The first time I saw the Frutigen coat of arms I have to admit that I laughed out loud. It looks like what is left if an eagle (wearing a crown) flies into a windscreen – complete with a look of startled surprise on its face. Frutigen, in case you don’t know it, is a small town in the Bernese Oberland, the chocolate box mountain region of Switzerland, to the south of the capital Bern. Frutigen is famed for its Blauer Kuchen (blue cake), which is remarkable only because it isn’t blue…

The town is also known for its Tropenhaus, which uses geothermal energy from warm water which flows out of the Lötschberg base tunnel, to warm a large greenhouse, in which exotic tropical fruits are grown and there is a sturgeon farm, which produces caviar for the rich folk who live in the region and fish meat for the rest of us.

You might ask why I ended up in Frutigen on a trip to Monza. Well, it was because I was tired after a busy weekend and a heavy night of work after the Ferrari victory at the Autodromo Nazionale. It was pouring with rain on the Monday morning and I was facing a 12-hour drive home. That’s fine if you are on the road by six or seven in the morning, but it was 10 before I shut my computer, paid the hotel bill and hit the road. I was thinking that I would drive as far as I could, stay overnight wherever that was and get home on Tuesday.

The Mont Blanc tunnel was closing that day for 15 weeks of upgrading work and, as efficient as that route can be, it is also a bottleneck and so I decided instead to head east from Monza to Arona and then north, parallel to Lake Maggiore. You don’t see much of the lake, which is beautiful, but you are soon in the Diveria valley and on the way to Domodossola. From there you normally go north up to the Simplon Pass and then down into Switzerland. That is a complicated wiggly road. But I had a cunning plan. At Iselle di Trasquera I turned off the narrow highway and drove my car onto a train.

Some of the wagons were not covered so it was a slightly disconcerting experience as the train rattled through the tunnel. It felt like one was driving at speed in the darkness a few inches behind the car in front, an optical illusion, of couse. After you get used to it, you can doze off and let the train take the strain. When the lights came on again I was in Brig where the sun was (almost) shining and I was soon motoring off down the Rhône Valley.

I knew (vaguely) that there was another auto-train that goes under Bernese Alps and so I stopped for a quick lunch and Googled my way to Goppenstein Station, from where I travelled (asleep at the wheel) to the picturesque Kandersteg and I was soon heading downhill to the land of non-blue cake.

Within an hour (having skirted around Thun and Bern – and resisted the temptation to visit the old circuit at Bremgarten – I was climbing out of the flat bit of Switzerland and going through the Jura to France.

Swiss efficiency had inspired me to try to go all the way home.

Soon I was in Peugeot country, passing between Belfort and Monbeliard. One is then faced with a Pythagorian question: Is the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle quicker that the sum of the other two sides? One can either go by autoroute down to Dole and Dijon or one can cut across country on the RN19 to the fortress city of Langres. I chose the latter. This was shorter, lovely, but not very quick. Still, I was home by 10.30pm, which wasn’t bad in the circumstances.

The famous Parco di Monza looked rather different this year. In July last year, two massive storms hit the park within three days of one another. Winds were measured at more than 70 mph and the park’s old trees, taller and less flexible than younger ones, were unable to cope. Ten thousand trees fell. This changed the nature of the circuit because, for example, the Lesmos were no longer a tunnel of trees.

However, the destruction may have worked in Monza’s favour because with all the trees gone the conservationists had few arguments left regarding changes needed at the Autodromo. You cannot protest against Mother Nature (because she doesn’t pay much attention to whiney humans) and so all manner of work was easier to achieve. Thus there were new roads, roundabouts and tunnels, not to mention a new track surface, the first complete resurfacing job in the 102 year history of the track. The work took 140 days and cost €36 million. The figures came from a very useful Ferrari race preview which also revealed a little known fact about the celebrated Autodromo: during the war the park was used to house 69 wild animals from Milan zoo, because the city was being heavily bombed because of its factories (notably Alfa Romeo, Breda, Caproni and Isotta Fraschini, all of which were churning out military hardware) and its railway marshalling yards, with lines to every region. During the zoological adventure one of the keepers was mauled to death by a tiger… 

These are happier times, of course, and there was much excitement in Italy even before Charles Leclerc (who is hailed as an Italian when he wins and is Monegasque when he loses) won on Sunday. Italy was already celebrating the arrival in F1 of Kimi Antonelli, who will next year become the first Italian F1 driver since Antonio Giovianni left Alfa Romeo at the end of 2021. The fact that he will will replace Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes suggests that it may not be too long before the youngster becomes the first Italian to win a Grand Prix in nearly 20 years. It is a little odd, perhaps, that he will be second Italian F1 driver named after a Finn, following in the footsteps of Jarno Trulli, who was named after the motorcycle racer Jarno Saarinen.

