walks of life. Their backgrounds are wildly diverse. Many start with very little and are driven to achieve success, to leave something behind. It is rare that the wealthy find the kind of motivation required to climb to the pinnacle of the sport, but there have always been exceptions to the rule - and Edward Everett Mayer is a prime example of a wealthy man who had the ambition and drive to make it to the very top.

It is a story that really begins in 1840 in the hamlet of Slocum's Hollow, in the Lackawanna valley, in north western Pennsylvania. It was then that the Scranton family arrived, looking to establish an ironworks, in an area that they knew had both coal and iron ore. Iron-making was a complicated business in that era and knowledge was not widespread. So it took the Scrantons seven years to get it right. The good news was that when they did this coincided with an urgent need for railway lines, as the railroads spread across the nation. The Scrantons' business boomed and quickly a town grew up around the ironworks. By 1851 Slocum's Hollow had been renamed Scranton and the family had diversified, investing its money in steel, coal mining, railroads and utilities. Money ceased to be a problem, but the Scrantons were ambitious folk and continued to build their empire for the next generations. In 1928, however, the spendidly-named Worthington Scranton sold the Scranton Gas Works and Water Company for $25 million (about $370 million today).

Worthington was a man of wealth and connections. He had married into the Warren family, which could trace its roots in the US back to the Mayflower in 1620 and three daughters Sara, Katherine and Marion were followed by a son called William. Worthington's wife Marion Margery Warren Scranton was a political operator, a campaigner for universal suffrage and a mover and shaker in the Republic party. William would become a congressman, then the governor of Pennsylvania and ultimately a candidate for President in 1964, although he was defeated in the Republican primaries by Barry Goldwater. Later he would become United States Ambassador to the United Nations.

That was all ahead when Marion married Edward Bloom Mayer in 1932. He was a native of Iowa City, where his father had been the postmaster. He was an adventurous soul and at 21 had gone off to Europe to become a fighter pilot. He was shot down and injured and so ended up as a flying instructor. When America entered the war he joined the United States Air Service and served as a First Lieutenant with the American Expeditionary Forces. On his return to the US he met Benita Guggenheim of the wealthy mining family. They were married five months later and Edward worked as an investment broker, becoming an early partner in the Bear Stearns company. After his wife died in childbirth in 1927, Mayer gave up his job and retired, at the age of 32.

Five years later, at the age of 37, he met 24-year-old Marion and they were married. They soon had three sons: Worthington Jr, Edward and Timothy. They were known as Tony, Teddy and Timmy and each in turn attended Yale University. Tony went on to become head of the White House personnel office under President Gerald Ford, while Teddy and Timmy embarked on a rather different career path. Teddy was keen on car racing and when he moved from Yale to Cornell to study law, he met another racing nut, by the name of Peter Revson, the heir to the Revlon cosmetics fortune. Revson would move on to the University of Hawaii, where in 1960 he started racing a Morgan in sports car events. Timmy started racing as soon as he turned 21, driving an Austin Healey, but he then acquired a Formula Junior single-seater and began producing good results. He then had to complete with military service but raced when he could with a team called Rev-Em that Teddy had set up with Revson.

In 1962 Timmy returned to racing full time and won the SCCA Formula Junior title. This led to the chance to take part in the United States GP at Watkins Glen in a factory Cooper, as team-mate to Bruce McLaren and Tony Maggs. He retired early with an ignition failure. The two Mayer brothers and Revson then decided to head to Europe for the 1963 racing season and Timmy raced for Ken Tyrrell's Formula Junior team and competed in saloon car racing with a Mini-Cooper. At the end of the year he was signed to be a Cooper F1 driver for the 1964 F1 World Championship.

At the same time, Teddy was helping Bruce McLaren to set up his own McLaren Racing operation to take part in the Tasman Series and ultimately in F1. Timmy went along as team-mate to McLaren and was soon showing great ability, mixing with all the top names of the era. It looked like he was heading for a big career in Grand Prix racing. But fate is cruel and at Longford in Tasmania, for reasons that no-one really knows, Mayer's car went off at high speed. It went straight into a tree and he was killed instantly. It was an awful blow to Teddy but he took the decision to remain in racing and do what he wanted to do. When McLaren was killed in 1970, Mayer took charge, along with engineer Tyler Alexander. Although the team enjoyed great success in CanAm and in IndyCars, it was Formula 1, that was the primary motivation and under Mayer McLaren won World Championships with Emerson Fittipaldi in 1974 and James Hunt in 1976. Nicknamed "The Wiener" because someone mistakenly thought he was related to Oscar Mayer, the celebrated producer of hot dogs in the USA, Teddy remained in charge of McLaren until 1980 when Marlboro insisted that McLaren go into partnership with Ron Dennis's Project 4 Racing Formula 2 team. Mayer stayed on as joint managing-director until 1982 when he sold his shares and departed, going on to establish Mayer Motor Racing with Tyler Alexander for the 1984 CART Championship. The team was an immediate success and a few months later Carl Haas (no relation to Gene) convinced the Beatrice Companies Inc, a vast American consumer conglomerate, to finance a Formula 1 team. Haas did an exclusive three-year deal to use Ford V6 turbo engines and hired Mayer and Alexander to run the team, which became known as Haas Lola and later FORCE. It was not a great success but helped develop the careers of several young engineers, notably Ross Brawn and Adrian Newey. A change of management at Beatrice resulted in the sponsorship ending and at the end of 1986 the team was closed. Mayer joined his old rival Roger Penske and remained a senior executiv with The Captain's operations until his retirement.

