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.