We finished off the GP+ e-magazine in the Media Centre in the Hilton Hotel in Baku, at around midnight. We struggled to upload it, for reasons that were not entirely clear. It all seemed to be fine, although there was a confusing message about a problem with a firewall. As I don’t have any firewalls and it all looked to be OK, we headed back to the hotel by which time there were sufficient messages from the world suggesting that all was not well. It was impossible to do anything from the hotel and with little time before I needed to be at the airport, I concluded that it was probably the best place to try from because airport wireless systems tend to be devoid of firewalls. This proved to be a sensible decision and the problem was quickly solved. Apologies for those who struggled to get the magazine for the first few hours. It was beyond my control, as John Malkovich said several times in the movie ‘Dangerous Liaisons’…

In the circumstances I did not have the energy to argue with the taxi driver over whether he should charge me five times the normal fare to get to the airport. Many nations across the world fail to understand that their most important ambassadors are taxi drivers, the first local people most visitors encounter. If they are bandits, then one is wary of a country. I had a ride into town on Thursday for 10 Manats and the return journey was 50 Manats. It is not the money that is important, it is the principle and smart countries, such as Canada, have solved the problem by having a set fare from the airport to the city centre.

The plane left at 05.00 and flew up alongside the Caucasus mountain range, passing to the north of Sochi and then up across the Sea of Azov and up the Dnieper River until it descended into Kiev Borispol Airport. To be honest I was unaware of all of this as I was asleep but I awoke as we landed heavily. In 34 years of travelling it was first international airport I’ve ever been to without a single plane at any gate. It was downright eerie, although it got busy later. I had breakfast and then began typing out the notes from the green notebook. The first thing I spotted were two scrawls, close to one another: the first said ‘Briatore’, the second ‘sewage’. There are some who might argue that the two are related subjects but if the truth be told they both related to the starting grid in Baku. At the back the air smelled bad. It wasn’t burning oil – because the FIA had quietly told Ferrari to stop burning oil as fuel – and in the end the conclusion reached was that the perfume in the air was sewage.

Ah, the glamour of F1…

At the other end of the grid was Briatore, a man who keeps turning up in F1, despite the fact that he was thrown out of the sport some years back for a disgraceful piece of cheating which cost him his job. One does wonder why a NASDAQ-listed media company would want the association with such a person, but then one must also remember that Briatore was the man who brokered the Azerbaijan race contract, for which he receives a substantial commission each year. (Note to self: find country that needs Grand Prix and get $5 million annual commission on deal.)

Briatore was swanning around with President Ilham Aliyev and Vice President Mehriban Aliyeva. The latter has a unique combination of roles that might tickle Donald Trump’s fancy. She is not only the Vice President, but also the First Lady, being married to the President. Still, such things seem to be the norm in Baku, where the race promoter is the also son of the Minister of Sport.

The presidential party (involving flunkies, hangers-on and hitmen) was noted because it seemed to be constantly in the wrong place at the wrong time. The F1 grid is a complicated place and one needs to be alert to the fact that one can easily get run over. This is why passes are restricted to people who know what they are doing – and to a few VIPs who are usually shepherded carefully. I don’t know who was shepherding this presidential flock, but whoever it was managed to get them into the path of an incoming Ferrari and then Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes. The team mechanics are usually pretty good at getting people out of their way, sometimes with a fairly insistent hand on the collar. Fearing an international incident, I snuck up to one of the Mercedes boys and whispered: ‘You want to be a bit careful with this one. He’s the President’ and I expect an MBE in the post at some point for services to international relations…

The serious notes in the green notebook from Azerbaijan begin with a lot of scribbles about Sauber. The words ‘god-awful mess’ are prominent. To be fair to the chairman of the Swiss team, he is not the first person to have come bumbling into F1 thinking he knew all the answers. There are many stories of people who don’t know what they are doing, being advised by the wrong people, and thinking that F1 is easy.

“The skill of being a team principal,” one of the other team principals told me in Baku, “is not what you do right. It is doing everything right. The problems come when you do something wrong”. To a large extent these days, it’s a bit like being the manager of a soccer team. And that’s not good because success in Formula 1 does not happen overnight. It takes time, effort, care, intelligence, management skills and, above all else, passion. To lead a team you need to be a leader. Being a leader requires turning up at more than one in every five Grands Prix. I remember once discussing the question of leadership with another team principal (now long departed) and said that a true leader runs up to the cliff edge and says to his (or her) troops: ‘This way chaps’ and they follow. A poor team principal rushes up, says the same thing and the troops are very polite and say: ‘After you’.

