Formula One | Brad Spurgeon's Blog

The 10th Edition of the Singapore Grand Prix – and a New Racing Section to this Blog

September 14, 2017
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Chase Carey of Liberty Media at Singapore GP 2016. Photo: Brad Spurgeon

This weekend marks the 10th edition of the Singapore Grand Prix, the first running of which took place in 2008, as Formula One’s first ever night race. As it happened, that first edition would take place just as the world financial markets began to fall apart in the beginning of the financial crisis the effects of which we are still feeling today. I recall the strange atmosphere in the paddock perfectly: We were gathered in the financial hub of Southeast Asia in the slickest racing environment in a downtown setting that we had ever seen, and basking in the paddock in an atmosphere of wealth and luxury. While all the talk was about the underpinnings of that wealth and luxury falling apart around us – banks going bust, the global financial system sinking into an apparent abyss, and with it, the prospect of so many of the series’ sponsors pulling out and leaving Formula One adrift in a series that survives on begging for money.

As the series continues to negotiate for a new contract with Singapore, and in a season in which a new company has taken over the running of the series – the U.S.-based Liberty Media – I thought it would be a great time to look back at a couple of the stories that I wrote in the past, as well as to start a new auto racing section on this blog. Today I am running what I feel is the biggest story I wrote about Formula One as almost classical theater, a big, world story of glamour, glitz and drama. This was a Page 1 story in the International Herald Tribune, and later ran in the New York Times, and summed up the state of Formula One at the time, at its biggest race of the season: The Monaco Grand Prix. Read the story and tell me if the series is the same today 15 years later?

Tomorrow, I will run my preview for the first ever Singapore Grand Prix, and talk a little more about how the weekends go in Singapore.

By the way, while we all thought the first night race and the collapsing financial markets were the biggest story of the weekend in 2008, it turned out that there was a much, much bigger sporting story going on behind the scenes. But that scandal would only be revealed a year later when Nelson Piquet Jr. told the world that he (and his team directors) had staged a fake crash in order to help his teammate at Renault, Fernando Alonso, with his race strategy. The help would lead to Alonso’s first victory that season, and a year later, to the banning of two of the team’s directors from the series in one of the sport’s worst cheating scandals. Last year also marked the beginning of the Liberty Media story, as the announcement of the takeover of Formula One had just been made at the beginning of the month and Chase Carey, the new boss, visited the Singapore paddock – his first ever visit to a Formula One Grand Prix.

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A Musical Experience in Milan – or Rather, in the Paddock at Monza… Joan Thiele

September 1, 2016
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Joan Thiele MONZA, Italy – So far so horrible on the level of my open mic experiences in Milan. Followers of this blog will have noticed – or not – that in the last few years I have mostly been playing on Thursday night at a blues jam in a bar/restaurant called Fermento. Well, this year, this very night in fact, that jam don’t exist no more!!!! But I have had a really, really fun and very cool musical experience in Italy in the least expected of places: In the Formula One paddock in Monza, where I do my day job this weekend at the Italian Grand Prix. How so? It gets kind of long and complicated, so I’ll skip that for the moment, but let me just say that the experience was all about a mini-concert given in the motor home of one of the Formula One teams, by an Italian singer-songwriter by the name of Joan Thiele. I’ll try to get the rest of that story down here in as few words as possible, but that won’t be easy….

So it turns out that the Formula One team, called Manor, has as one of its sponsors, the music app called Shazam. And it turns out that Shazam is doing few little mini concerts around the world in conjunction with Formula One. (Does that sound like an alternative to the tiny desk concerts on NPR??!! In a way it is!) And it turns out that they try to use a local musician each time. So, as the PR woman at Manor knew that I was interested in music, she asked me if I had seen they were going to have a mini-motor-home-concert in Monza tonight. As it turned out, a sucker for the image of a microphone, I had indeed noticed this playbill outside the motorhome not three minutes before.
Joan Thiele – Save Me

So I went to the mini motorhome concert and found that, on the top floor of the motorhome – henceforth to be called a hospitality suite – they had set up a beautiful little playing area for the musician. There was a Fender Stratocaster, a ukulele, a couple of amplifiers, a microphone, and a mixing table. I felt envy and desire to go and play. Until I heard the musician, and said, no, I just want to listen to this. Enter Joan Thiele. What a mix of everything: A father who is Swiss, Italian, Canadian, Colombian, and who knows what all else, and Joan’s mother also a mix from one or two of those areas, and Joan having grown up partly in Colombia, but living in Italy now, and having spent two or three years in England, and learning her trade at open mics etc., this woman of – I think – 22 years old, got up with her Strat and used it as a kind of electro-music surrogate, and her voice too. Vocals that reminded me to a degree of Lana del Ray, and a sound that goes in that same direction – that’s my feeling, but there’s much more (in fact, I had a colleague who thought one of the songs reminded him of, “Down on my knees, I’m beggin’ ya…) – I listened quite hypnotised to the five or six songs she played. (Another colleague said she had Brooke Shield’s eyebrows.)
Joan Thiele – Taxi Driver

