Italy Fermata 12: Monza

tl;dr: beating the rush for the grand prix

I was a month early for the actual Grand Prix, but I made it to Monza. The Autodromo Nazionale Monza.

To get to the race track (when there is no race on and you are without a car) requires trains, buses and many steps. Get to Milan Lambrate, and find the train that goes towards Saronno, Monza is only a couple of stations out. Once you get there, grab bus Z221 (though getting a ticket can be tricky without an Italian cell number and there not being paper tickets). So you just wing it. Then, after going through most of the town, you get off in the middle of a random suburb. The only thing that seems to indicate there is a historic race track nearby is a billboard with sun drenched photos of race cars and races from nearly a century ago. You walk down a quiet road, past a row of residential houses, until you see fencing that separates you from a park. Past the gate, you keep walking and walking, eventually you are at the back of the grandstand. You can’t really see the track. As you walk through a tunnel, you realise that the starting grid is right above your head. You are now in the paddock, the pit building is on the right, you can look left and if you tiptoe above the fence you can just make out a bit of the back straight that is between Ascari Chicane and the modern Parabolica.

When I was small I liked cars. In a calm way. Comparatively. I did really like formula 1 for some reason, the cars looked so elegant, sleek, and logically colourful. In my single digit years, I had a little pedal car that was like a red formula one, and thanks to the Austria-Hungarian design of my grandma’s flat above the Sarajevo brewery, I could get up to a max speed of 2km/hr in the long passageway. I could have been a racing contender, had my sister not decided to stand on the front left wheel during a pit-stop and then hit her head on the green couch. She survived, with a small scar above her eyebrow. In Addis, I remember pressuring my dad to go to one of his friend’s houses who had Dstv (satellite TV) so we could catch a bit of the race. The starting grid looked like a box of colour pencils on wheels. But the first time I tried to drive a car, I managed to reverse our Toyota Corolla with the door open so that it got in the way of a tree and couldn’t close anymore. After the war was over, and we went back to Sarajevo, and Sunday would find us at my grandad’s orchard, I would be the only one parked in front of the tv watching Schumi own all the tracks. But in the same summer, I would be driving a Mitsubishi Pajero on the family road trip and blow the engine just outside Kroonstad. A few years later I wouldn’t pay attention to the flashing oil light in a VW Chico and repeat the same outcome. That same year my sister went to the F1 Grand Prix in Montreal and sent me videos of cars zooming by where she was sitting. Flashes of colour. Closest I got to F1 was getting a Logitech steering wheel and pedals and hooking it up to the F1 2019 game and a projector. And racing against the computer with infinite instant replays for all the spins and crashes.

Now I am at my first ever visit to a F1 race track. I just can’t see the track. On the website they say they offer a drive around the track or even the ability to bike on it - but not today, not with asphalt being redone ahead of the race in a month (and Brad Pitt’s motion picture filming in one of the pit garages). Best I could do was sign up for a tour of the public section of the pit building - press room, control room, & podium. The end of July sun was blazing. But many people gathered, they had to split us in three groups of 20, each with a different guide. As we started walking through the parking lot where all the giant motor homes will go, it dawned on me that these people were here for the same reason I was.

These F1 fans, some families, mostly from Europe from what I could tell, some very British, definitely a Polish group of young men who kept harassing the guide about how good Robert Kubica was and if he would have been world champion had it not been for that rally injury. Meanwhile the guide is trying to tell us about the history of the track and what happens on Grand Prix weekend. I found myself getting very annoyed at these other F1 fans who came on my tour. And they were really not that annoying, apart from the persistent Kubica fan club. But I was somehow expecting to be all alone on this pilgrimage. Did I want to explore it solo? In what world was I expecting that I would have the whole race track for myself?

I tend to watch all the F1 races solo. I have been doing so for most of my life. There are a few people I might talk about it later, but I never watch with a group. A watch party? Not a thing for me. I always feel a bit outside the crowd when it gets passionate, I can’t get into it. Am I stopping myself from feeling the excitement so I don’t have to deal with the disappointment if who I support doesn’t win? I try to stay objective (only exception was the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix of 2021). The end result of this solo pursuit is I don’t know the community. Sure I see other fans on TV, I know they exist. But I am not at the race.

And after all these years my relationship with F1 has been quite private. And now here is a small selection of F1 fans, a community with the shared interest, and I am not vibing with them. I don’t even know them, but I don’t like that they are here. Another way to explain it is to compare it with music. Like when you have a favourite song. The one that speaks to your soul, and you put it on repeat, and you spend hours and days singing it alone in your house or car, letting it build a relationship with you. Then you are lucky that the artist is coming to your side of the world, you go to the concert and the song plays. When everybody in the arena starts singing the song, you realise the song is really not yours, as everybody else has built their own relationship. And you have to decide whether you join them in this communal private reconnection or just go home crying “IT WAS MY SONG AND EVERYBODY ELSE RUINED IT.” Okay maybe that is a bit extra, but the song was never yours.

As we walked through the building, through the control room and the press room, I realised that I was not present so much. I was thinking more about getting the tour done and getting back on the train. That was definitely a bit extra.

We got onto the roof of the paddocks. Finally I could see the main straight, from the Parabolica to First Variante. The real life scale of it is colossal. The main straight was wide, and forever long. It couldn’t have stretched out more. I look around and all I see are trees and the race track. It stretches beyond the horizon. I wonder what it must be like to watch the cars swing out on your left, where the Parabolica is, and keep conquering the pavement down the straight. Then I realise I have seen that. From my mental garage, I try to recall all the images I had captured from watching this straight on TV (or on the projector). Then I try to blow it up onto my current three dimensions, overlay the cars in my mind on to this empty straight in front of my eyes. It is silent now, apart from the noise of the various languages of the tour group participants, but with that transposition also comes that sound of the engine. The F1 cars are on the straight in front of me, coming closer, louder then flashing and whizzing past. Then getting smaller and smaller as they close in to the First Variante, where I see them almost pause and change direction, right and left, through the chicane and then out of sight beyond the trees.

Still on that roof, traveling in my mind - I am here now, in this space with no race going on. My brain has assembled all the fragments of images of a race that took place right here at some point, and jumbled them up with all the computer game driving that took me down this very straight. Standing on the roof, alone from the tour group, I keep superimposing those images of cars on the main straight and dare myself to feel a bit of excitement at witnessing and feeling a flash of a Grand Prix at Monza.

Maybe the empty race track is enough.