The key point about Sauber is that there is no other team like it and if you don’t understand that, you will fail. It is unique because it’s a family. They have a core of people who stick together no matter what. Peter Sauber, the team founder, came out of retirement and risked his own fortune to look after his people after BMW ditched the team in 2009. Peter did not want to come back but he did it save the team and then he handed it on to the person he chose to be his successor – Monisha Kaltenborn. And to make sure that she was effective he gave her a third of the shares in the team. No-one would ever suggest that Peter was being poltically-correct. He chose Monisha because she was the right person to do the job. It was really interesting in Baku to see just how many top people in the sport were shocked by what had happened at Hinwil. Monisha has proved to be smart and took the team from a very weak place in 2010 to seventh in the Constructors’ in 2011 and sixth with four podiums in 2012. However, money is the key in F1 and if there isn’t enough of it the teams weaken. Getting international people to move to Hinwil is really hard. In the end the best option for the team was to be sold to investors who would leave the management in place. With a bit of money Kaltenborn began by investing in international talent and negotiated a Honda engine deal with money attached. This basically meant that the team would be safe until the next round of contractual negotiations with the Formula One group in 2020.

It was smart work. A second Honda might not sound great, but it is really not that different from a third-string Ferrari and if there was money coming with the deal and no engine costs, it was a no-brainer. The team was safe and there was potential to move forward. The key element was to get a good technical director and in this respect Kaltenborn made an unusual choice, picking up Jorg Zander, who had been out of the F1 game since disappearing from Brawn GP in 2009. Prior to that he had a curious mish-mash of an F1 career, starting out with Toyota before being hired by BAR in 2003. Two years later he moved to Williams for a few months, then went to Sauber for 15 months before going back Brackley to the team by then called Honda. He stayed for just under two years and departed as Brawn GP (as the team had become) was winning the World Championship. There were rumours at the time he was at Williams that the entire technical staff rebelled and went to Patrick Head to ask for his removal, but that sort of story will never be confirmed by those involved. Whatever the details, the move to Sauber was an odd decision for the team – and it was not really a great surprise when there were whispers that Kaltenborn was looking for someone else. It is not an easy job to fill, because few F1 people want to move to Switzerland and uproot their families. You cannot do any major F1 job if you are flying in and out. Good team principals and technical directors are always in the factory, always on top of the game.

In the end it is fairly clear that Kaltenborn walked because she felt it was impossible to work with the new chairman, an Italian called Pascal Picci. The bone of contention appears to have been the question of technical management. The team issued a statement that said that Kaltenborn and the new chairman had “different views how to operate the company”, which was a very bizarre explanation. Why would a newcomer think that his view on the future might be better than that of a tough and experienced team principal?

I don’t know Picci but what I do know is that he has no experience in F1 and no passion for it. He has said as much in German language interviews. We know that he represents some very wealthy people and they seem to trust him. That’s fine, but then we also know that they are not overly passionate about the sport because otherwise they would have come to more than half a dozen races since taking it over. So the only conclusion one can reach is that the team is a plaything that someone hopes might bring in so cash in the long term. A place to go with some mates when there’s nothing else on at the weekend.

F1 has seen so many similar people over the years and the major fear is that all this will damage the team to such an extent that it will end up on the path to destruction which Manor went down not so long ago. I would hate to see that. Sauber is special. It’s in the wrong place, but they accept that and keep fighting. It’s a family that will do all it can to survive, but it will need an extraordinary person to come in from the outside and get it working properly. In truth, I doubt that person exists because of the nature of the team. It has to be run by an insider, but there are no obvious candidates. Perhaps the problem could be solved by sacrificing the chairman and putting Monisha back in charge. This would obviously steady the ship, but I cannot see that happening at the moment. It is now nearly a week since this all began and there is no sign of a new appointment. This underlines two things: firstly, they were not prepared for Kaltenborn to walk, and secondly, they cannot find anyone else to do the job. That is no surprise because those who understand F1 know that Sauber is different – and trying to change the team is not the right thing to do. There are always people who would take the job if offered, but the word is that those who might be qualified have either turned it down or cannot make up their minds. I wonder if we will have an announcement before Austria. I also wonder how many technical people will leave or be purged in the days ahead.

Despite colliding with one another, the two Sauber drivers both managed to get to the finish with Pascal Wehrlein again scoring points. This should not be seen as the same kind of victory that he achieved in Spain because Baku was a most extraordinary race. I don’t think there has ever been a race in which nine of the 10 F1 teams have scored points (the odd one out being Renault). It really was a case of the last man standing picking up points. McLaren managed to grab two points thanks to Fernando Alonso’s skills, but with Wehrlein having scored four in Spain, Sauber is still ahead. However, I am not sure that this will continue unless we see some serious technical improvement from the team.

The race in Baku was, of course, quite a controversial one and I have to say that I was utterly amazed when Sebastian Vettel was not given a more serious penalty for deliberately driving into Lewis Hamilton. There is no question that he lost his temper, having run into the back of the Mercedes. He pulled out and petulantly drove into Lewis.

