Red Bullseye - Imola

“It feels like coming home,” said an FIA official on his first day in the Imola paddock. And so it did to the majority of Formula 1 people, assuming they have spent more than about five years working in the sport. Creatures of habit, they feel the new venues like Bahrain and Malaysia just don’t have the emotion or charisma of the older European circuits.

The Imola circuit is like a lovely old house that’s been badly maintained, with some areas – like the toilets – virtually neglected completely. The paddock had been slightly extended for last weekend and Red Bull is partly to blame for that, along with other teams who have now produced giant “motorhomes” as there simply was not enough room to fit these new palaces into the previous space. That’s not to say the area behind the pits is any better than it used to be, with an awkward triangular shape, tapering to a point at the far end. This means that motorhomes don’t necessarily line up behind their team trucks. Facing the longest walk were members of the MF1 team, as they had a new and very strange looking hospitality unit that was a good half kilometre from their garage. The predominantly male workers in the paddock did not seem to mind, as MF1 had employed some of the prettiest catering staff, who had to tackle the journey up and down several times a day, thus causing a bit of a diversion. The team had clearly been able to warn its drivers before the weekend that they faced some long walks, as Christijan Albers turned up with a motorised skateboard to commute from one end to the other.

It’s not just the trucks and motorhomes that get bigger with the passing years. You also have the journalists. No, they don’t physically get bigger as individuals, but there are more of them than had ever been catered for when the circuit buildings first went up. The media room is really tiny and to make matters worse, as this was the first race of the year in Europe, the usual hardcore of regular F1 writers was swelled by those who never venture outside the old continent. The guys who look after Red Bull Racing’s wheels and tyres are now on first name turns with almost every one of those journalists, as the stairs to the Media Centre were squeezed in alongside our trucks.

Another unusual factor about the venue for the San Marino GP is that at times, it seemed as though half the world was sneezing. The paddock backs onto a small river, the banks of which are lined with trees that, at this time of year, are heavy with a very strong pollen and allergic reactions left a lot of people with runny noses and watery eyes.

Now, all this is about to change and along as the future of the San Marino Grand Prix is assured for the next few years, then the bulldozers are due to move in within the next few months to produce a brand new circuit designed, inevitably, by Hermann Tilke, the German architect responsible for the majority of new tracks on the calendar. Let’s hope he finds some way to leave the sneezing trees and other idiosyncrasies alone.