With Austin being six hours to the west of the prime meridian, the deadlines that an F1 journalist faces at the United States Grand Prix are much shorter than for races that happen in the east, where one has extra time to get everything done. This means that the pressure is on, with some forced to write reports as the race develops, in order to hit deadlines back home.

We crashed out our e-magazine GrandPrix+ in a little over six hours and then headed back to our hotel, stopping to buy remarkably unhealthy (and unappetising) food at a garage on the way home. The rest of the F1 circus might be dancing at Pete’s Piano Bar (or wherever) but we worked through until dawn and then on to breakfast time. It was brutal, but a visit to the local café in Austin (our hotel doesn’t have one) usually perks us up on the day after the Grand Prix.

It is a weird and wacky place where a very thin man called Daisy wanders around in multi-coloured clothing and a pork pie hat, taking orders for tofu, vegetable and nutritional yeast scrambles, served with hemp seed patties, and sweet potato hash, rather than the traditional corned beef version. They even do weird stuff with pork bellies and scrambled eggs. But this is Austin and Austin is meant to be weird. You expect the unexpected. So what if your bartender has purple hair and a psychology degree? Who cares that on an election map the vast majority of Texas is Republican red, with just an island of Democratic blue around Austin. The people of Austin, Texas, pride themselves on being different and years ago, a local business alliance adopted the slogan “Keep Austin Weird”. It was perfect.

But then, let’s face it, F1 is not exactly crammed with non-weird people, so Austin is a very popular venue. In my green notebook one of the first notes reads “258,000 over the three days”, which was the crowd figure, slightly down on last year, but still a very acceptable number. This is really important in Texas because the State Government needs to justify its annual grant to the Circuit of the Americas and so there is pressure on the track to hit big targets. And, after trying with F1 alone, COTA reached out (don’t you hate that expression) to the world of music for help, shipping in Taylor Swift last year and Justin Timberlake this year to bump up the numbers and to try to generate new fans from their followers. Bobby Epstein, the CEO of COTA, says that he wants the race weekend to become more of a music festival, but still centred on the Grand Prix.

This is a bit odd. In early October, Austin has a huge music festival called as Austin City Limits, which brings in 450,000 spectators over two three-day weekends. Having another music festival a week after this makes no sense at all, and adds to the argument that perhaps COTA really ought to look for a deal to run the race back-to-back with Montreal in June, and let Mexico become twinned with Brazil. This makes a lot of sense because in the autumn in the US the competition for live TV viewers is intense, with the mighty NFL and the NASCAR Play-Offs all happening at the same time, not to mention college football, which is huge.

Austin claims to be the “Live Music Capital of the World”, and perhaps it is, but then one can never be sure because the baseball world has a World Series that only allows US teams to play… It seems that people think the world ends when the US reaches the oceans on either side, and that there is nothing out there beyond the horizon. This is one of the reasons that F1 has struggled in the United States, because sport is so very foreign and people from Kansas City don’t really know who to cheer for. F1 is still what the Americans might call “a gourmet item”, which means it is foreign, expensive and rather exotic. In culinary terms that would be foie gras aux truffes. A few folk like it (some say its a criminal offence because some people do nasty things to ducks), but a lot of others are quite happy with NASCAR, the motorsport equivalent of burger and fries.

Trying to turn F1 into a popular sport is not going to be the work of a moment, but now that it is American-owned and NASDAQ-listed, things are beginning to change to get Americans excited. In Austin the Formula One group decided to try a little NASCAR-style show business, with some old buffer called Michael Buffer from the world of boxing, introducing the drivers with that unique way they do things over here. The F1 stars emerged on to the grid on a red carpet from a tunnel spewing dry ice and the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders jiggling about within their upholstery. F1 fans, being a conservative lot, seem not to have much liked this, judging by the ranting and raving on social media. Frankly, I am all for a bit of glitz and jiggle. I went to a rugby game not so long ago in Paris and they used flame-projectors to get the atmosphere buzzing. And it worked… I’ve also seen that done in the elegant gardens at Versailles, which one might think should only have string quartets. There is a place for razzmatazz in any activity, if you want to keep the people happy. One doesn’t often read quotes from the Roman poet Juvenal in motor racing publications, but what people want is panem et circenses (bread and circuses). So let’s not be snobbish and give it to them.

“I think it was amazing,” said Lewis Hamilton, a man who is not averse to bling and kitsch, after the race. “It was great to see something different. For many many years, the whole 10 years of my F1 career, it’s been the same old boring thing on the grid. I think this one was just much more like an NFL game – which is exciting, with the fireworks and everything.”

There is a note in the green book that says that most of the drivers were looking self-conscious and what was missing from the pre-race show was sufficient energy from the participants. Add a little of that and the whole thing will be a great deal better.

Having former US President Bill Clinton and Usain Bolt on the grid along with a bunch of other stars from different walks of life can only be seen as a good thing, but if you think that this is all a bit over the top, allow me to quote a preacher saying a prayer not long ago as part of the pre-race ceremonies at a NASCAR race: He praised the Lord for “mighty racing machines”, for Fords, and Chevrolets, Dodges and Toyotas. He even praised the Lord for “Sunoco racing fuels” and rounded it all off with thanks for his own “smoking hot wife” and that well-known religious exhortation: “boogity, boogity, boogity, Amen…” which I am told means that it is time to go racing.

