When we go to Austin, we don’t go downtown much. It’s a great town, but the locals do have a taste for the dollar and that means it is rather expensive, particularly now that the Pound is at parity with the Ruritanian Ringgit. For the last two years I have tried to host an Audience in the city, but I cannot find a venue that is cost-effective because they all want too much money.

Out in the burbs things are a little more sensible and we don’t have to deal with traffic. The circuit is close to the city, but actually out in the country and if you go off the main roads, you end up in places that look amazingly like sets from the 1974 movie “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”. Interestingly, in the course of the weekend, I discovered that the movie was actually filmed in the area and used real houses because there was no budget for sets… Yes, folks, Austin is weird. We had a very weird experience on the Friday evening when we went out to dinner and were curious to see that waitress looked very familiar. In fact, she looked just like the waitress we had had the previous evening, at a completely different restaurant. In the end, we asked if perhaps she had a sister and she replied by explaining that she had two different jobs and we had miraculously managed to eat in two different restaurants on consecutive nights and yet be served by the same waitress…

Anyway, my notebook from Austin has a lot of jottings, including “Gordon Ramsay”, “Luc Besson” (who I spotted on the grid because he was dressed like a man who had just climbed out of a dustbin and was completely out of place) and “Jeff Gordon”. The race had a very high VIP count with film stars and sports people who had come to watch the fun. There were squillionaires aplenty but the only ones I noted down were “Michael Latifi”, one of the richest men in Canada, who was around the paddock a lot. His son races in GP2. There were some very strange absences as well. One would expect to see American wheeler-dealer Zak Brown, for example, and it was astonishing that there was no sign of the Stroll family. But I guess they probably wanted to lay low and not have to answer questions about the future. The word is that Lance Stroll will be confirmed as a Williams driver (alongside Valtteri Bottas) on November 3.

On the way over I spent most of the flight reading “Total Competition, Lessons in strategy from Formula 1”, a new book written by former Williams CEO Adam Parr, which is actually a conversation between Parr and Ross Brawn about strategic thinking. I am not sure I really understand the target audience because it’s not your average racing book, but then it’s not really a business book either. It was fascinating to read some of the insights about F1 but odd to waltz off from time to time into discussions about the philosophies of Sun Tzu, Napoleon Bonaparte and Alexander Svechin. It was also interesting to see that Brawn’s assessment of the problems of Ferrari was almost exactly the same as the recent outburst by former chief engineer Luca Baldisserri who described the team as “a group of frightened people, afraid that they will lose their jobs”.

All the talk about strategy got me thinking about various F1 situations and there was one, in particular, which made no sense at all to me. I was so mystified that I even went to talk to Christian Horner on the subject. What is the strategy of Red Bull, I asked, because I don’t understand. If you want to win World Championships, you cannot easily do it with a customer engine, when there is a factory team among your rivals. It just makes no sense. Christian shrugged and said that there was really no other choice and that they had looked at every possible idea and concluded that they will be most competitive if they stay as a Renault customer until 2020, when there ought to be a rethink of F1 engines and therefore new opportunities. Despite this odd strategy, Red Bull still seems to be able to deliver the goods and indeed there is no-one else looking as thought they might beat Mercedes. Ferrari talks a good game, but never seems to deliver… Anyway, I did hear whispers that Red Bull will soon wow us all by announcing a major sponsorship deal with the US oil company ExxonMobil. This is currently a McLaren sponsor.

McLaren was very much in the gossip in Austin with stories floating around that Ron Dennis, who is chairman of McLaren and F1 team principal, may soon move out of that role. How that is presented to the world will be interesting because Ron deserves a huge amount of respect for what he has achieved. In many ways, McLaren is Ron Dennis, even if it all goes back to Bruce McLaren in the 1960s. Dennis has always argued that best leaders have succession plans and are happy to step back and leave their creations to new generations, but since the removal of Martin Whitmarsh, that has not really happened. Dennis wants to regain control of McLaren… Unfortunately, it hasn’t happened and it seems that the other shareholders are now doing the unthinkable. Dennis is a fighter, of course, and is still trying to find a way to buy out his partners, but at the moment it is not happening. McLaren is also in the rumour mill because there is believed to be a big BP deal up for grabs and McLaren and Renault seem to be scrapping for it. It will be interesting to see how it all unfolds.

