Matt Bishop: 'I discovered Monaco's magic despite the dull F1 race'

You will doubtless have read quite a lot of media commentary about Sunday’s Monaco Grand Prix, not because Lando Norris won it faultlessly, which he did, nor indeed in tribute to McLaren‘s 16th race victory at the principality, which is a seriously impressive stat, dwarfing as it does even mighty Ferrari‘s win total there, which is 11.

No, the issues du jour, given the failure to spice up the on-track action of the new-for-2025 mandatory-two-pitstops rule, are (1) whether Formula 1 has outgrown the tortuous streets of Monte Carlo; and, since the Monaco Grand Prix remains one of the jewels in F1’s crown from a showbiz, razzmatazz, and indeed commercial point of view, (2) how the show could be improved such that it also might offer something attractive to fans of actual racing, which currently it does not.

I tweeted as much after the race, and a number of interesting replies followed, some clever, some silly, some both. Why not require teams to design, build, and run one-off Monaco-spec cars, as IndyCar does for the jewel in its crown, the Indy 500? Why not require teams to qualify their regular F1 cars but race F2 cars or F3 cars or even touring cars? Why not require those in charge of the TV coverage to focus their cameras’ lenses less on the dull on-track goings-on and more on what makes the Monaco Grand Prix special, in other words the A-listers, the supermodels, the billionaires on their mega-yachts, and indeed the fans who still flock to the ‘race’ to enjoy its carnival atmosphere?

I would add: why not focus more TV attention on technical and lyrical expositions of the in-cockpit bravery and bravura that go into delivering a fast quali lap at Monaco, which difficult and daunting task remains one of the most visceral challenges for a racing driver anywhere in the world? Norris drove the race’s fastest lap this year, stopping the watches on 1min 13.221sec in so doing.

That was not too shabby, but his pole lap the day before, utterly committed yet meticulously precise, was of a different order — 1min 9.954sec — and watching the in-cockpit footage of it was breath-taking, especially the last bit of sector two (ie, the Harbour Chicane and Tabac) and all of sector three (ie, the Swimming Pool parts one and two, Rascasse, and Anthony Noghes).

The truth is that overtaking, and therefore racing, have been problematic at Monaco for many years. So, unless and until a radical solution to that thorny issue can be found, we should focus on ways to enjoy the event that do not involve looking forward to a nail-biting 100 minutes on the Sunday afternoon, because, to put it bluntly, that is not what the Monaco Grand Prix can serve up.

I have been to Monaco dozens of times — and, in the context of deriving pleasure from aspects of those trips that centred not on the on-track action, the visit that I have enjoyed most so far was the one I made to the 1995 Monaco Grand Prix, which was run on May 28 that year, in other words 30 years ago tomorrow.

No, it was not a great race. After a restart triggered by a lap-one shunt at Sainte Devote involving David Coulthard (Williams), Jean Alesi (Ferrari), and Gerhard Berger (Ferrari), pole man Damon Hill (Williams) led the early laps, from Michael Schumacher (Benetton) in second place. However, we were denied the epic battle that we had been looking forward to between Hill and Schumacher, bitter rivals already after Schumi’s professional foul at Adelaide six months before, because Michael jumped Damon during the pitstops, and he then ran out an easy winner, more than half a minute to the good at the flag. Third was Berger, also more than half a minute behind Hill. No one else was even on the same lap.

So why did I enjoy myself so much on that 1995 Monaco weekend? Well, I did two magical things that, for various reasons, it is quite impossible to do nowadays, one on the way down there and the other after I had arrived.

First, I did not travel in the usual way – which tends to be a flight from London Heathrow to Nice Côte d’Azur, followed by a hire car, a taxi, a train, or a helicopter to Monte Carlo – but instead I drove all the way in a Lotus Esprit S4S press car, the then brand-new version of that beautiful mid-engined supercar, equipped with a turbocharged 2.2-litre variant of Lotus’s venerable in-line four-cylinder engine, which banged out 285bhp (or 300bhp on ‘overboost’, which mode you triggered by mashing the accelerator pedal) at 7000rpm and 290lb ft at 3600rpm. Weighing just 1339kg, it was good for 168mph (270km/h) and 0-62mph (0-100km/h) in 4.6sec: quick now and extremely quick 30 years ago.

Oh and it handled and gripped fabulously well, thanks to its low centre of gravity; its upper and lower wishbones, coil springs, telescopic dampers, and anti-roll bar at the front; its upper and lower transverse links, radius arms, coil springs, telescopic dampers, and anti-roll bar at the rear; and its 235/40 ZR17 Michelins at the front and 285/35 ZR18 Michelins at the rear, mounted on a hunky set of OZ alloys. Oh and the gearbox was a conventional five-speed manual, and the steering wheel was a gorgeously minimalist leather-bound Nardi: in those days Lotus drivers were undistracted by fripperies such as paddle shifters and airbags.

Speeding was illegal in France in 1995, of course it was, but the new-ish autoroutes à péage there were wide, flat, and empty, since truck drivers and locals tended to use instead the old routes nationales, to avoid paying toll charges. It feels extraordinary to be writing these words now, and nothing would possess me to behave in such a way today, because attitudes to the immoderate driving of fast cars on public roads have changed over the past three decades, and rightly so, but, not only did I use all the performance that ‘my’ hot Esprit made available to me, but I also wrote about it without reserve for Car, of which magazine I was then the features editor.

At one point I found myself in convoy with a Porsche 911 Turbo and a Ferrari 512TR, both yellow, both German-registered. We ran in line astern at high speed for mile after mile, until I ran out of petrol at an indicated 165mph (266km/h), which was very disappointing but surprisingly undramatic.

I solved that problem in the end, and eventually I arrived in Monte Carlo. I spent Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in the media centre and/or trackside, wearing a photographer’s tabard, as I always used to at Monaco, for nowhere else can journalists get so close to the action, but on Sunday I had a rather special invitation. So it was that I viewed the race from the terrace of Roy Salvadori’s spacious flat on the seventh floor of a luxury apartment block on Boulevard Albert 1er, the street that forms the start-finish straight, from which remarkable vantage point he, his wife Sue, and his happy and privileged guests could track the F1 cars all the way from the exit of Anthony Noghes to the exit of Massenet on the first part of the lap, and, on the last part, all the way from the entry to the Harbour Chicane to the entry to Rascasse.

I was one of about 20 people there, all of us plied with vintage Champagne, and I spent the race in joyous and petrolheaded reverie, leaning over the balcony to watch – and listen to – the screaming F1 cars below, which were then powered by naturally aspirated high-revving 3.0-litre V8s, V10s, and V12s.