Mark Hughes: F1's Inside Line

If you didn't know better you'd assume Sitges was just another pleasant Spanish seaside resort (below, right). But back in 2000 I knew better.

I knew the old monster was still here somewhere, dormant but not dead. I didn't know exactly where it was, but I'd seen it from the sky, knew I could find it. I asked in the tourist office where at first I got blank faces, then another lady trying to explain to me how to get to the Formula 1 track in Barcelona and pointing out that I'd missed the race, that it was yesterday.

Sure, I'd missed the race, but not by a day. I'd missed it by 77 years and it wasn't in Barcelona, it was right here. A man came from another office out back, there was a discussion with the lady as they glanced over towards me.

The man nodded reassuringly, he would take control, she shouldn't worry. He knew what I was asking about, he told me, though no one ever came here to find out. He drew out a little map, showed me the road I should take out of the town and the sharp right I should take after the bridge.

I must've driven that hired Clio past the little dirt track after the bridge half a dozen times looking for something more obvious before I gave it a go. The ruts were deep, the little car grounding out in first gear many times.

For sure this track was going nowhere, was about to dump me in the middle of a field or in someone's backyard. It was a savagely sunny day out here in the Spanish nothingness, so hot and languid that even the crickets couldn't be bothered to chirrup.

Then I rounded a bend - and there it was. A huge wall of stone maybe 100-feet high smack in front of me - the east banking of the almost mythical Sitges-Terramar track. Its scale sort of gave you a fright, so sudden had it loomed out of that barren rural scene.

I stopped for a few moments to take it all in. The banking looked all there, still perfectly intact. Over to the left was a tunnel to the infield. I ventured through it but once on the other side stopped in my tracks. To the left was a private house, obviously occupied. I didn't want to be invading their privacy.

I turned the car around and went back out, parked, got out and walked away from the house. At a distance I clambered up through the undergrowth onto the track itself, walked up to that banking, then climbed to the top of it, way, way up high. Up on the rim there you weren't far short of 90 degrees to the flat back straight off in the distance.

The garden of the house ran onto that straight where in the 1923 Spanish Grand Prix the Sunbeam of Albert Divo and the Miller of Louis Zborowoski thundered down inches apart as they fought for the win, averaging around 97mph over the lap - faster than that year's Monza race.

Remarkably, it's all still there, grass growing through the gaps in the concrete, bushes crowding the track's edge, but in generally great nick given its age. A kiddie's tricycle and plastic tractor now stood on that track, discarded where they'd last been used, probably just a few minutes ago.

Across on the infield were buildings housing farm machinery. They looked like they may once have been racing garages and faded painted lettering could still just

be made out. Might once they have had team names upon them? Looking beyond, there was the other straight and

off in the distance the opposite banking to this one. It's like they walked out and shut the door after the last race and left it untouched ever since. Sitting in solitude up there with only the ghosts, the contrast to the full-on intensity of the previous day's modern grand prix, the huge media attention, the slick show, the gaudy colours, it's impossible to feel there's any historical connection between the two events.

Sitges-Terramar never hosted another grand prix after that inaugural event. The organisers got into financial difficulties: the track had cost a lot of money to build and the teams were unsympathetic to their plight when it looked like they weren't going to get their promised start and prize money. There were even stories that they seized the takings - or what was left of them after one of the guys taking money on the gate disappeared with the loot.

A year before that race, Monza hosted its first Italian Grand Prix. Just six years after the Sitges race Monte Carlo hosted the first Monaco Grand Prix. Both, of course, are with us still, and in very recognisable form. It seems not possible that they could be contemporaneous with Sitges, this dinosaur from a dusty, very dim and distant past. There's

a photograph of a youth sitting about where I was on the banking - legs dangling over the track as the race was going on! If he's still alive he'll be around 100 years old. Probably no one there that sunny day, that day when the king's car was escorted to the track, when thousands crowded in for the occasion, is around now.

One day soon modern F1 tracks in Europe might face a similar fate to Sitges. What will Magny-Cours look like a decade from now? Will Silverstone still exist? Will Imola echo only to ghosts and birdsong? The cost of them hosting grands prix could put them out of business just like it did Sitges.

But the reason will be very different. It won't be the cost of building the track. It will be the cost of moving F1 too far from its heartland. Bernie's telling us he doesn't see any way back onto the calendar for Imola. This is the last year of Magny-Cours. Instead he's talking of night races in the far more lucrative (for him) climate of Singapore - in order to have a race that better fits in with European tv schedules.

I've got a great idea about how to make a race fit in with European schedules - have it in Europe! During the day. As a bonus you get free use of daylight - rather than going completely against the green image the FIA is trying to introduce to the sport by drawing on the immense amount of candle power required to give 80 per cent daylight during the night to a three-mile track.