I went to the Australian Grand Prix

I got to spend the week at this year's Australian Grand Prix. Here are some things I liked and some things I did not.

One of my earliest motorsport watching experiences was in 1996. This was the first year the Australian Grand Prix had been held in Melbourne, after 11 years of being hosted in Adelaide. We were at a church thing, or maybe it was the family group - the Venn diagram of the two is the family group contained entirely within the church one.

It must have been a lunch thing, given the time, and there was a TV in the room. One of the older kids flicked it on and changed the channel to the F1. 2pm rolled around, the lights went out and the race started.

I can vividly recall Martin Brundle, on the run up to turn 3, getting poleaxed by the David Coulthard's McLaren, going sideways across the nose of what I think might have been a Ferrari, getting airborne, flying along the catch fence with the car (a yellow Jordan) landing upside down, in pieces, in the middle of the gravel trap.

The race was red flagged.

Brundle exited the remains of his car, seemingly unhurt, before making his way back to the pit lane so he could take the restart in the team's spare car.

"Miracle of miracles," was the line from Murray Walker on the TV commentary.

That was nearly 30 years ago.

This year, after decades of watching grand prix racing on TV, I finally got to attend one in person.

Suffice to say, this trip was ticking an item off my bucket list.

Some things I liked

Presented in no particular order.

Having the Carrera Cup and Supercars paddocks be accessible. They were located on the outside of the circuit, basically near the main entrance to the track. Previously, they have been in the inner paddock, where the F1 is. Doing this adds to the low-rent backyard nature of domestic racing series. Something the organisers and those involved would refute they have, but they do.

Having a grandstand seat located in a pedestrian dead-end of the track. The Vettel stand, you get precisely no guesses as to which former world champion it is named after, is located on the outside of turn 11 in the back third of the circuit. Because it was near where all the helicopters were taking off and landing, it meant that the only place you could get to down that end of the circuit was the Vettel stand, so there was not a lot of general admission traffic.

On that, Thursday, being the slowest day in terms of interest, is open slather for grandstand seats. So walking around the track and checking out the different vantage points was fun.

The entire Albert Park precinct is easy to get around.

Getting into and out of the track is also pretty easy. Thursday started with an hour-long queue to get in, but I have suspicions as to why that was the case (more later), but every other day it was a piece of cake. Even race day. Getting out of the track was also pretty straight forward. I experimented over the four days of the race meeting opting for bus on Thursday (as I was going straight to the MCG for the footy. This was a mistake because Bus, can't hold that against the F1). Friday was a tram and Saturday and Sunday I legged it up St Kilda Road and Swanston Street to Flinders St Station.

Considering the whole "big event with a captive audience" aspect of the grand prix, food and drink wasn't stupidly expensive (that I saw, your mileage may vary). $11 for a can of (full strength) beer is fine. I payed that for cans of mid-strength at the MCG on Thursday night. Food options were also plenty more than just deep fried everything, which was also nice.

Formula 3 and Formula 2. Despite being undercard series full of children and operating at a level of talent significantly below F1, these two series provided some tremendous racing on Saturday. Very, very entertaining. Also the F3 cars were easily the loudest things racing.

Some things I did not like

"Drive our F1 simulator" - mate, it's a cheap logitech wheel hooked up to an Xbox running last year's F1 game. Settle down.

Access to the genuinely interesting stuff (e.g. the F1, F2 and F3 paddocks) is for the blessed few only. People that might actually be interested in seeing more about how the teams operate during a race weekend can get stuffed. Even pitwalks are for those with the correct credentials only. Even on Thursday.

"Give yourselves a big round of applause, it's a record crowd!" Piss off. The reason it took me an hour to enter the track on Thursday was because the Australian Grand Prix Corporation had invited seemingly every school child in the greater Melbourne area to the track for the day. Motorsport crowd figures have always been something one needs to take with a grain of salt (British Grands Prix of old were always good for completely fabricating crowd numbers), but when you're juicing your numbers by making sure tens of thousands of extra tickets are coming through the gates on what would be slow the day...yeah, man, record. Cool.

Greg Rust. If I never see that bloke on anything ever again it'll be too soon. What to producers see in him, exactly?

Some things I found incredibly odd

Some rich bloke bought one of the 1999 BAR Honda "zipper" cars. It cut some demo laps with honorary Australian Valterri Bottas behind the wheel. The perplexing bit was they replaced the 3-litre V10 of the original car with...the turbo-V6 from a current-gen Formula 2 car. This is just bizarre. The only reason - the ONLY reason - anyone in the year of our lord 2025 would give the slightest fuck about the abysmal piece of shit that is the BAR 01 is because of the noise the engine makes compared to modern F1 cars. Taking the engine out removes the only point of interest the thing had.

Still, gave the now-without-a-drive-but-the-face-of-f1-in-Australia an excuse to get out on track in front of everyone.

Also weird were the historic cars where the tobacco advertising had been removed. This Williams happens to be the one I have a photo of on-hand, but there were others. I find this censoring of history particularly odd because in most cases everyone knows what is supposed to be there. And in many cases (Rothmans porsches, JPS Lotus) the throwing back to the tobacco era on modern cars (without using the brand names, obviously) is looked on lovingly.

I just find it jarring.

Whatever the fuck this is.

Usually getting your old fella out in public results in a discussion with the constabulary and an requirement to stay away from primary schools. And yet, here it is celebrated.

Or it's something to do with Mark Winterbottom. Either way. Very odd.

Finally we have the area inside the circuit that I came to refer to as the Punishers Precinct. In this area what they did was get a dozen or so Melbourne hospitality venues with a bit of a known profile (think the Esplanade Hotel, Heston FunkoPop's restaurant), set up a knock-off version of it inside a wedding marquee and call it an "experience". This is the place where you found the people that still instagram their drinks like it's 2008 still. The types that were there for the #content.

An odd conclusion

Putting all this together, the big conclusion I arrived is that I do not think I am the target audience for the Australian Grand Prix. Which is weird, because it fundamentally is a motor race and I do very much enjoy motor racing.

But the Grand Prix, as an event, isn't about the motor racing itself. It's focus is everything else.

Am I glad I finally got to go to one? Absolutely. But I was asked not long afterwards if this was going to become an annual calendar entry. And the answer to that question is "no".

Would I go to a different grand prix? Absolutely. But I don't think I'll be going back to Albert Park.

Also, when is Australia going to get a WEC race?