With the infrastructure around the French circuit not ideal for a major sporting event, traffic queues stretched for several miles – and many fans gave up attending the track at all after being stuck for hours when practice was on.

Force India COO Otmar Szafnauer said that he had to cancel a business meeting after a guest ran out of time to get to the track.

"It took us two hours to go 10 miles," he said. "It was ridiculous.

"We had a guest who was flying in to have a meeting with me and then flying back. He never made it to the meeting. He had to turn around and go back to the airport.

"He phoned me and said: 'Sorry I've moved 7km in two and a half hours, my flight is at 5pm. I have to turn back.'"

Szafnauer said that the traffic issue should be a worry to F1's bosses because fans would ultimately vote with their feet if they could not stomach such a headache getting into the circuit.

"For me it is not a big issue if it takes me two hours to go 10 miles, I am going to come here anyway," he said.

"If I was a fan and on Friday it took me two and a half hours to go seven km, I might think twice, and that is the problem. To me, it doesn't matter. I am coming, it is my work.

"But the fans have choice, and they will probably choose events where it doesn't take two and a half hours to cover seven kilometres."

It wasn't just fans and team members facing problems, though, because Sebastian Vettel and Romain Grosjean had to be forceful at a police roadblock after they were told they could not go any further.

Grosjean said: "We were driving, riding with Vettel and we got stopped by the police and we wanted to go again and the police wouldn't let us go. I had the pass, I had my T-shirt, I had everything."

Additional reporting by Oleg Karpov