And I suddenly found myself forgetting I was in the Formula One paddock. As it turned out, I need not forget this: The Formula One paddock is a hugely diverse place. And it also turns out, then, that in that world, another of the reasons that we had Joan Thiele – who is working on her first album, and her A&R person from Universal Music was there with her – is also represented by Trident Management, which is a management and promotions agency that also owns one of the Formula One support race teams in the series known as GP2, the Trident Motorsport team. So it all suddenly fit together, in a way. Trident also represents two very well-know Italian musicians, Eros Ramazzotti and Jovanotti.
Joan Thiele – Hotline Bling

In any case, the other thing that fits together is that this being within the Formula One paddock, I, as a print media man with a print media pass, cannot use the video I made of Joan’s hypnotizing performance. The Formula One promoter sells audio visual rights to the television and radio companies for huge sums of money, and that then means that print media journalists cannot use any audio visual footage – or sound files – that they gather in the paddock, without fear of huge problems.

So my recordings will have to wait for the future. But in the meantime, I’ve decided to cut and paste some of Joan Thiele’s music videos that I find on the web into the blog to show who it was I got to hear and speak to today in the Formula One paddock and feel that from a musical point of view, my trip to Italy, even if it wreaps no musical stage-time for me, will have been fulfilling in another way! A nice discovery. Check her out, Joan Thiele.

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Quick Notes From Milan, Nice, Paris and Singapore….

September 16, 2015
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SINGAPORE – Looking back to see what my last post on this blog was, I’m stunned to see it was about my trip to Belgium! Since then I’ve been to Milan, Nice, Paris, and now I’m writing from Singapore. I’ve done an open mic in Nice, another in Paris, and I’m going out for music tonight in Singapore. I did a gig on Saturday night too, by the way, in Bondy, just outside Paris, in a neat restaurant called, L’Atelier. Time goes too quickly sometimes. But there really is a good reason for the lack of activity on the blog during that period.
First performer at the Snug open mic.

I’ve just emerged from my busiest period of the entire year in my job as a Formula One writer, having produced 16 full-length feature articles for the next two races, Singapore and Japan, which you will be able to find amongst my Brad Spurgeon stories on The New York Times site in the coming days; I have written a 5-page profile of the Ferrari racing boss, Maurizio Arrivabene, in the October issue of Road & Track magazine, which just came out on the newsstands yesterday, and I have also been preparing the visas, flights and hotels for the remaining part of my world travels, which will be hugely intensive over the next two and a half months, taking me around much of the world….
Fourth performer at the Snug open mic in Nice.

So it is that occasionally, just occasionally, I can truthfully say that I’m not updating the blog because I’m a slacker who has run out of steam, but because it’s totally full-steam ahead in other areas, leaving no time for this. But now I’m back, and I’m hoping to keep this going massively in the coming months!
Second performer at the Snug.

But first, I want to report that I finally got to play at the Monday night open mic in Nice at the Snug & Cellar pub. I’d been wanting to go to this for years, but I was never in Nice on a Monday night – until last week when I had to interview a legendary author – of one of the greatest car racing books ever written – and so I had a bit of time to check out the Snug.
Third performer at the Snug.

It was a pretty good atmosphere, full of people, full of musicians, a nice presentation by the MC, but the sound system was not the best on earth. And it tended to be a very vocal audience – during songs, I mean.
Fifth performer at the Noctambules.

In Milan, I think it was the first year ever that I did not get to play anywhere, as there too I had on the only night I usually play in a jam, I had an important interview to do for my job, so I had to let the music drop there. That was the first race at which I have not played at a venue in I have no idea how long, but it seems like years!
First performer at the Noctambules.

So it was that once back in Paris, it was with a vengeance that I went and played at Raphaëlle’s open mic at the Noctambules bar on the Place Pigalle – which I actually help organize a little too, making sure the sound is good for every performer…. It was another fabulous night, in any case, mostly because of Raphaëlle’s extraordinary MCing, and her incredible singing too, between the other wonderful musicians of the evening….
Fourth at the Noctambules.

And that takes me to Singapore, where I am quite exhausted as I write these words and prepare to go out and force myself to keep awake, as the more than 20 hours of travel without any real sleep have begun to weigh on me…!
Second at the Noctambules.

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Sixth at the Noctambules.

Third at the Noctambules.

A Bru-typical Night at the Brutopia Open Mic in Montreal

June 1, 2015
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brutopia

MONTREAL – Arrived in Montreal pretty wiped out from a long, long day of travel yesterday. But there was no way I was going to be in Montreal on a Sunday night without hopping over to the Brutopia pub and taking part in one of the best open mics in Montreal.

So that’s where I went after a pizza dinner just up the street at which I was terribly let down by horrendously bad, and expensive, wine. But that’s another story!!!! Brutopia is one of the mainstay open mics of Montreal, and it is located right downtown on Crescent Street, where, during the Formula One racing weekend – next weekend – the street festival and all the off-track fun happens.

But Brutopia might be a pub just about anywhere in the world, were it not for the unmistakable mix of a cosmopolitain crowd, with people from Africa, Europe, Quebec, Ontario, Vietnam and just about everywhere else, along with a great little selection of beers, including local brews, and Canadian accents all over the place.

