Doha has lots of roads with numbers rather than names, presumably because they cannot think of anyone to name them after. Street 356 is a good example of this. It runs from Street 358 to Street 355 and is interesting only because there is a whopping great Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where F1 folks stay during the Grand Prix weekend, at prices that make billionaires wince – if only a little.
It is close to the Lusail circuit, a place that a private beach, an Italian restaurant, some padel courts and a beach club called Sushisamba, which claims to offer creative Latin American sushi. When the F1 circus comes to town, normal people don’t stay in such places.
The good news is that Doha has a great road network (although the traffic light sequences are so long that one can fall asleep waiting), so getting to the circuit isn’t bad. The driving standards are (somewhat) better than Saudi Arabia, which will no doubt soon be funding a World Championship for Shocking Drivers, giving the host country a chance to win all the medals.
In a few years from now, if all goes to plan (it won’t), one will be able to drive south from Doha and take a 40-mile (give or take) causeway across the Persian Gulf to the tip of the Ras Ghumais peninsula in the United Arab Emirates. The aim of this is to bypass the red tape at the Saudi Arabian frontier so to make trading in The Gulf a lot easier. In a perfect world, there will be a second causeway from the north of Qatar across to Bahrain. If all this ever happens it will make life a lot easier for F1 as the sport will not need to fly between Bahrain, Qatar and Abu Dhabi – all venues for Grands Prix in this gilded age of oil money and soft power.
Soft power, in case you don’t know, is the good feeling one has about a country, a suitable example being what the United States used to have until it all evaporated in January.
But let us not forget that Doha is also in “The Middle East”, a region where troubles can flare up at any moment. F1 folk might not think about it much, but in June Iran launched a bunch of missiles at the Al Udeid airbase, just outside Doha. This is the forward headquarters of US Central Command.
In September F35 stealth strike fighters from Israel flew down the Red Sea and launched 10 missiles which flew across Saudi Arabia and landed in a gated residential compound belonging to the Qatari government in Doha’s diplomatic quarter. The Israelis were trying to kill Hamas leaders who were gathered there to discuss peace proposals for Gaza. Six people were killed, none of them the intended targets. The peacemakers were blessed on this occasion… The glittery hotels where the F1 folk stay, just north of there in Katara, The Pearl and Lusail may look out over the placid waters of The Gulf, but incoming ordnance is not impossible. This aside, Doha is basically a nice place, but like all the other cities in the region there are shiny skyscrapers and interesting architectural adventures, but little else of interest, beyond the odd old fort or a mosque or two.
Otherwise, it is all just flat sandy desert.
If you Google “things to do in Doha”, the answers all seem to involve dune bashing, sand boarding (which is surfing on sand rather than some dubious torture), with a few camel rides and photo opportunities with falcons thrown in.
You can take a ride on a traditional Arabic dhow and look at the city from the sea or you can visit the Qatar National Museum, where architect Jean Nouvel based his design on the desert rose, a Qatari symbol of resilience in the barren lands beyond the glitter.
It is very clear that Qatar is not short of money, thanks to the power of oil. This has allowed it to have significant influence in international finance and politics, and its financial tentacles extend around the world.
Before oil, Qatar was a poor country with little else than pearl diving, fishing and a history of piracy. Its primary asset (other than oil and gas) is sunshine which attracts Europeans in the winter. Qatar uses sport and a great airline to draw visitors. The explains the incongruous adverts one sees for Sunday lunches of roast beef and Yorkshire Pudding, although this is not much use for F1 folk, who tend to be busy on Sundays…
Everything is going swimmingly well in F1 at the moment. The sport is awash with dosh.
The one discordant note is the impact of the international automobile federation, which exists to administer the sport with quiet efficiency but is often troublesome and pushy in addition to being prone to complicating things that don’t need to be complicated. The current President wants the sport to provide him with even more money.
Initially people laughed at his desire to jump in front of every camera and to tell drivers that he had been a driver too, although his F1 career consisted of smashing up a Renault F1 after just a few metres. I’ve never broached the subject with him as it seems a bit too like shooting fish in a barrel, but I guess it has made him want more power, so people are scared to mention this unfortunate incident. Some of the things he has done are actually quite sensible, but a lot of other things make no sense at all and some have been rather dubious. As a consequence, there are a string of legal actions following him around and he has to keep kicking the hand grenades down the highway before they explode. With the FIA election (read coronation day) now just days away Ben Sulayem is figuratively juggling chainsaws in the air, while riding a motorcycle through flaming hoops, but he seems to think that all is well and he will be able to place the crown on his own head (a la Napoleon) shortly in Tashkent.
