The Mystery of São Paulo

In the Parc de Montjuic atop a hill overlooking the magnificent Catalan City of Barcelona, there sits a delightful building which is the home of the Joan Miró Museum. There is a terrace on the rooftop of this building which, on a bright day, offers a beautiful vista stretching from Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia Basilica to the west and the Mediterranean to the east. It was here that Alfredo Cipriano had hastily arranged to meet Fernando Alonso this week while the latter was en route from the penultimate F1 race of 2012 to the last one in Brazil. Upon meeting one another the two men embraced silently. Cipriano then stepped back and took a long hard look at his friend. His hair was slicked back in the manner beloved of southern Italian gentlemen of a criminal persuasion. His eyes were bloodshot and his lips dry.

“You need not say anything to me, Fernando,” Cipriano said at length, “I understand everything. Now, come with me and let me show you some of the beautiful things contained in this marvellous place.” As they walked down the stairs, Alonso noticed that the big man’s shoulders were unusually drooping and he seemed to hang his great head. Cipriano’s demeanour was one of a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. Presently, they stood before a bright canvas painted by Miró in 1940 and entitled The Escape Ladder.

Cipriano spread his arms wide and began to explain. "Europe was in political turmoil in 1940. Worse still, the world was at war. But Miró found a way of escaping from the prevailing political climate and the war by the use of his art. He produced paintings which were alive with birds and stars and strange creatures. They evoked a sense of freedom and energy and transported you to a beautiful fantasy world. Unlike his other Surrealist friends like Salvador Dali, who frightened you, or René  Magritte who befuddled you, Miró charmed you. I have always loved his work. More so because I had the privilege of knowing Miró personally during the sunset of his alluring life and I was sufficiently advantaged to have been present here when this elegant museum was opened in 1975.

“Whatever happens on Sunday, don’t lose heart. The enlightened forces are behind you. Their effectiveness may have been dulled this year because of an error I made in concentrating a little too much on your English schoolboy friend but the secrets I learned from my travels in the Levant many years ago are still with me. One of them was to seek solace from images such as the splendid one before us.”

“Relax, Alfredo,” Alonso said with a smile, “we never give up. And don’t forget, whatever else it may not be, Ferrari is still an Italian team.”

Meanwhile, in Heppenheim, a small German town an hour’s drive away from Frankfurt, a frowsy, middle-aged German lady was dusting a teenage boy’s bedroom for the fourteenth time that day. The teenager who had once occupied the room had long since left to live on his own, but she still kept his room as if in expectation of his imminent return. As she dusted the posters the boy had on his wall, her hand trembled when it came to the poster of Michael Schumacher as Ferrari world champion. She stepped back slightly and shut her eyes reverently. 

Then something occurred which startled her. She remembered the other task she had performed earlier and let out a out a little shriek. As quickly as she could, she scuttled out of the bedroom and raced down the stairs to the kitchen. It was too late. Thick smoke was billowing out of the oven. “Scheisse!” she screamed. When she extracted the smoking baking tray, she found to her horror that the cake she had lovingly prepared that morning was burned to a cinder. “Das kann nicht wahr sein (I don’t believe it)!“ she screamed.

Shortly afterwards, her portly husband, Norbert, came rushing in. “Was ist los (what’s going on)?“ he demanded. Through clenched teeth she explained that the Himbeer Streuselkuchen (raspberry crumble cake), Sebastian’s favourite, whih she had been preparing in readiness for his visit that afternoon was ruined. Norbert Vettel looked again at his wife. She was a bundle of nerves. Her eyes were vacant, her hair unkempt and she looked extraordinarily pale.

“I think you should sit down for a little while, Heike.“

“Why are you telling me to sit down? Sit down yourself!“

“Come now, darling, I’ll make some tea for us and we can relax a little.“

“I don’t want tea. Leave me alone!“

The cauldron-like atmosphere of the Vettel family home was not typical. But then how many mothers had been on the brink of seeing their son becoming only the third man in history to win 3 Formula One world championships in a row? On Sunday evening in Sao Paulo, Sebastian Vettel could join the ranks of Juan Manuel Fangio and Michael Schumacher in the history books. If he failed to win the title this year, that particular record would never be one he could claim. With his thirteen point lead over Fernando Alonso, the odds were weighted heavily in his favour. And yet...

Sao Paulo was a worrying place. It was difficult for Heike or Norbert Vettel to imagine a place less sanitised than Heppenheim. In place of clean, well lit orderly streets on which not the slightest scrap of rubbish was to be found, there were vast, teeming slums in the shadow of forbidding skyscrapers. Instead of tidy German people who smiled and wished one a good day when they chanced upon you at the baker’s, Sao Paulo had huge gangs of knife-wielding teenagers with scars on their faces, bandanas on their heads and gaps in their jaws where teeth had once belonged. Voodoo hung in the air. If Sebastian’s parents had been asked to select a place in which they imagined their beloved precious young son making history, Sao Paulo was not it.

Notwithstanding everything, a 3rd consecutive world championship was a 3rd consecutive world championship whether won in Sao Paulo, Hockenheim or Timbuktoo. The weight of thinking about this was proving so intense, so harrowing, so gut wrenching, that Mrs Vettel could not function any more as a normal human being.

History awaits us on Sunday night. Every driver would love to win three consecutive championships. Perhaps more important than that is the overwhelming significance of the Ferrari name to Formula One. It is an often forgotten fact that every driver would give almost anything to be a Ferrari world champion. To have won the world championship in Ferrari scarlet is a far more important achievement than any statistic in a world record book. That also is at stake in Sao Paulo.

There is a big weekend ahead...

Enjoy Brazil!

