Dodgy Business

Motor racing journalism is not conducive to fitness. Two things recently brought that home.

Talking to Anthony Davidson as Super Aguri were in the final throes, he wanted to get across that with weighty KERS devices just around the corner, he was quick and he was light - just 56 kilos to be precise. Even more pertinent now, he reckons.

That puts him at eight stone 11 pounds. I can remember being exactly that weight when I was about 17. Playing the odd physical sport and working out quite a lot, I can recall desperately wanting to be nine stone. I'd still love to be, except that now I'm looking at it from north of 12 and a half ...

The Red Bull Energy Station © LAT

I realised just how silly the situation had become when I settled down to watch the Joe Calzaghe/Bernard Hopkins fight recently and saw that the fighters weighed in at 173lbs, or 12 stone five. I realised with some horror that I would not have made the weight. We're talking light-heavyweight here.

The fact is, I'm too fat to fight Joe Calzaghe. And I'm five feet six. A narrow escape for Joe then, I'll have to take on Lennox ...

I blame Red Bull. At each Grand Prix they put up a huge two-tier structure known as The Energy Station. Sundry hacks and marketing types can go and fill their faces with a selection of delectable dishes prepared by gourmet chefs.

Superbly prepared meat, fish and pasta is served on dinky little square dishes. You are meant to savour it. But of course you end up going back three or four times and sampling it all. And then there's pudding and, if you're indisciplined, or French, there's wine ...

It's fabulous, but Red Bull clearly accepts a degree of culpability when it comes to turning Stan Laurel into Oliver Hardy.

Dismantling the structure for the last time in 2007, they noticed that the upper platform - the load-bearing bit - had bowed under the weight of the world's media. And so, in Barcelona, they arrived with a set of scales. The plan was you jump on, register your embarrassment, and then do so again at Monza, and see how much you have gained.

It does, of course, lead to impromptu weight-loss contests between fatties, and of course I have fallen into the trap against fellow Autosport.com columnist Adam Cooper.

Ex-F1 Racing editor Matt Bishop proved over the winter that it can be done. Faced with the prospect of leaving the ranks of journalism and heading off to PR, he knew was going to have to sport McLaren's tight-fitting Lycra race gear. He promptly dropped more than three stone, an inspiring effort!

There's no excuse really. Yes, we get up early and work strange hours but the F1 paddock really does have pretty much everything. You can have a fresh fruit breakfast at Ferrari and everywhere there are people at the top of their game, including dieticians and fitness gurus. There's even a track to run round, and people do. The only thing lacking is personal willpower ...

Standing on the upper tier of the Energy Station at Istanbul and surveying the scene, I was struck by the incongruity of this fabulous, gleaming, inch perfect show.

The Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul © LAT

At the end of the day you jump into your hire car and head down deserted, freshly tarmaced roads away from the circuit. This was obviously all part of the F1 build programme for a race that first ran at Istanbul Park in 2005.

Most people still fly into Ataturk airport on the European side and stay in central Istanbul. That means a trip across the Bosphorous Bridge. At busy times it can be 90 minutes or more each way. Four days in a row, this gets tedious. And so this year we took an Easyjet into Sabiha Gokcen on the Asian side, and found a hotel within about 25 minutes of the circuit.

Apart from that last bit I mentioned, what you get is dust, pot holes, craters, more dust and stray dogs. Road discipline is arbitrary and generally he who is fastest and heaviest is king. English is notable by its absence and it strikes you as the kind of place you don't want to have an accident.

Of course, inside the F1 bubble that is Istanbul Park, everything is first class, but stray dogs outnumber spectators ten to one. You do wonder how people can talk about alternating France and Britain so we can have more races in such places. Yes, I know times change and it's about the bottom line, and it's still a first rate show, but where's the soul?

On Sunday morning, in the middle of the GP2 race, a couple of dogs somehow got onto the circuit. One unfortunate animal, running down the back straight. was passed on the left by Mike Conway at about 160mph.

The startled animal was looking across with a 'what the hell was that?' expression, when it was collected by Bruno Senna, who had been drafting Conway and was totally unsighted as Conway jinked left. Senna's right front wheel collected the dog, which would have known very little about its fate.

Bruno was less than impressed and still clearly upset when he jumped out of his trashed car at the pits. He was simultaneously unlucky and hugely fortunate. It was, after all, just a motor race. The circumstances of hitting the dog square on and having it come back over the nose section do not bear thinking about. Something not lost on Bruno's watching mother, Ayrton's sister.

You also had to have sympathy for iSport boss Paul Jackson, who set off to race control to find out what to do about an insurance claim ...

Turkey got into hot water in 2006 for letting the wrong politician onto the podium. At the last minute, the Turks let Mehmet Ali Talat, the Cypriot president of Northern Cyprus, a state recognised only by Turkey, present the winner's trophy to Felipe Massa.

Neil Horan invades the track during the 2003 British Grand Prix © LAT

The FIA viewed this very seriously, feeling that the appearance of a leading political figure from an unrecognised state compromised their political neutrality. They jointly fined the Turkish sporting authority (TOSFED) and the race-organising MSO $5 million.

Silverstone was lambasted for letting an Irish nutter go for a jog down the Hangar Straight in the middle of the British Grand Prix in 2003, which rather spooked Mark Webber.

The Aussie, a man who manages to stay supremely fit despite his proximity to the Red Bull Energy Station, does so partially by going running with his dogs. As a dog man, Webber was unhappy at what happened in Istanbul and if he had a straight choice between reducing the canine or Irish lunatic population, the Paddys would undoubtedly be a man down.

As Peter Sauber said in defence of Silverstone five years ago: "When a man sets fire to himself on the streets of Paris, nobody blames Paris ..."

But if the politician warranted $5 million, what will the Turkish cop for an incident that could have killed someone? Let's hope some of it goes towards some spare parts for Paul Jackson and some tranquilisers for Bruno's mum.