Antonelli made a big impression with his brief FP1 outing, which ended with a sizeable crash, which caused Toto Wolff’s wrinkles to deepen. Still, it impressed Red Bull’s Dr Helmut Marko who said that the crash was not such a big deal because the kid had been impressively fast…

Marko would love to have a driver like Antonelli on Red Bull’s books as this might help alleviate the current nail-biting at Red Bull as McLaren closes in on the Constructors’ title (the gap is now only eight points). At the start of the year it looked like we were in for another year of Red Bull domination with Max Verstappen winning seven of the first 10 races. Verstappen is still a long way ahead but Lando Norris is chipping away at the gap. Some think that Lando should be allowed to beat Oscar Piastri to help his championship challenge. I don’t agree with that. I’ve never been big on team orders as I think they cheapen the value of any World Championship.

The season is developing into a great one with seven different race winners from four different teams – all of which are competitive, depending on the race. The missing eighth driver is, of course, Sergio Perez, who continues to be rather underwhelming.  He has scored 143 points to Verstappen’s 303 and is seventh in the championship. It would be eighth if George Russell had not been disqualified in Belgium. The team decided to keep Sergio just before the summer break, by made it clear that he must do better. He has not done so. Dropping him is still an option, but he is hugely popular in the Americas, where a lot of Red Bull is drunk and sponsorship worth $17 million is at Red Bull because of him. Red Bull bosses say (quietly) that they will bench him if he does not get better, but if that is the case the Austrian drinks company should order some suits of armour for Christian Horner and Helmut Marko for when they visit Mexico City (and an armoured personnel carrier to get them in and out of the circuit). The problem for Red Bull is that it is not 100 percent certain that Daniel Ricciardo would do a better job and Liam Lawson lacks experience.

Still, Williams has now got rid of Logan Sargeant and Franco Colapinto did a good solid job on his debut which did the team a lot of good. A new driver energizes people and gets motivation going again. Perez fans will, no doubt, argue that Sergio was much closer to Verstappen in Monza, but given the normal gaps, it looked more like Max having a bad weekend than Sergio improving. Time will tell, but one way or another, Red Bull is in danger of losing the Constructors’s title. Financially-speaking, losing the sponsorship that follows Perez might be worse than losing the prize money, but the problem with this argument is that racing people like winning and even if the books balance, the team does not want to be second.

There is still talk in the paddock about the second Audi/Sauber/Stake seat for 2025. Mattia Binotto was present all weekend, changing shirts depending on whether he was doing an interview for Sauber or for Audi. He was accompanied on Sunday by Gernot Dollner, the CEO of Audi AG, who knows nothing about F1 and is understood to have no desire at all to be involved, although the Audi board seems to have told him to get the programme working. One feels a little sorry for Dollner if this is true because the team is not about the turn around overnight. There are also questions about whether it is a good idea to go on given the poor Audi financial results of late and the recent news that Audi’s parent company Volkswagen is going to introduce a cost saving plan that will be one of the most radical in its history and might even result in the closure of German assembly plants. This as been caused by falling sales. The powerful workers committee is promising to fight any closures.

One can speculate that Dollner might soon start to argue that it would be better to sell the F1 team (at a profit) and get out of the game before the ventilation and the excrement get together. Blaming the economy is a good way for car companies to bail out of F1 because people cannot then say that a company ran away because it was not doing a great job. If one looks back at the financial crisis of 2008 this proved to be a nice easy way for several not very successful car companies to get out of F1.

One can argue that Renault is doing much the same already as the concept of shutting down the 2026 F1 engine programme at Viry-Châtillon and switching the Alpine team to Mercedes engines is tantamount to giving up F1, although Renault boss Luca de Meo is denying the intention to sell the team. No-one sensible in F1 believes that Alpine-Mercedes will last for long and most believe that de Meo is simply trying to get a better engine to push up the value of the team and will then check that his static line is attached and will leap into the void, brandishing a big cheque from a buyer to present to the world when he reaches the ground. Investors like money and if de Meo makes them more, he will have done his job. Alpine, an all-electric brand in an age not ready for electric cars, will probably be spun off to the public and then snapped up by a Chinese firm, looking to get production capacity to avoid import tariffs in Europe and America. This is logical, deniable (at the moment) and we will have to wait a few years to see if it all comes true. Flavio Briatore, who is de Meo’s henchman in this affair, never does anything unless there is money in it for him, and he prefers commissions to salaries.

