I guess at some point in our lives we all want to be cowboys – or cowgirls. Still, I have found it a little eccentric when I have stumbled into cowboy towns in places you would not expect them to be. One in particular stands out. The High Chaparral is a cowboy town in the wilds of Sweden, where a man called “Big Bengt” Erlandsson decided he wanted to build a Western town back in the 1960s, after he acquired 200,000 telegraph poles from the Swedish national phone company.

We used to stay there when we went racing at Anderstorp, which is about 10 miles away on the forest roads through Jönköping County.  We would go through these like the Duke Boys in Hazzard County. The Wild West Stunt Show was pretty average with cowboys shouting each other in Swedish before falling off houses or horses (and stagecoaches, if I remember correctly).

Anyway, having tunnelled my way out of Austria (you cannot go anywhere in this part of the world without using tunnels),  I hooked up on the German Bundesautobahn Drei (otherwise known as the A3), which conveniently goes from the German-Austrian border near Passau  all the way up through Germany until you reach the Dutch border at Emmerich, where Nico Hulkenberg comes from. It is 483 miles and you whizz through past places like Regensberg, Nuremberg, Wurzberg, Frankfurt, Bonn, Cologne, Dusseldorf and Essen. It then becomes the Dutch A12 motorway that takes you to The Hague, which is really useful if you plan to go to the Hook of Holland and take an overnight ferry boat to Harwich. from where one can potter across to Silverstone without having to deal with London and the evil M25. The downside of this routing is that you have to dodge the Dutch all the way and after a weekend like the Red Bull Ring, the troops in Verstappen’s 1st Motorised Army were not in the best of moods and hogged the fast lane (too slowly) with intransigence. I fear that for weeks to come I will dream of yellow number plates in front of me and will wake up in cold sweats. Still, the A3 crosses the mighty Danube five times before you get clear of Regensberg and also passes by a place called Pullman City, which seemed like rather unGermanic name. This is a cowboy town where Germans who dream of “Den Wilden Westen“ can live out their fantasies. I thought about stopping for a gunfight, but knew that I would have to overtake the Dutch all over again.  I admit that I usually prefer to take “the path less traveled”by Dutch caravans, but I knew that if I did that my two day trip to The Hook would take three days. I could have done the trip in one day if I was really on it, but 800 miles is a bit of a hike after a relatively sleepless post-race night in Styria. So I pottered along, passing to sleep for a bit here are there and arrived in Wurzberg, in the late afternoon. The Franconia area has been a centre of winemaking since the Middle Ages and the so-called Steinwein was so good that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote poetry about it.

The Formula 2 driver Oliver Goethe is, by the way, a descendant of the aforementioned poet, although he has passports from Denmark, Britain and Germany, although I have not got round to meeting him to ask how that came about. What I can tell you is that the 20-year-old Goethe went to the same school as Lando Norris, as did such luminaries as Sam Bird and Max Mosley, while Oscar Piastri went to the same school as Sir Stirling Moss and Ferrari driver Mike Parkes. Useless information, perhaps, but when it comes to writing profiles of the two World Championship contenders of 2025, it could come in handy…

The chit chat in the paddock in Austria was all about Max Verstappen, even if Toto Wolff and Max Verstappen were not willing to be drawn on the subject. The fact remains that Mercedes has yet to confirm George Russell for 2026 and the only reason why that would not have happened by now would be if someone better was available. Toto said that the intention is to stay with George, but it is clear that the team cannot ignore the possibility that Verstappen might come on the market. Russell understands the situation and is talking to other teams just in case he needs to hand over his seat to the Dutchman. If Mercedes believes that there is a possibility of getting Max, one has to conclude that there is a way it can be done and that will no doubt depend on option clauses that we do not know about. I have been asking around about this for some time and I have concluded that if Red Bull is not third in the Constructors’ Championship by the end of July, Max might be able to leave. If the team is third he is automatically locked in for another year. However, if he does walk away, all hell is going to break loose at Milton Keynes, although in such a scenario, one can imagine that Red Bull would abandon the idea of promoting youngsters who are not ready and sign George instead.