Gitau

22 November 2012

Abu Dhabi upsets everything

The stewardess bearing a tray laden with glasses of champagne and orange juice for the refreshment of passengers sitting in first class on the flight from Abu Dhabi to Barcelona, approached the very large gentleman in seat 1A, bent her knees and leaned her tray gently towards him. “A drink, sir?” she said gently. The gentleman, whose eyes had been shut until this point, opened and them and glowered at the hapless lady. She drew back in  horror and with a slight gasp scuttled back to the galley to compose herself. Alfredo Cipriano’s eyes, normally green and mystifying, were now frighteningly purple. For the remainder of the journey, Cipriano kept his eyes shut and his brow knitted. He was a troubled man.

Upon arrival at his home, Cipriano bellowed instructions for lunch to be brought up to him in his study. As he waited for his meal, he mused on his surroundings. Cipriano had always maintained a secret admiration for the much despised northern European island nation separated from France by a narrow shipping lane. English authors had always been a source of enlightenment and amusement, and neatly arranged on the vast shelves were volumes of English literature going back many centuries. He particularly enjoyed the works of William Somerset Maugham and dipped into his collection of Maugham’s short stories from time to time. Maugham typically crafted his tales so that the ending came as something of a surprise to his reader, which appealed to Cipriano’s sense of the irregular. Between the high bookshelves in the study were several paintings; in homage to the great author, two, by excellent English painters, were of Maugham himself.

Cipriano’s eyes rested on The Jester, Gerald Kelly’s 1911 portrait of his close friend Somerset Maugham in the poise and attire of the well-heeled English gentleman of the early twentieth century.

 

“You couldn’t have written this one better had you tried, my old friend,” he said aloud. “I crafted this tale so expertly, that even I, master of the enlightened forces, was beguiled.”

Lunch was brought in and he fell to eating from the steaming plates of patatas bravas with chorizo, garlick prawns, fried scallops, sautéed asparagus and spicy chicken livers and gulping thirstily from a large goblet of red wine. While eating, he cast his mind back to the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. It had been a thrilling race, the first part of which had gone exactly to plan. Lewis Hamilton, on course for a certain victory, had suddenly suffered fatal transmission failure and been forced to retire. As he had done on each of the many other mysterious incidents of McLaren unreliability this season, Cipriano had raised his hat in the direction of the McLaren garage. Now, he stuffed his mouth full of some prawns and turned his head to stare at length at the other portrait of Somerset Maugham in his study which stood opposite The Jester. This one, by Graham Sutherland in 1949, depicted a reptilian Maugham in his dotage, leering guilefully at the world.

 

“Had I been thinking like Maugham, as I ought to have when I made my promise to Fernando in May, I would have known that the Englishman against whom I have since marshalled the enlightened forces was the wrong Englishman,” said Cipriano to himself. “The correct target does not drive racing cars, he designs them. The person deserving of a transfer of the burden of ill-luck from Fernando’s shoulders was not Lewis Hamilton, it was Adrian Newey. My plan worked beautifully, but it was the wrong plan. What a fool I have been!”

Cipriano skewered some chorizo, shoved it in his mouth and fell deeply into thought. There was very little time available for any meaningful thing to be done about Adrian Newey – his icons to crafting genius, the cars driven by the Red Bull F1 team, had long left the drawing board and were wreaking destruction on the ground with only

two races left to go – but something needed desperately to be done if Fernando Alonso was to stand any chance of being world champion again. An English genius and a cruel set of circumstances had come together to deliver the worst of all possible outcomes, another Red Bull victory.

At the Yas Marina Circuit on Sunday after the best ever Abu Dhabi Grand prix and the most thrilling race thus far this season, the senior sheikh turned to the sheikh on his left and gave him a knowing nod and wink. This was in turn repeated by each sheikh to his compatriot on his left all the way along the row of sheikhs sitting in the VIP seats.

A little while later, a convoy of white limousines with blacked-out windows snaked its way through the streets of Abu Dhabi to a sumptuous palace on the outskirts of the city. Inside the palace, once his guests had taken their seats, the senior sheikh rose. “My brothers,” the sheikh said solemnly. “They said we were mad. They said we could not understand motor racing. They said Formula One did not belong in Arabia. We Arabs were cursed with too much money and thought we could buy ourselves the sophistication that can only come from hundreds of years of civilisation. After all, we had moved from the camel to the Cadillac in only one generation and could not possibly possess the subtlety to appreciate Formula One. ‘Stupid sheiks’ they called us. Who looks stupid now? This is not the time for words, my brothers.” He turned to face the servants lined up against the wall to his right. “Bring in the meat,” he declared. “Bring in the champagne!”

The sheikh turned to face his guests once more as a wry grin spread across his bearded cheeks. With his arms raised, he cried “bring in the dancing girls. Let’s have a party!”

Meanwhile in a hastily arranged suite at the swankiest hotel he could find in Abu Dhabi, Kimi Raikkonen, accompanied by a large group of merry Formula One drivers, was guzzling vintage champagne straight from the bottle and dancing to a rap tune by Jay-z.

 

After winning an incident-filled Abu Dhabi Grand Prix despite the concerns of his race engineer (who Raikkonen had had to admonish over the team radio: “Leave me alone! I know what I’m doing!”), Raikkonen felt justified in announcing in the loudest voice he could muster “the Ice Man is back!”

Gitau

06 November 2012

PS I am as guilty as anyone about having cast aspersions at the very notion of a race in Abu Dhabi. I find humble pie very difficult to swallow at the best of times, but swallow I must. The 2012 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix was a corker of a race. The circuit design did not do any harm to the race at all and was in many ways responsible for a great many of the overtaking moves we saw. As awful as it is to admit, this was in every way a “traditional” race in the style we had known to grow and love many years ago. So there, I have said it.