No question, Formula One has its critics. Often parodied for being out of touch with the real world, it is perceived by many as a frivolous sport, fuelled by money rather than the purer sporting motives that enable village cricket and suchlike to thrive. That, though, is what the promoters want you to see. Hence the TV directors’ insatiable appetite for celebrities on the grid… and closely cropped shots of cars in countries that don’t attract much of a live audience. Empty grandstands present the wrong image, you see.
There is no such trompe l’oeil in Telegraph Motoring’s F1 Diary. Now into its fifth season, it reflects the realities of life on the road as experienced by three freelance journalists, author Simon Arron and travelling colleagues Mark Hughes and Tony Dodgins. At the time of writing they have a collective age of 149, three wives and six children (divided equally between them). Between March and November, however, they tend to see more of each other than they do of their families. It’s a world of shared hotel rooms and hire cars, candid moments with drivers and team principals and, just occasionally, misadventure. Well, not that occasionally…
If you have ever watched a Ryanair passenger trying to force a clearly oversized bag into a measuring gauge, and doing so with such force that the rivets eventually separate from the metal, that will be Tony.
If you’ve ever seen an AirAsia passenger trying to rest part of a clearly overweight suitcase on his foot, to convince the check-in clerk that it is less than 10kg as the scales fluctuate wildly while he tries to maintain balance, that’ll be Tony, too. The clerk was wise to that one: she suddenly activated the conveyor belt, causing the bag to shoot forwards and Tony to fly backwards. “Fancy that,” she said, “it will have to go in the hold”.
And if you saw a stray journalist prowling the streets of Southport for most of one night last year, searching for a “lost” cat that was asleep in his airing cupboard, you can probably guess who that was.
In truth none of us is immune to misfortune (although last year Tony was the only one who flew into Bristol when his car was in Luton and he needed to be in south-west London – a detail he managed to keep quiet for several months).
This, then, is the other side of F1. The journey begins here.
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