Magic Melbourne to launch 2025 season
DARK glasses hid some dog-tired faces in melbourne. i don’t believe in jet-lag, actually, but my denials of its existence faced a stiff examination last week. a fly-in, fly-out trip to and from the other side of the world for the third race of the season is lunacy. Doctors and mechanics can agree on that. which is why it is fabulous news that the 2025 season will, i can reveal, start in melbourne next season for the first time since 2019 (a result of Ramadan putting paid to the counter-attraction of the big-paying middle eastern states). melbourne would have staged the opener in 2020, too, but for Covid striking. melbourne as the season-starter has many attractions: a brilliant week’s build-up with various events down by the beach. it is wasted otherwise. not that the race atmosphere wasn’t special this year. the crowds — 130,000-plus on three consecutive days — were record-breaking. albert Park is a tremendous setting, the organisation exceptional, the lively vibe friendly. it was also clear how much the demographic has morphed. the old petrol-heads mixed with the netflix generation: women and girls as well as men and boys. no wonder stefano Domenicali, who loves the place, was smiling ear to ear when i saw him on the grid.
FACTIONS wish to bring down Mohammed Ben Sulayem as FIA president. To wit, Susie Wolff has started a criminal action in France against the governing body relating to conflict-of-interest allegations made against her. But history tells us that unseating Ben Sulayem is a fool’s errand. He was democratically elected by member clubs, 242 motoring and motor sport members in 147 countries, in 2021 and is pretty much invulnerable. The organisation’s inherent attachment to their president was made clear in 2008 when Max Mosley, besieged by a News of the World sex sting, faced a vote of no confidence. Of 169 delegates eligible to vote, 103 voted in Mosley’s favour, 55 against. Seven abstained and four submitted invalid votes. A two-thirds majority, in other words. Yes, wounds can be inflicted on Ben Sulayem, 62, to curtail his authority. But, if he is willing to fight on, there is no conceivable way to force him out before his four-year term expires.
WILLIAMS team principal James Vowles got it right when he dropped logan sargeant for the australian Grand Prix. a lot of commentators rated the decision unreasonable. it was, their argument went, unjust to hand the american’s car to team-mate alex albon when albon totalled his own machinery in practice. i understand that. it went against the natural order of things. Vowles countered that albon was more likely to score points and so elevate them in a tight constructors’ championship. Yet i think he was informed by a deeper impulse. For it is around albon’s talent that Vowles wishes to rebuild williams, his professed life’s work. while one feels for the accident-prone sargeant’s fate, he is irrelevant to that dream.