Dodgy Business

Eight people are killed every day on the roads in Shanghai. That, apparently, includes pedestrians and cyclists as well as people hitting things in cars and trucks, etc. Frankly, when you see it, you wonder how the toll is not a whole lot worse. If ever there was a place for the FIA's road safety campaign...

The circuit itself is well out of downtown Shanghai and it's at least a 50-minute schlep backwards and forwards every day, with each trip involving at least 20 near misses.

In Europe the routine is straightforward enough. You take hand luggage only, get off the plane, head straight to the hire car desk, grab some car keys, jump in, and follow well known roads to familiar hotels and the circuit.

Going to the Far East is different. If, like me, you can't kip on planes, you miss a night's sleep en route, arrive mid morning and make a valiant attempt to keep going and get onto Chinese time. The older you get, the bigger the victory scored by jet lag.

Shanghai, China © LAT

They don't let you hire cars in China, so you spill, semi-comatose into the back of a cab. Well, that's not strictly true. You have to be vaguely on the mark to beat your mates to the back seat, for fear of ending up in the front! Then you let tiredness overcome you, close your eyes and try to forget about what's going on around you.

The hotels are great - big, spacious rooms, good service and reasonable prices. That's unlike Japan, where entering a hotel room is known as doing a Boris Becker. In case you don't understand, they're about the size of a broom cupboard. If you still don't understand, I'm sorry...

As with most places we go that have an underground or Metro, Shanghai's modernity puts London to shame. After ambling around and enjoying some excellent food with a fabulous view of the Bund, we ended up, inevitably, at a bar.

Despite an airy outside table and beers giving way to double espressos, the eyes were shutting and there was no fighting it anymore. Zebedee had arrived and it was time to sleep. For all of about four hours. To a man we were all wide awake by around 3.30am. Rather than stare at the ceiling and wait for daylight it was up, shower, early breakfast and off to the track. There'd be less to hit at that time, we figured.

For the past two years we'd been staying in one of the 'official media hotels,' whatever that meant. Actually, it meant that an old rattly Toyota van would shuttle you back and forwards to the track each day.

Down we went to reception. No shuttle.

'We no official hotel anymore," said the girl.

At the taxi rank, all hell had broken loose. No sooner had a big, loud Yank climbed into the back of the regulation VW Santana than he was jumping out again.

"Get me another effing cab!" he yelled. "This guy's a bloody maniac."

The driver, who we immediately nicknamed Ayrton - because he was obviously very fast and a bit uncompromising - scorched off, did a lap of the hotel concourse and screeched to a halt again. Whereupon the porter ushered the same American back into Ayrton's cab, kindly holding the door open for him. Time to turn on the bleeper...

The Shanghai circuit © LAT

Ayrton did another hot lap of the concourse and pulled up in front of us. We declined Ayrton's services as well, so he screamed off on his third lap, now rattling away in Mandarin, Cantonese or whatever, and waving his arms around a lot.

The next guy arrived, we jumped in and asked for 'Shanghai International Circuit.' He looked blank and gave us the Chinese equivalent of 'Never 'eard of it, mate.' Much discussion between porter and driver, to the accompaniment of opposite lock simulations and engine noises from us. Then we thought better of that, in case he felt we were in a hurry.

When the press office opened at 7am we were on pole. We'd even beaten the Swiss, who I'm convinced camp overnight in the press room.

No cars go out on Thursdays of course and it takes a while for people to start appearing in the paddock and so there was plenty of time to drink coffee and take in the incongruity of that fantastic Shanghai structure. In stark contrast to year one, there seemed to be very little promotion on billboards and it was interesting that so many taxi drivers didn't actually know where the track was.

By mid-afternoon we were sleepy again and it was much the same story on Friday. The paddock is a massive affair, with air conditioned rooms tucked away all over the place and you can walk miles trying to find people. But the message from the first day was that it was going to be cooler than expected and that no one's dry tyre selections were going to work.

The last time that happened was Hungary but it was rendered irrelevant by rain that saw most of the race run on intermediates. And so it was in China. But for both race and qualifying.

If we'd been struggling on Thursday and Friday, there was no risk of falling asleep on Saturday or Sunday. If you didn't have a set of Michelin intermediates bolted on for the conditions that prevailed on Saturday afternoon, you were in big trouble.

Sometimes a great performance is masked by circumstance and so it was for Michael Schumacher. Putting a Bridgestone-shod Ferrari sixth on the Shanghai grid was a fantastic effort, every bit as laudable as Alonso's pole. But still, sixth was sixth, and, frankly, you couldn't see Renault losing it from there.

"After Monza, justice through divine intervention!" was the off-record statement of one team boss who didn't happen to be wearing blue and yellow and had no particular axe to grind.