The driver market is also very interesting at the moment, not least because several drivers seem to think that they are going to get the second Force India drive. The team has been having a bit of a fashion parade since it became clear that Nico Hulkenberg would be moving on. I hear that a whole string of drivers have been spotted having meetings with Force India, including Magnussen, Jolyon Palmer, Pascal Wehrlein, Esteban Ocon and Felipe Nasr. What is really interesting is that this could end up being a test of clout between the Formula One group and Mercedes.

Let me explain, the choice will be made by team owner (for the moment) Vijay Mallya. But he has a number of problems to overcome. He has the makings of a decent budget for 2017 but more money will not hurt. Out in the market, there is a problem in that Formula 1 really needs a Brazilian driver because of the large TV audiences there and the fact that Felipe Massa is stopping. Brazil, it should be added, is in a bit of a mess at the moment with various scandals and economic trouble, but that is not something that Bernie Ecclestone cares about. His view, apparently, is that Nasr should be at Force India for the good of the sport. The team has enjoyed a great deal of support from Mr E (if you understand my inference there) and so Vijay ought to do what he is told to do. Nasr is a decent driver and has money behind him and Brazil is important. However, the other serious candidate appears to be Esteban Ocon, who is a Mercedes-contracted driver and the word is that Force India owes Mercedes rather a lot of money and it could solve the problem by taking Ocon and getting a discount on the engines (or running him to wipe out some debt). This means that Mallya may find himself caught in the crossfire and the result will indicate who is more powerful…

Drives are running out, of course, and there are more players than there are seats, so someone is going to suffer in the longer term. Danny Kvyat is delighted to have been retained by Red Bull, but right now drivers like Nasr, Palmer, Wehrlein and Magnussen are all feeling a little uncomfortable. I think we will see KMag staying where he is, alongside Hulkenberg at Renault. There is one Sauber that is open and a lot of drivers talking about it. Haas may also have one seat available as Romain Grosjean is staying, but no deal is yet done with Esteban Gutierrez. The team says that it wants the best drivers it can get, but no-one is quite sure who that could be. The word is that Wehrlein might be in the picture. He might also stay at Manor, but that team seems to need more money and so one should watch for Rio Haryanto, reserve driver Jordan King or a well-funded youngster looking to get his hands on a Mercedes engine.

Finally, the Austin weekend proved to be a big success, to a large extent thanks to Taylor Swift. I didn’t see her around the paddock but she held a concert on Saturday night inside the circuit and 83,000 people attended. Now, some of these were definitely race fans, taking advantage of the two-for-one event tickets that were on offer for $150 apiece. A lot of the others were Swift fans, who are largely young ladies and not a group who are overtly keen on F1 cars. Still, some brilliant thinking by the Circuit of the Americas figured out that if you get girls to see a concert, they will convince the menfolk in their lives to go along too, using the race as bait so that everyone will end up happy. The boys might not be too into Swift, and the girls might not be too into F1, but it’s a good compromise and a lot more tickets were sold as a result. The overall three-day crowd figure was up 43,000 on last year and even if some of them did not attend the race, it really does not matter that much because they paid and the fact they paid also means that the circuit can claim more money back from the state of Texas which is committed to funding the event on the basis that it drives economic activity. Clever. In any case, the F1 world will not complain if more young women attend races…

And finally, along similar lines, there are quite a lot of F1 projects on the go in the US at the moment, specifically in California, which is the obvious market for the sport (other than New York City). Chris Pook popped up as usual to see Mr E and he usually has at least two projects on the go at any one time. He is very discreet, but one gets the feeling that F1’s primary target at the moment is Long Beach, where the Indycar contract finishes after 2018. There was some utter fluff being talked elsewhere about Las Vegas (which is and always will be a waste of energy) until the day comes when someone builds a Nurburgring in the hills. That might work, but messing about in parking lots or trying to set up a temporary circuit on The Strip is a total waste on time. People go to Vegas to gamble, drink and get laid, not to watch Siegfried and Roy, Barry Manilow or an F1 race. And the casino owners know this…

There was a project until recently in the hills between San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean, to the south of San Francisco, but that seems to have run out of steam because of permit problems, while I hear whispers of a project out to the east of Los Angeles, in the desert, where there is a lot of Indian land, where permits are not essential and where the inhabitants are always looking for ways to bring people in so that they can build casino resorts and such things. Looking at a map and guessing where that might be is the best we can do at the moment, but I’d say Twenty-Nine Palms seems like a possible option…