He has no opposition because the process of registration as a candidate is so difficult that there is a lawsuit about in Paris. There are also a variety of ethics complaints about the process, which he is seemingly doing nothing about. The role of FIA President was meant to be for idle sportsmen who did not need to work but these days it has become an office for misfits who like to play power games and often have with dark secrets. There is no real need to list all the legal cases again, but all of them seem to still be ongoing. And new things are still happening which could lead to further trouble. A week ago the FIA’s chief performance officer Julius Renk (who is responsible for the management of the FIA’s financial matters) departed. It is not clear whether he jumped or was shoved, but the bone of contention seems to have been a disagreement over the way in which the FIA accounts are going to be presented to the General Assemblies in Uzbekistan.
There are also outstanding questions about some of the people on Ben Sulayem’s election list and there are complaints to the Ethics Committee about them although former candidate Tim Mayer said in a recent statement that these had not even been acknowledged. The first action will be this week when a French court will decide whether there should be an injunction to stop the election process, pending a full investigation, following a legal challenge from another frustrated candidate Laura Villars.
Mayer’s remarks were part of a statement denying the recent claims from Czech FIA delegate Jan Stovicek about the Guidepost investigation that Mayer had commissioned it. It is all very weird because Stovicek, a lawyer, offered no evidence at all to back up his claim. The Guidepoint investigation is understood to have produced a report that has been sent to US Department of Justice. Mayer said “categorically and unequivocally” that he was not behind the investigation and that he had written to Stovicek to correct his “falsehoods”, arguing that were “clearly aimed at damaging Tim’s credibility and integrity both as a potential candidate for the presidency of the FIA as well as that of a long-standing motorsport professional with an impeccable reputation”.
It is not clear why Stovicek would want to bring all this into the public domain because until his letter no-one was willing to talk much about Guidepoint. We know that Guidepoint was looking to establish whether Ben Sulayem has any skeletons in his cupboard. Putting it into the public domain is thus an odd thing to do. Stovicek probably wants to the be next FIA President, but he is working closely with Ben Sulayem on the basis that after the election he will get a major FIA role, rumours suggesting that this could be as head of the FIA Foundation.
The fascinating things about all of this is that the two men met in the F1 Paddock in Doha, in full view of the world, but when photographers tried to take pictures, they were shooed away by an Asian security man (right), who seemed to be a little like Inspector Clouseau’s manservant Cato Fong.
Given that Ben Sulayem loves cameras and is constantly jumping in front of them, this was odd and one was left with the impression that he did not want to be photographed with his Czech mate. It is not clear why Guidepost was digging into Stovicek’s background when they were focussed on Ben Sulayem, but they clearly were.
Stovicek is often described in the Czech media as being “controversial” but it is rarely explained why this is the case. He is well-connected in political circles in the Czech Republic where his brother Petr was director of the state land office. There has also been a criminal complaint filed against the Czech automobile club relating to a subsidy from the National Sports Agency, which it claims was not used in accordance with the rules about such matters. The only other thing of note is a lot of coverage of a rather messy divorce in 2020 which resulted in claims of blackmail against his wife Kristýna’s lawyer, who allegedly threatened to reveal “sensitive details of their lives” if Stovicek did not agree to her demands. How all this relates to MBS is unclear but obviously Guidepoint thought Stovicek worthy of investigation.
The FIA meetings in Tashkent could be quite interesting if there are discordant voices bringing up uncomfortable questions about all of the above. But the chances are that the blazer-wearing delegates will not care that much about anything other than getting what they want from Ben Sulayem’s system of patronage. This attitude tends to lead people to think that FIA club presidents are all self-serving and willing to let things slide by without a challenge if they get what they want. Perhaps that is a fair assessment.
In the end, as I have said before, the federation will get the leadership it deserves and if that leads to trouble then that is the price that must be paid.
Elsewhere in the paddock there have been other mysteries that are more interesting than Ben Sulayem, notably the bizarre decision at Aston Martin to name Adrian Newey as the new team principal. Newey is a designer and anything that detracts from his work in this domain makes no sense.