In the paddock, meanwhile, Spyker had signed a Ferrari deal and that was very bad news for Cosworth, who now face being left out in the cold.

I could never be one of these local paper reporters who have to go and knock on the door of a family that's suffered a personal tragedy and ask, 'how does it feel?' But it felt a little like that when I had to go and seek out Cosworth's Bernard Ferguson on Saturday afternoon.

Bernard Ferguson and Otmar Szafnauer © LAT

Bernard, having flown to China hopeful of nailing the Spyker deal, was wearing a glazed expression that had nothing to do with jet lag. Cosworth, of course, had been here before, quite recently in fact.

"When I went to Imola last year and got off the plane, I had 50 text messages telling me that Red Bull had just signed with Ferrari. I guess I'm suffering a bit of Groundhog Day," he said, trying to muster a smile.

Although Ferguson and Cosworth are not giving up - and were quickly on the blower to Gerhard Berger, just in case the Spyker announcement was as unexpected by Toro Rosso as it was painful to Cosworth - the situation does not look good.

The Cosworth lads heard the news at around 2.30pm on Saturday, just as they were doing their final checks at Williams prior to Q3. They simply got on with it, as professional as ever. But it must be hard to take for a group that has produced what's widely held to be the best engine on the grid at a fraction of most manufacturer engine budgets. Williams, of course, will run Toyota engines next year.

A great irony is that in China two years ago, Max Mosley hosted a press conference at which he outlined the stupidity of the engine spending in F1 and advocated a new framework of regulations that would protect independents - both teams and engine suppliers such as Cosworth.

"It is ironic," Ferguson nodded. "The difficulty we found ourselves in is that there has been an awful lot of friction between the engine manufacturers and the FIA over all of these moves and sometimes I think people lost the thread of what they were arguing about.

"There's lots of things that Max is trying to achieve that currently seem to be being ignored. He has talked about reducing the numbers of people operating in F1, saying that the teams and the manufacturers are just too big, and yet Mario Theissen (the BMW Sauber team principal) sat there in a press conference on Friday and said that his objective was to hire another 150 people before the end of 2007. Which doesn't seem all that consistent with keeping the cost down...

"But who's to say he's wrong? He has a budget and an objective and he's going to spend what it takes. Will he get 150 salaries worth of benefit to the team? I've no idea. But all of these things that are designed to save money seem to be just transferring it in a different direction because a lot of the companies don't want to lose the engineers that have been developing engines and now, of course, they've all got this opportunity to move them off into energy recovery activities."

Ferguson added that the decision to allow teams to sell on chassis has also not had the effect some imagined.

"I've read lots of quotes from Dave Richards saying that what he wants to do is to acquire a chassis/engine package and, realistically, that's something we can't deliver unless we are working with another team. All the other manufacturers can sell on their chassis, engines, everything, into the customer base.

Chinese GP victor Michael Schumacher © LAT

"Maybe ultimately that reduces the overall cost of entry to the teams and means they don't need to have such a big infrastructure and can concentrate on their racing activity. But the bottom line is that a lot of these regulations that are meant to help, when they are actually interpreted and brought into play, are actually a disadvantage to us."

So, what about Red Bull/Toro Rosso?

"It's a personal opinion," he said, "but to me there is something very strange about the Red Bull/Ferrari relationship because both brands are so strong that they don't need anything from each other and they are actually competing for space.

"You look and you see Red Bull - extreme sports, the little guy taking on the big guy - and I would have thought there was a brilliant story there for an independent. A position with attitude. Whether it was Toro Rosso or Red Bull, I think that would have been a terrific mix with Cosworth, in line with the brand essence of Red Bull, but it wasn't to be."

Not yet anyway. But never say never.

That, surely, has to be the personal credo of Michael Schumacher after Sunday. When you saw the rain on race morning you just thought there was no way. But no matter how much the cards are stacked in your favour, you just can't afford a slip-up with Michael around. Most people heading off to find Renault's Pat Symonds on Sunday night felt much the same way I'd felt looking for Bernard Ferguson.

On Sunday night in China, one thing struck me above all else. You've got your endless testing, done with military precision, you've got your computational fluid dynamics, you've got your computer simulations and your strategy calculations, but the Chinese Grand Prix came down to something as simple as the length of time it took to scrub the top off a set of new Michelin inters.

But that's the point. It wasn't simple. You can test but you can't ever be perfectly prepared for the conditions and the peculiarities thrown up on the day. Alonso thought it would take four laps, the reality was nine or 10. Formula One is as fascinating as ever it was. I had sympathy for Fernando when he said, at Monza, that F1 wasn't sport. It certainly was in Shanghai. And brilliant entertainment to boot. Who knows what lies in store this coming weekend...