Teddy's son, named Tim in memory of Teddy's brother, is today a leading player in the world of motorsport organisation - being one of the regular FIA F1 Stewards, in addition to numerous other roles...

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Kad bi F1 remasterovala stare trke na ovaj način ja bi pišao benzin!

 

 

Realno stvarno, kada gledam stare trke uvek se izgubim jer ne znam ko se gde nalazi i na kom se mestu nalazi. Btw, u zadnje vreme kada pratim stare trke koristim ovu zahebanciju ▼

 

http://www.statsf1.c...r-par-tour.aspx

 

 

Meh. Kako bi pratio trke da si uzivo na stazi ako preko TV nisi kadar ispratiti bez 100 dzirlo hepeka statistike?

 

[Rad-oh-yeah?]

Fascinating F1 Facts: 6


According to the songwriting duo John Kander and Fred Ebb, money makes the world go round and there are times when one marvels at the power of the stuff. It is so powerful that it can even bend borders...You would think that it was the obvious thing to host a Grand Prix in the country after which the race is named, but Formula 1, particularly under the commercial control of Bernie Ecclestone, developed some very strange habits in this respect.

Logically, the German Grand Prix would take place in Germany, and the British Grand Prix in Great Britain. It's not rocket science. Admittedly, things might get a little complicated if there was a country which wanted to have more than one Grand Prix in the same year. The usual way around this problem was to use a more regional name, so the European GP was tag was employed, while in Japan the second race was given the Pacific GP moniker. Let us not waste too much energy noting that there were non-championship Pacific Grands Prix at Laguna Seca in California in the 1960s. The Pacific Ocean is a big old region.

There was the rather odd case of the Pescara Grand Prix, a one-off World Championship race in 1957, which was a second race in Italy, but it was not called the European GP, for reasons that long ago disappeared in the mists of time.

When it came to multiple races in the United States, it was initially sensible to call the races the United States Grand Prix (East) and the United States Grand Prix (West). This was the case between 1976 and 1980. But then things started to get complicated because in 1981 there was a race in Las Vegas, known as the Caesars Palace Grand Prix, named after the casino which provided the parking lot through which the race was run. One presumes that horse-choking wedges of wonga were delivered to allow this to happen.

Anyway, back to the European GP. This was originally an honorific title given to one race each year, the first being way back in 1923, the last being the British GP of 1977. After that the name was not used until 1983 when Brands Hatch wanted to host a second British race. The European GP name would then appear at the Nurburgring in 1984, 1995 and 1996, Brands Hatch again in 1985, Donington Park in 1993 and Jerez in 1994 and 1997. There was then no European GP in 1998 before the event settled at the Nurburgring from 1999 to 2007 - one might say the Schumacher years - before it moved to Valencia from 2008 to 2012 (the Alonso era?). Then things went completely crazy when the European GP of 2016 was held in Azerbaijan. Given that Baku is located around 1,350 miles to the east of Istanbul, the celebrated meeting point of Europe and Asia, this was a little far-fetched, but as they were paying a great deal of money and wanted that title, a way was found to make it happen. The title was justified by the extremely tenuous argument that a very small part of Azerbaijan is located north of the Caucasus Mountains and to the west of the Urals, these being seen as the geographical boundaries of Europe... oh, and the Eurovision Song Sontest had previously been to visit Baku.

Strange though this may be, it is not the weirdest thing Formula 1 has done when juggling races. There was the Swiss Grand Prix, once a major F1 event in the early 1950s but after the Le Mans disaster in 1955, Switzerland voted through the Loi Fédérale sur la Circulation Routière, Article 52 of which states that motor racing was banned. Thus in 1975 the appearance of a non-championship Swiss Grand Prix was just a tad bizarre, not least because it took place at Dijon in France, which is a good 100 miles from the nearest Swiss border. In reality, it was the chance for France to have a second race (although some would argue that the country already has that with the Monaco GP each year...) Five years after that, there was a second Swiss GP at Dijon, this one counting towards the World Championship.

There would be further complications in 1981 when the Italian circuit of Imola wanted a Grand Prix. It had held the Italian GP in 1980, while Monza was being rebuilt, and in 1981 the Formula 1 world was in a big fight with itself and so the idea of a European GP was not even broached. Instead the race was given the improbable name of the San Marino Grand Prix.

The Most Serene Republic of San Marino is a small part of the Italian peninsula that was left out of the unification process when the Kingdom of Italy was declared in 1871. It is entirely surrounded by Italy and is about 55 miles from Imola. But, for Ecclestone there was money on the table and it was close enough. Besides, who was going to argue if Italy had two Grands Prix? The race stayed on the F1 calendar until 2006, becoming infamous, of course, for the accursed weekend in 1994 when Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger were both killed.

OK, that naming strategy was a bit weird, but then one must also consider another less-than-classic event, known as the Luxembourg Grand Prix, which took place at the Nurburgring in Germany in 1997 and 1998. Believe it or not, there were some non-championship Luxembourg Grands Prix in the late 1940s and early 1950s held at the Findel aerodrome, but the Grand Duchy never had a track that could be used for F1, although Goodyear might argue that because it has a testing facility at Colmar-Berg.

The problem was that Germany had a Grand Prix at Hockenheim and the European GP title was being used by the Spanish at Jerez de la Frontera. In the second year the European GP title was not actually used, but could not be employed by the Germans because there was a fight going on between the FIA and Jerez over the celebrated podium incident in 1997, which meant that the Spanish refused to give up the rights to the name.

The Nurburgring, by the way, is only 44 miles from the nearest point of Luxemburg… but, hey, who's counting anything... other than money?