Everything that happens in Putinland tends to surprise us. Their way of doing things, very specific to their culture, society, political heritage and customs, tend to irritate us, and all of this always ends up leaking into the world of racing. Russian things, what is said in Russian is Русские вещи.
The year was 2012, Sebastian Vettel dominated Formula 1 with pleasure, the Arab Spring was hatching, Barack Obama was re-elected and in Russia he commanded, commanded and will command Vladimir Putin. In 2008, his government reached an agreement with Bernie Ecclestone for Formula 1 to hold a race there. For this he began to build the Moscow Raceway, located about a hundred kilometers north of the capital.
At some point the negotiations went to hell and the works directed by Herman Tilke they stopped… until in 2012 someone thought it would be a good idea to resurrect the skeleton of that dead circuit before it was born. The category chosen to execute the electroshock that would bring the track back to life was the now extinct World Series by Renault, and for this reason the organization led by Jaime Alguersuari was chosen to open the venue. The World Series was the first international racing car competition held on Russian soil with all that that entails.
He had the help of a very primitive Google Earth, and combining the two things he created a kind of guide
The first problem the organizers ran into was the simplest of them all: getting to their destination. Google Maps was of little help back then, browsers were uncooperative in the absence of up-to-date data, phones lacked GPS, and being a new presence on the calendar there was no experience on the ground. «Well, we will have to get the Michelin Guide»someone said. But that someone was unaware that the Michelin Guide must have gotten stuck on its border, because his cartographers did not get there. The key was to avoid the always congested center of Moscow and take a detour through secondary roads. In this way Óscar Urdeitx, one of the officials of the organization and who later worked in the FIA single-seater commission, had to go to a specialized bookstore to buy Russian road maps.
With them displayed on a desk, he had the help of a very primitive Google Earth, and combining the two things, he created a kind of guide based on tracing a route from the Sheremetievo airport to the final destination on the circuit. Oscar, who worked for Doctors Without Borders in Africa and has swallowed a few Dakars, built a road book based on the photos he could find. Wherever he understood that there were detours on the road, a change of direction, a crossroads or an indication, he put an image in… Because the problem was that all the ex-Soviet signage was written in Cyrillic characters, and that was an absolute mess. In reality, the spellings were not recognized, but rather that reverse alphabet soup that the Russians spend and that sounds like Chinese to the users of the Latin alphabet.
Urdeitx detected that there was a word that was repeated with some frequency, probably адрес, and that he understood what detour, or direction, or whatever it meant, so that served as a reference. But Russian traffic is ‘different’. in their own words “There are no roundabouts there, and at many intersections there are no traffic lights either. The avenues are huge, with four or five lanes. You simply stick to the left lane, and wait for oncoming traffic to thin out before you slam on the throttle and cross at full speed, like in a drag race. Rarely have I had a more suicidal feeling.
Hey, Oscar, and the road book? “Oh yes, he road bookIt was very rudimentary. There were hardly any legible indications and almost everything was based on the fact that in the photos you saw a mill, a tall building, a service station and that was what helped you to get your bearings a bit. It was similar to what was used before in the Dakar, analog and based on notes and notes, because if you stopped to ask, and in Russian… well imagine. The people were very kind, but neither they understood you, nor you understood them (laughs)».
As soon as they passed under the track through the usual tunnel under the main straight, the first surprise was found in the form of machines. Asphalting machines, because two days before practice started they were still paving the track! And the fact is that when they painted it, the floor was still warm… Everything was freshly laid, and not just the paint. Electricity, for example, came through aerial cables. Aerial cables that a construction crane cut opportunely during free practice on Friday. Automatically on the circuit they were left in the dark, without a timer, without radios, without race direction, without screens, without cameras. Without anything. Activity two hours KO. Someone from the organization said: «There are no problems, tovarich. We have a generator that will bring energy to all of us”. Something that the comrade did not notice is that the ‘gienerr’ was outside the runway, just where the line cut by the cable-killing crane led.
Proof of the immaturity of the stage, facilities, systems and personnel, it was a scene that could turn into drama in the first race on Sunday. The show was served in the opening test. The stands showed a good occupation. Alain Prost offered something of a show after a few laps aboard a Mégane Trophy, and an aerobatic team led by pilot Jean Ragnotti delighted the audience with a collection of skids and synchronized manoeuvres.
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The grid was formed, the race director turned off the red lights, and the more than 15,000 horses applied to the still hot Russian asphalt unleashed a decibel hell of free exhaust. The twenty-two single-seaters that made up the grid shot out. All but one. That Dallara with size traced to that of a Formula 1 was unexpectedly stranded in its starting box. The local stewards had rehearsed many things: track exits, rescues, fires, and even incidents in the paddock, but not a car getting stuck in the middle of the straight. This is one of the most dangerous situations in a raceand those novice commissioners limited themselves to staring at that colorful and inert racing car with their hands in their pockets.
RPM, Alguersuari’s company, had a small but muscular team of installers. The speed plumbers were called by the surname of the boss of all of them: “The Tudelas”. Jordi Tudela, now deceased, was Jaime Alguersuari’s mechanic in his days as a motorcycle rider, and they moved their trucks from track to track assembling everything. The advertising, the traffic lights if necessary, the paddock signage, the billboards, set up the podium in the middle of the straight in front of the main grandstand, etc. They were great guys, very nice, and they worked great. The Tudelas were in the pitlane lifting the podium and stopped their activity to see the start.
When they were aware of what was happening, that strange lack of reaction from the marshals, they jumped the wall as if propelled by an invisible spring and pushed that car out of the access gate before the rest of the pack arrived… The leader of the test, in the end the winner Arthur Pic, who took meters away from a jules bianchi who finished second, could cover those 3,955 meters in just 1:25, so there was a lot of hurry. Given the situation, the race management would have issued a yellow flag and the logical warning of danger, but there was little, very little missing. That was not solved by the commissioners but by the guys who put up the posters, without helmets, orange overalls, gloves, or safety boots, distinctive bibs, no: in a T-shirt.
A few seconds later it could be read on the screens in a flashing way: DOG BEST LAST TIME DELETED
But the best, the funniest happened on Saturday, in the qualifying round. The caretaker of the facilities had a dog, black and white, without a specific breed; he was a stray dog. The pooch was around the paddock on that opening day and they are questioning with some concern where that exotic tribe that made so much noise would have come from. The goalkeeper was where he had to be; it was the careerists who had invaded their domains and for the canid there were plenty of them.
This round has a limited time, the teams plan their performances very closely to them, and breaking their plans leads to great disappointments and unpleasant surprises. The race director was the Belgian Pierre Deletre, a very funny guy, who had very much in mind the scene in which Michael Schumacher he stopped his car in the middle of the track in Monaco. For this reason, always in agreement with the organizers and the FIA, he imposed the rule that anyone who caused a red flag would have his registration suspended. In the middle of the qualifáin, the guard dog, overwhelmed by that annoying and unexpected noise that had suddenly appeared in what he considered his territory, got on the track, where he went to bark directly at the cars in his path.
A steward saw it and notified the race management, which immediately stopped the activity on the track due to the obvious danger that this entailed. In the press room, race direction, and on the monitors of the teams, the protagonist was not a car but that nervous canine that interrupted the planned activity. Spell, forced by the rule that he himself issued, began to give an order in a low voice to the officer in charge of the messages that was sent to the screens. A few seconds later it could be read on the screens in a blinking way:
DOG BEST LAST TIME DELETED
Following the regulations, they had eliminated the time on the lap made by the dog. Those who were present say that never before had the sound of laughter overshadowed the noise of the engines. That day yes. Russian things.