At the moment Red Bull Racing is fourth in the Constructors’ so you can see that there is a window of hope for Mercedes – if the stories I have heard are correct. To be quite honest, Red Bull should not be fourth in the Constructors. but having a second driver who has scored next to nothing means that it is effectively a one-car team. Mercedes might also have scored more points if it had decided on a more experienced second driver, while Ferrari might claim to be doing OK, but when you consider that the team has two seasoned race winners, who would be able to win if there was the machinery to do it, one must conclude that the Scuderia is really not in a very good place at the moment.

The other big rumour in recent weeks has been that Fred Vasseur is possibly on his way to the door at Maranello, which is marked “Uscita” (exit).  The 57-year-old Frenchman is now in his third year in charge and he has a three-year deal. Thus now is the time that there should be discussions going on about a new deal. He was hired to turn the team into winners and this is clearly not the case at the moment. Ferrari has been unable to win a World Championship since Jean Todt departed in 2008, which means that this is the 17th season of failure, two years longer than Ferrari’s previous worst run, between 1983 to 1998.  The hounds in the Italian media is in hot pursuit of foxy Fred and it seems that they getting closer to the kill with each passing week. This sort of thing is not unusual at Ferrari and for those who think history is useful it is worth remembering that Todt was in this kind of situation at the end of his third year at Maranelo, back in 1996. He was on the verge of quitting when Michael Schumacher said that he would leave the team if Todt was no longer there and Ferrari Presidente Luca Montezemolo then jumped in and supported Todt. The storm blew itself out. The difference today is that as Vasseur is being executed with the old Chinese technique of lingchi  (death by a thousand cuts) no-one is coming to his rescue. The top management at Ferrari is as silent as lambs. There was some progress with the SF-25 chassis in Austria with Charles Leclerc able to finish on the podium, but the harsh reality is he was still 20 secs behind the McLarens at the finish. And that is three-tenths a lap.

There was some amusement caused when McLaren Group, which owns the McLaren road car business and owns a small share of McLaren Racing, appointed Montezemolo as a non-executive director… Still, the 77-year-old Italian does know a thing or two about how to run a supercar company…

Talking of senior citizens, it was fun to see a Mr Bernard Ecclestone returning to paddock. In greeting I shot him with a finger (just for fun) and he came at me and started stabbing me in the chest, saying that he preferred knives to guns. I suggested he stab me in the back, as that is the ways things are done by some folks in F1, and he replied that he preferred the front because he likes to see the blood coming out! The fun we have… Mr E was there with his wife Fabiana and was clearly being supportive of her role as an FIA Vice-President. The Bernard was even wearing an FIA lapel pin, which caused a few people to do a double-take.  The President has been busy putting out a string of positive press releases, hoping too how the world what a success he has been but although Carlos Sainz has dropped out of the running, it is still by no means certain that there will not be another candidate. And if one declares a candidature in the next week or two, it will only be because whoever it is believes that they have a good chance to win. If no-one stands, the fIA will get Ben Sulayem for another four years. If that is fine with them, good luck to them. The FIA gets the President it deserves. There are still some significant potholes in the road ahead which Ben Sulayem could trip over, including a variety of legal actions we already know about. There is also a quiet investigation going on with a heavy-hitting US investigation agency digging around to see if they can find any unsavoury items about the President. They key question, of course, is not what they might find out, but rather who commissioned it… Still, if the President is as clean-living as his policy about swearing, he has nothing to worry about…

One wonders whether Flavio Briatore will be having sleepless nights as well, as Renault tries to decide what to do with its Formula 1 team, now that Luca de Meo has jumped out of the Renault plane, using the troubled Kering as a parachute. Quite why a car guy would do this has yet to be explained. And it was completely unexpected. This was almost as odd as his decision to hire Briatore 12 months ago, in a move that left many in F1 open-mouthed, given that Briatore is 75 and rather a shadow of his former self. No-one at Renault seemed to mind until someone leaked details of the arrangements to a financial publication and, oddly enough, within a couple of weeks de Meo is departing. Is that a coincidence? 