In the mean time, the employees of Viry-Châtillon turned up in the grandstand at Monza with a big banner proclaiming that the engine programme should not be axed and the engine men in the team wore discreet armbands which said: “Let us Race!”. Back home in Viry-Châtillon the local politicians are also getting involved and the president of the conseil départemental of the Essone says he has written to French President Emmanuel Macron to save the sinking “industrial flagship” which Renault’s competition department represents.

Alpine’s new team principal Oliver Oakes will probably have a bumpy ride in the months ahead, but it will be useful experience. Whatever happens he will live happily ever after because the word is that his Hitech Grand Prix organisation is going to get a decent chunk of money from the FIA in the next few months. Hitech wanted to graduate into F1 and put in a bid at the same time as Andretti. Hitech was rejected by the FIA.

Oakes and his backers felt that this was unfair as they believed they had a better project than Andretti. This led to quiet legal action, ostensibly because the FIA rejected the bid on the grounds of finance. Hitech, it is said, argued that as the FIA must not be involved in any commercial decisions relating to F1, it cannot do what it did. In order to stop another omelette falling from the sky on to FIA President Mohammed Ben Sulayem and his advisors, it was agreed that the matter would be settled using a confidential arbitration process so that Oakes could argue for money and no-one would know much about it.

No-one wants to talk about this dispute but it is out there and I heard that the first phase has now been completed. The word is that Hitech has won a larger share of the legal costs involved, which suggests that the arbitrators thought his case was better than that of the FIA. There is now expected to be a second phase to assess the damages. This is expected to take place on September 16. Oakes won’t say a word and the FIA won’t even admit that the case exists. I guess that we will all have to look at the FIA accounts to see what it cost, although these have sometimes included large sums that were not explained. Given the ongoing mess with Andretti, one can say that the FIA President’s idea of opening up the entry process may not have been a good idea as it has caused nothing but pain.

This is probably all a bit confusing for motoring clubs in obscure countries, for whom getting a smart tailored FIA blazer is a big deal. I hear that the prize-giving this year in Rwanda might be quite confusing as everyone will be wearing identical blazers to celebrate 120 years of the federation. I did hear that some of those who want to attend this annual motorsport jamboree had considered trying to get a free flight to Kigali by getting caught trying to paddle across the English Channel and being deported to Rwanda under a Conservative Party plan to address the issue of illegal immigration in the UK. The bad news is that the new government under Sir Keir Starmer halted the plan on its first day in office, so those looking for a free ticket to Rwanda in December will have to look elsewhere.

Rwanda is a subject that is being discussed quietly in F1 as there is a project to build an F1 circuit there in the years ahead. F1 is very keen to have a race in Africa and Rwanda is keen to attract international events (hence the FIA General Assembly and Prizegiving) and so we should watch out for news on that front. The plan seems to be not unlike what happened in Malaysia 25 years ago when the government funded an F1 track near its new international airport as part of the “New Development Policy” to transform the country and create an educated and comfortable middle-class.

Formula 1 continues to excite in countries around the world and, despite the recent political upheaval in Thailand, the country still wants to host a Formula 1 race. However the idea of a street race around the royal palace in Bangkok is off the table as I am told King Maha Vajiralongkorn is not keen on noisy cars running around his neighbourhood. F1 will need a new venue.

The next few weeks will see a series of announcements of renewals of race contracts with the first likely to be the Italian Grand Prix. This year’s race drew a crowd of 335,000, up from last year’s 304,000. The spectators included Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. We also expect F1 and Prince Albert II of Monaco to confirm a new deal shortly.

I bumped into Meloni (literally) on the grid and she did not seem to have any security because otherwise I am sure I would have been removed from her presence. Instead I just looked up, saw a face that I vaguely recognised and then, like ships in the night, we were carried by the currents of VIPs in opposite directions. The grid was packed with people but I am afraid, as usual, I failed to recognise most of the celebs and influencers who bask in the televised glory of being there… For a working journalist, the grid is a good opportunity to talk to people who have been trying to avoid you, although I have to admit that there are some folks I am always happy to avoid.

My favourite photograph of the weekend was taken from the grid, through the debris fences along pit lane. It includes people watching from the various suites, an empty pit lane but the F1 cars, hidden from view, reflected in the tilted windows. Art, innit?