When I arrived, as usual, the small stage already had a clipboard on it waiting to be signed for a place on the open mic. It is so laid back that you don’t even have to arrive hours ahead of time, but can pretty much sign up all night long and expect a spot on the open mic. The momentum of the evening is such that people who are in the bar without even having thought of playing in the open mic end up singing up….

I got on second on the list, and after the MC opened, and a woman named Sarah from Perth did the horrible job of being the first musician aside from the MC in the open mic to play, I got to go up and relax my way into it.

Warning: Brutopia may be a very large bar, with a very cool stage, and a receptive management and audience for music, but it is far from an easy audience to grab. It’s very much a pub for carousing, and if you don’t hit the right musical chord – as it were – you can be prepared to hear talking throughout. Even if you do hit the right notes, in fact…

Anyway, I’m kind of adding words to this whole thing without saying anything, so I had better stop. Suffice it to say there were some very interesting and fun acts last night, my favorites being the Quebecois who did a great Creedence cover, and Kwa (hope I got his name right!) who did all sorts of interesting electronic things – looping, etc. – with his travel guitar, and vocals. Oh, and the fabulous Michael Jackson cover too….

I plan to be back next Sunday, so keep posted!

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5-Minute Documentary About Dad at Open Mics by Daughter: Me by Emily

February 17, 2015
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PARIS – Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my ongoing project making a film about open mics around the world. Well, guess what? My daughter, Emily, beat me to it! As a student at the Ecole de la Cité film school outside Paris, she had a class exercise to make a 5-minute documentary film portrait of a person. She decided to choose as a subject her wacky, crazy Dad who travels around the world doing open mics – while writing about Formula One car racing as his real job….

One of the main riddles she had to solve in doing the 5-minute film, called “Rebellious Youth,” was what story to focus on in the telling? My bizarre past working in a circus, acting on TV and in films, in bit-parts, or busking in London and working as a bartender at the National Theatre, or writing about Formula One car racing and writing short stories and novels, etc. Where to start? So in order to find coherence to the story within the 5-minute limit, she decided to focus entirely on the story of a guy in his 50s who has a straight – or actually really exciting – day job writing for a major newspaper, who spends his spare time singing in bars at open mics with a generation that is generally many times removed from his own.

So that’s why there is the emphasis on the “old guy” playing music with young people…. Check it out for yourselves. I’ve been given permission by Emily to put it up on the blog. There are a few moments of pretty average sound quality, but keep in mind that Emily filmed the whole thing by herself with no crew, and then she edited it too. Thanks a million to the Coolin, the Galway and the Escargot Underground venues for letting her film during the open mics – and thanks to the people she interviewed for being so nice about what you say about me!!!!

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Worldwide Open Mic Journey 2014: The Multimedia Consolidation – Paris

December 26, 2014
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Paris Skyline

My worldwide open mic journey began in China in 2008 after the Formula One race in Shanghai, and little did I know that it was a journey that would continue for six more years and cover most of the globe, every continent except Africa (where I once lived and played music in an open mic decades earlier) and Antarctica, and that it would spawn a book, a blog, an album, a documentary film, numerous podcasts, music videos and other multimedia projects.

This year, 2014, I have decided to finish all of the projects and tie them together into a consolidation of multimedia. As part of my personal impetus to gather it all together for myself, but also put it into perspective on this blog, I have decided to create a page for each city I have visited on the journey, tying together samples of the whole multimedia adventure linked to that city.

So here is the page devoted to tying together the pieces of the open mic adventure that I have lived in Paris since I first started.

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Worldwide Open Mic Journey 2014: The Multimedia Consolidation – Abu Dhabi

December 10, 2014
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bait al oud

So here is the page devoted to tying together the pieces of the open mic adventure that I have lived in Abu Dhabi since I first started.

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Worldwide Open Mic Journey 2014: The Multimedia Consolidation – Brazil

December 8, 2014
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Sao Paulo skyline

So here is the page devoted to tying together the pieces of the open mic adventure that I have lived in Sao Paulo since I first started.

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Worldwide Open Mic Journey 2014: The Multimedia Consolidation – United States

November 9, 2014
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For my U.S. chapter, I divide it up between the two cities I visited for the adventure, New York City and Austin, Texas.

So here is the page devoted to tying together the pieces of the open mic adventure that I have lived in the United States since I first started. At each subsequent Formula One race that I visit this year, I will add a new such page. Keep posted….

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Worldwide Open Mic Journey 2014: The Multimedia Consolidation – Istanbul

October 16, 2014
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Istanbul

Because the last race that I attended was in Sochi, Russia, and it was the first time that I have been there, I did not have any material aside from my weekend’s experience there there year to constitute a part of the Worldwide open mic multimedia thing. So what I have done instead, is to take a race that used to exist, and where I have a lot of material, and which no longer exists. In that way, I have fit into the multimedia adventure a race location in the place of Sochi, and made use of a major part of the adventure:

So here is the page devoted to tying together the pieces of the open mic adventure that I have lived in Istanbul since I first started. At each subsequent Formula One race that I visit this year, I will add a new such page. Keep posted….

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