If I had been the steward I would given him a one race ban for such behaviour. That was what was merited. It does not matter that it was not a huge hit, what matters was the intention. He is a four-time World Champion, an ambassador for the sport (although in truth he doesn’t do much away from the race tracks), a role model for youngsters and he really ought to be able to control himself. We have seen this before. Last year in Mexico he called FIA Race Director Charlie Whiting a lot of very rude names when he didn’t get what he wanted and was lucky to get away with only having to apologise. But this was worse… Not punishing such an action completely undermines the FIA’s road safety initiatives. Tens of millions of people watched Vettel do what he and the FIA’s lack of reaction.

A good example of not controlling drivers was seen in Baku with the incident between the two Force India drivers. In Canada the team allowed Sergio Perez to get away with some fairly lurid moves against his team-mate. Ocon was gracious, said he now understood the rules, the result was Baku, where the team threw away an armful of points when the two drivers collided.

Force India is, by the way, looking at changing its name soon in order to become “something more generic”. This may be because team owner Vijay Mallya is feeling peeved about the way India is treating him, or it may be because the team has never raised much money with the Indian connection (almost all the sponsors from India having been linked in business to Mallya or to his partner Subrata Roy). A name change will, of course, require a change in the name of the chassis, which some teams will not want to agree to. However, Force India needs only 18 of the 22 votes on the F1 Commission and so some of those objecting might be overruled. No doubt, Mallya and his cohorts will be poring over Roget’s Thesaurus looking for suitable names. The trouble is that lots of good names have been used or have been trademarked elsewhere.

Elsewhere in the notebook are several notes that indicate interesting stories. There is one which reads: ‘McLaren-Merc, not until 2018’, another that says: ‘PRic using Monaco grandstands’ and a third that says: ‘Teams irritated by timetable change’. The first two are fairly self-explanatory, but the third relates to the decision to move qualifying in Austin to the late afternoon, in order for the racing action to be closer to the start of the Justin Timberlake concert.

I kid you not. Lots of the teams think it’s not fair because the big teams will be able to do more to their cars in four hours rather than the usual two, but the Formula One group wants to be nice to fans as well and so have agreed to do this as Austin wants to keep the fans happy.

Finally, there is a page of notes about the supposed new Chinese F1 team. I did some research last week and found that the name of China F1 Racing Team Ltd has been registered in the UK, by a French lawyer. He was actually a lawyer who raced a few years ago in GT events. The plan seems to be something that a man called Christian Kuhn has come up with. He has been working in US motorsport over the years, even running a small NASCAR team at one point for Klaus Graf. It seems that he believes he has found some money from China to create a team along similar lines to Haas F1, by buying in as much equipment as possible and keeping expenses to the minimum. The problem is that there are not many qualified chassis builders out there and Haas has already got Dallara tied up. The only obvious choice would be to go to an F1 team with a sister technology company which could do the work without breaking any rules. McLaren and Williams are the two firms that leap to mind and I hear that the plan was for Williams Advanced Engineering to be commissioned to do the job. The obvious choice of engine these days is Mercedes, although Renault is shopping for customers, but once again the deal was obviously dependent on money.

The word is that the man who would pull all of this together is a Frenchman called Benjamin Durand, who has never been in F1 but did work on the bizarre Lotus F1 track car project called the T125 ,in the days when Lotus was run (into the ground) by Dany Bahar. Durand was also involved with BR Engineering and SMP Racing in sports cars, both of which are funded by the Rotenberg brothers, buddies of Vladimir Putin. He was also involved with a thing called Speed Car, back in 2008. This was an interesting attempt to set up a stock car racing championship in the Middle East and Asia, which failed when the money did not appear.

The F1 circus is fairly dismissive of a team that gets found out about before even applying for an entry and the idea of sounding out engineers, premises and so on, without having an entry is indeed rather bizarre. Starting a new F1 team is not something one does lightly. It takes at least two years before one gets an entry and another two before one starts to earn full prize money. To run a team over that period would cost about $300 million, if one includes set-up costs. And one can buy Force India if you have $300 million…

In F1 circles the only question is: ‘Where’s the money?’ and the word in Baku was that the funding is supposed to be coming from the Chinese company that bought the Milan football club. The problem is that both of Milan’s soccer teams have been acquired by Chinese companies in recent years: AC Milan is owned by an entrepreneur called Yonghong Li, through a company called Rossoneri Sport Investment Luxembourg, while Inter Milan is owned by Suning Sports International.

It would be nice if whichever one is involved is serious – because the sport could use more exposure in China…

… finally on a happy ending note, two F1 fans were delighted to be given access to the Mercedes garage during the weekend. This was the work of Mercedes PR Rosa Herrero Venegas, known as ‘Trouble’, who works to give a number of lucky fans the chance to see more than just the pit lane walk. ‘Trouble’ is smart and trained as a lawyer and is a great example of the unusual people of F1. The fans were being shown Lewis’s car when Graham promptly dropped on bended knee and asked Victoria to marry him. She accepted… We bumped into them a little while afterwards and we all went home with silly smiles on our faces, thinking romantic thoughts. Ahhh…