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Team principals work pretty hard and have limited time and so one must assume that the appointment is simply a title and that someone else will be doing the work. As explained in previous Green Notebooks, the clash between Newey and Andy Cowell was inevitable because the way in which the reporting structure was put in place by Lawrence Stroll.
My spies say that Cowell actually resigned as a result of this but that Stroll convinced him to take on a new role instead. This sounds right. The office door plate name generation department at Aston Martin (there has to be one) must be working overtime given all the changes and the complexities of the “chief such and such officer” mentality. I suspect that almost everyone is a chief of some sort, including the chief hygiene officer, who probably cleans the loos. This is a very American thing where everyone wants to be a president or a senior vice president. Whether it makes the team work better is another question. One hopes also that the doorplates have removable inserts because the constant changes (which are not over yet).
One presumes that Newey’s role is only temporary until the team can find someone else but it is clear that the message that Stroll is sending out to the world is that Newey is in charge. This is probably why Christian Horner did not pop up. Horner did not have a secret tour of the factory as some are claiming and is not going to buy into the team.
But who knows? That may all be in different in six months from now…
Horner has been in America of late and it seems that he has been able to raise inordinate amounts of money if he can find a decent shareholding to buy in another team. There is a frenzy of private equity investments in sports at the moment with valuations in the NFL and MBA now getting into double-digit billions. F1 remains a desirable sector because while the NFL, MBA and MLB leagues each have more than 30 teams and all fundamentally operate in one major market, F1 has just 11 “franchises” and is a global industry and so it is logical to suggest that the valuation of the teams will go higher than those in America.
At the moment no-one is officially selling any F1 team equity but it is clear that Alpine shareholder Otro Capital is willing to part with its 24 percent of the team, if someone is willing to pay for it. I hear that they would like $1.2 billion for this, although that does seem an insane number given that they paid $218 million for the shares in June 2023. Renault may have first call on the shares but paying five times what they sold the shares for is really not a good move for the French government-influenced car company. So it is hard to see that happening. Will Otro get the money it wants? Probably not, but the current desire for equity means that it is a seller’s market
There are some shares available at Audi, where the word is that the team is looking or a partner to spread the risks. But Audi wants control and so investors are less excited. It was interesting to spot Hans Dieter Pötsch, the chairman of the advisory board of Volkswagen AG and of Porsche, on the grid for the Sprint race with Audi chairman Gernot Döllner.
This was not really a surprise when you consider that Qatar is the third-largest shareholder in Volkswagen with 17 percent of the shares and the Qatar Investment Authority holds “a significant minority stake” in Sauber, which becomes that Audi factory team next year.
Abu Dhabi will thus be the last race for Sauber although officially the name will still be there in the company structures, just as Racing Point is still listed among the holding companies of Aston Martin.
The Red Bull driver line-ups have now been announced with Yuki Tsunoda being shoved out to make way Isack Hadar and the Frenchman being replaced by Arvid Lindblad, one of a new generation of multi-national youngsters, who can choose their nationality from either their parents or where they have lived. LIndblad is a British citizen with Swedish and Indian antecedents.
Yuki will stay on in 2026 in reserve driver roles for the two Red Bull teams.
New drivers tend to create new interest in their home countries – so, for example, Argentina now wants a race because Franco Colapinto is an F1 driver. This is normal but we have heard stories that Germany may be back in the running for a Grand Prix because the battle of the silver arrows – Mercedes and Audi – could spark more Germanic interest. There are so many race promoters now trying to negotiate deals that life is quite complicated for Stefano Domenicali and his staff, who are trying to keep everyone happy, while pushing ups the price because of the laws of supply and demand. At the moment we have Barcelona, Imola, Spa, Qiddiya, Osaka, Argentina and Korea all keen to get a full-time race. We hear that Hockenheim, Macau, South Africa, Portugal and Turkey are all ducking and weaving to try to get races as well. We will soon hear of at least one new race which will be on the calendar in 2027 and 2028.
A booming F1 means that revenues are climbing and Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team have just announced a new deal with Pespico to promote various Pepsico products, mainly with the Gatorade brand. The team, incidentally will have revenues this year of more than $1 billion…
The World Championship will be settled this weekend in Abu Dhabi, and the paddock is going to be a hotbed for gossip – not just about racing, but also matters commercial and political…
It should be fun…