Why F1 wouldn't miss Hockenheim

There's much to love about visiting the German Grand Prix at Hockenheim.

The beautiful neighbouring town of Speyer, with its Romanesque cathedral and al fresco dining; Mannheim, the starting point and destination of the Bertha Benz Memorial Route, the world's first automobile road trip; and Heidelberg, with its evocative gothic castle and vibrant Altstadt.

The Hockenheimring itself is not one of them.

Back when the circuit was Fortress Schumacher, and every grandstand was heaving beneath the weight of a capacity crowd wearing replica Deutsche Vermoegensberatung baseball caps, this was a veritable crucible of Formula 1 fandom. Few events could match the German Grand Prix for atmosphere, for the sheer passion of the crowd.

And yet off they drifted once Schumi had departed the scene; last year the attendance on race day was 71,000, almost half that of 20 years ago.

It's now difficult to tell whether Germany has fallen out of love with F1, or vice versa.

Last weekend, the crowds were sparse on qualifying day, less so on race day, but still a dispiriting shadow of times past, and numbers were boosted by the Dutch Army of Verstappen fans. In the early '00s it would have been unthinkable to have entire stands populated by fans cheering on someone else.

These days the circuit doesn't turn a profit on F1 - or even its round of the DTM. The only sell-outs are musical events.

Yes, Ed Sheeran is a bigger draw than Sebastian Vettel.

To visit Hockenheim these days is to plough through a cloying miasma of moribundity, an enervating air of can't-be-arsed-ness

As it stands, the German Grand Prix is off for next year. Liberty has an option that it hasn't taken up yet, and Mercedes is unwilling to rummage for change in the corporate purse, as it did last year in order to celebrate its 125th anniversary in Germany last weekend.

Even German media colleagues make a weary noise, like air escaping slowly from a punctured tyre, when the topic of Hockenheim and its future as an F1 venue is broached, such is the lack of enthusiasm for the grand prix and the general atmosphere of decrepitude that prevails at this venue.

To visit Hockenheim these days is to plough through a cloying miasma of moribundity, an enervating air of can't-be-arsed-ness, as you bump and bang your way in on the shuttle bus, past the access tunnel that can't be used (it floods) and the half-built Porsche Experience Centre, to be deposited outside the paddock gates for a disobliging day in and around the decomposing buildings (or, in the case of the media centre, a clapped-out shed serviced by a pair of stinky portaloos) that lie within.

It's almost impossible to escape the pervasive sense of neglect. When the indefatigable Edd Straw tried to venture trackside he was left to loiter fruitlessly at a locked gate that used to be permanently attended.

Readers who follow F1 on social media will have seen the video Daniel Ricciardo posted of himself and half the grid trapped in the lift on the way to the drivers' briefing. It was an amusing but illustrative vignette of the general frustration that Hockenheim visits upon anybody who has to work there.

I travelled in this accursed contraption myself, for the press conferences were also held on the fourth floor of the Baden-Wuerttemberg Centre.

Following the drivers' briefing debacle the maximum number of passengers on each journey was strictly prescribed, and rigidly enforced by an attendant whose task it was to bark at any poor sap hoping there was room for one more.

Press conferences being busy affairs, and the lift going about its function as if powered by a handful of dung beetles on a treadmill, this led to some tense scenes in the lobby on the ground floor as hacks and photographers jockeyed for position.

To pull press conference duty, then, was to witness the tawdry spectacle of queuing etiquette and good manners undergoing savage defenestration. Hockenheim made beasts of us all.

This is not to wave the card of journalistic self-indulgence and entitlement. Autosport scribes don't expect to be conveyed into the circuit precincts upon a palanquin and fed oysters on a silver platter with crushed ice and seaweed trimmings.

The wise heads now running Silverstone put time, effort and money into making the place less crap

It's just that for pretty much everyone in the Formula 1 orbit - particularly for the team mechanics who must toil in ageing garages and attend to their toilet in grotty cinder-block oubliettes - this is a dispiriting place in which to work.

A bit like Silverstone 10 or 15 years ago, in fact, when the home of the British Grand Prix was presided over by blazered buffoons who despised what they referred to as "effwun", as if any grand prix since the halcyon days of Raymond Sommer was not worth the name.

Vettel put a brave face on it, saying on race day: "I think the German crowd we saw today and yesterday is very passionate, a lot of people turning up.

"I think we have grands prix that we just mustn't lose such as Monza, such as the race at Silverstone in the UK.

"Germany and Spain have a long history of racing so it would be a shame to lose those and instead go to a place where they pay millions for the race to turn up but nobody is sitting in the grandstand.

"For us as drivers it's dull, so I think we rather enjoy here, close to the Netherlands with a lot of Dutch people coming."

For all that he may have confused some of the orange shirts with red ones, Vettel was right to acknowledge the contribution the crowd makes to the atmosphere and success of a grand prix.

Sporting events shouldn't take place in sterile, hermetically sealed cages.

But if value for money is poor, or if the race-day experience isn't up to scratch, or if the personalities within the sport gain insufficient traction with the general public, crowd figures will decline.

Some say the migration of F1 away from free-to-air TV platforms is stifling interest, and certainly it's having a negative pressure on viewing figures.

Equally, though, a grand prix should be a fantastic experience. Silverstone sold out this year regardless of Sky Sports F1's annexation of the UK TV rights.

To some extent that's a reflection of Lewis Hamilton's status and popularity, but it's also partly a factor of the wise heads now running Silverstone putting time, effort and money into making the place less crap.

At Hockenheim, supplies of those three key resources seem to have sputtered out.