F1 has a long way to go before it gets “too American”… although having a mechanical bull in the paddock was an interesting leap in that direction. I am sure that some F1 tried this, but I never saw it in action because F1 people already have plenty of other ways to fall on their faces…

Ask Ferrari.

The World Championship stayed alive for another week and there was controversy over whether or not the FIA Stewards are numbskulls for having ruined Max Verstappen’s fantastic charge to third place, by penalizing him. The rules say that he did wrong, but lots of people think that there are times when, for the good of the cause, such things should not be applied. Admittedly, that sows the seeds for troubled waters, but in this modern age there really ought to be a way to keep the drivers off the track limit lines. The old school in the F1 paddock says that walls should be built, but it is clear that Jean Todt and the Zebra Crossing Brigade would consider this to be dangerous. So perhaps there should be some kind of electronic system which would cut horsepower if the drivers went off the GPS-limited race track.

Oddly enough, they probably wouldn’t do it…

Max’s drive was a thing of wonder and he also won the prize in Austin for springing the biggest surprise when it was announced that he has extended his Red Bull contract until the end of 2020. This was not expected at all because everyone thought (including the teams concerned) that Max would leave Red Bull at the end of 2018 in order to join either Ferrari or Mercedes. By agreeing to stay with Red Bull until 2020, Max had done a number of things: he is in a team where he is happy and is still developing his talents. He is earning a lot of money (rumoured to be around $15 million a year), but that is going to go up significantly now, with the suggestion being that he will make $30 million a year in 2019 and 2020. This may be a very clever move because the advent of budget caps in F1 (which are coming) will mean that driver salaries are going to be affected and so doing a deal in advance of this means that Max is likely to bank more… By the time he comes on to the market again, he will still only be 23, while Hamilton and Vettel will be getting up to retirement age. This means that Max will not have to accept any kind of compromises over driver status, as is the case for the current Ferrari and Mercedes “number twos”.

There has been a lot of talk in F1 circles about the new ideas that Liberty Media is developing, with stories about two-day race meetings and so on. This does not sound very logical given that their plan is to try to develop week-long festivals around each race. Obviously there is some resistance to increasing the number of events AND increasing the length of each one, but the best solution to that would seem to be to restrict the number of events, make them bigger and better and charge the cities more for them…

I am told that the engine rules for 2021 are now pretty much done and will be presented at the end of the month, prior to being dusted by the FIA in December. It seems that there is broad agreement which will see the 1.6-litre V6 formula continuing, but with very significant changes to the hybrid and associated systems, many of which will be standardized, in an effort to reduce the costs involved. Teams will be allowed to buy and sell certain of their technologies, but the number of so-called listed parts will remain in place. It is expected that the sport will try to expand to have 12 teams, 24 cars.

Of course, there will be implications of all of this and the major push at the moment is towards putting in place a budget cap, which is expected to go before the F1 Strategy Group in the first week of November. This will propose a top limit of $150 million, reducing over time to $100 million. This will affect a number of the big teams, but will also make F1 much more attractive to other manufacturers. It will also mean that it will be a lot easier for teams to become profit centres and, as a result, their value will grow exponentially. We also expect Liberty to propose that all the teams get the same share of the revenues, allowing a small amount more for those who are more successful than others. What is likely to follow all of this, is the argument that teams no longer need as much of the revenues as previously and that the payments should be reduced, not to become the profit margin on the NASDAQ, but rather to be invested so that the sport can go where it wants to go, and not where it has to go. Thus, for example, if F1 wants to go a specific city and needs money to make that happen, this money could come from a new central fund created for that purpose. The goal, of course, would be to increase the revenues by building up the races.

There is a note in the green book about New York, one of the primary targets for a race. This notes that things may start happening more quickly once the mayoral elections are done on November 7. Bill de Blasio, the current mayor, is expected to win a significant victory…

There is a lot going on in the TV world as well, with Liberty Media keen to get switched over to direct-to-consumer coverage as quickly as possible, rather than using TV companies (effectively middle men) to provide the money. The potential rewards of such a move have been highlighted by the recent successes of Netflix and other such “over the top” services. For the moment, the sport is still working with broadcasters, but it is beginning to become clear that they are going to be less interested to pay for the rights if they see the sport becoming a rival. This is why no deal was possible with NBC for 2018 and why F1 coverage is switching to ESPN/ABC. This deal is clearly only a stop-gap solution and from what I hear ESPN/ABC will simply take Sky F1’s coverage. A similar deal has just been done in radio, with Liberty-owned Sirius XM internet radio having done an F1 deal to broadcast races live, using commentary provided by the BBC’s 5 Live. Liberty is expected to put together its own content and commentary teams for the planned streaming services.

Another note in the book suggests that we are about to get some surprises in Formula 2, with McLaren’s rising star Lando Norris tipped to be joining Carlin, which is not currently involved in the series. This means that the Prema Racing drives in F2, or at least one of them, is still available…