flabbergasted

The sudden and unexpected departure of de Meo to a job in luxury fashion was as odd as hiring Briatore and it led to suggestions that he may have been shown the door and given a parachute to avoid any hint of trouble. While his adventures in F1 have been little short of disastrous, his management of Renault seemed quite sensible, although transforming Alpine into an all-electric brand was a little bizarre given that F1 uses hybrid engines.  To be honest I’ve never understood anything that de Meo did in F1, even deciding to name the team after brand that he was taking full electric. We won’t go into the gruesome details, suffice to say he went through a string of team principals who were never given the time to do the job properly, or who had no clue what was needed to be successful.  Taking on Briatore made it look like de Meo had run out of ideas. Not surprisingly given the instability, the team is now last in the Constructors’ Championship this year, having scored only 11 points in the 11 races to date. Going into the British GP weekend, the 12th of 24 races, Alpine trails behind Kick Sauber (26), Aston Martin (28), Haas (29) and Racing Bulls (36). None of these teams has ever won a World Championship, while Alpine was once an F1 powerhouse, collecting 50 victories and seven World Championships since it began operating in 1981. De Meo also torched the F1 engine programme and it cannot be revived easily as all the good engineers have fled elsewhere. The conclusion in F1 circles was that de Meo intended to sell the team to help boost the Renault balance sheets. The team is trying to find another team principal at the moment, but no-one seems interested.

The irony is that results do not appear to be that important at the moment as the value of F1 teams is skyrocketing because there is huge demand and a limited supply. The investment world seems to be convinced that live sport will flourish forever and that the value of teams will follow the same trend as NFL, NBA and MLB franchises that are now getting astonishing valuations.  I have heard of at least five groups that have expressed interest since de Meo departed in buying the team. It makes sense as it would rid Renault of a big headache – and put some money back into the balance sheet. However, I doubt that the Renault chairman Jean-Dominique Senard will do anything until there is a new CEO. So they are likely to keep Briatore for a while, as he is quite useful as someone to blame… There is talk that the de Meo job could go to Denis Le Vot, who runs Dacia, but a much more logical choice would seem to be Maxime Picat, who was in the running for the CEO role at Stellantis. He is nearly 10 years younger than Le Vot and has had bigger jobs. I have no idea who might win the auction for the team but I know that the price will be high. I hear that Red Bull recently turned down someone’s bid of $1.5 billion to buy Racing Bulls. My feeling is that while US private equity types will put in competitive bids, the whole thing might be bundled (Alpine car company included) and that is the sort of package would be appealing to a Chinese firm. In the interim the team’s Global Marketing Director for the last 10 months – David Warren – has quit his role and says he is going fishing.

That was about it, but on Monday there was great news about the opening weekend of the F1 movie which notched up revenues of $144 million. This makes it Brad Pitt’s most successful opening weekend so far, beating his 2013 film “World War Z”, which scored $111.8 million on the opening weekend, and went on to gross $540 million worldwide. F1 is also the most successful debut weekend for Apple Original Films. This is very good news for Formula 1 as it seeks to draw new fans and to attract those with a vague interest in the sport to become more passionate. I guess they now need to figure out how to make a sequel and what to call it. F1-2 doesn’t really work, does it?

I was not in an enormous hurry as drove the entire length of the A3. In fact, I had time to divert briefly on to the A5 near Frankfurt Airport. As I decided that rather than sitting in the port waiting for the ferry, I would use the time to visit a couple of places which were on the way.  The two are not far apart. The first is a memorial to the German racing ace Bernd Rosemeyer who died while trying to set a new land speed record on a section of straight autobahn between Frankfurt and Darmstadt in January 1938.  He had just achieved a run of 268 mph in his Auto Union streamliner, when the car went out of control, possibly because of crosswinds, and flew into a bridge embankment.

It is nice to see that such a hero is still remembered today, with a neat and tidy memorial site once one had wandered through some long grass to find it.

A few miles to the west of that is the massive Opel factory at Rüsselsheim. If you go south from the town, on the L3012, you will see signs to the Opel Rennbahn. You will have to walk through the woods a bit to find what is left of the 1.5-mile banked oval that opened in 1919. It was meant to be used as a test track but also hosted some races but the arrival of other bigger and better tracks soon saw it fade from the racing world.

Today it is completely overgrown, but you can still see most of the  old banking, which is weird as it has trees growing on it. The Opel Family (which became the Von Opel Family). Fritz Von Opel was a pioneer with rockets and tried to set speed records with a a series of rocket-powered cars in the 1920s. He failed to kill himself and later his son “Rikky” von Opel, funded the Ensign Formula 1 team for a  while and raced in a number of Grand Prix, giving some of his money to Brabham team owner Bernie Ecclestone, the virtual assassin mentioned above. After that Von Opel decided that he would retire to a Buddhist monastery in Thailand… and that was the last heard of him.