It’s Monaco !! Not Silverstone, not Spa, Not Shanghai, not anything else.

The roads, the tunnel, the sea, the yatches, the homes, the narrow drives, the twist & turns, the crashes, the winning, the losing, the man and the machine.

The best part is the familiarity with the tarmac … that it’s the nearest cousin of where even we drive everyday.

That’s what Monaco is to me.

You pan across a stretch of gorgeous water, littered with yachts. The boats, the streets, the balconies are overflowing with a who’s who of the rich and famous.

You focus on a small tunnel crossing another small stretch of tarmac. It doesn’t look special, it’s just a road. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, a roaring mass of metal and wheels comes flying out of the darkness, whips past the normalness of the street and is gone again.

It’s perfect. The scenery, the track, the incidents. Even bright red cars can make a tiny mistake and end up limping from the tunnel with one wheel hanging off.

Monaco takes every single thing you love about Formula 1, and turns it up three notches.

…according to m. brundel – way back when, at the end of a session, lack of garage space meant it necessary for formula 3 drivers to drive their cars back through the streets of the principality to garages far, far away. the roads had by then been opened to regular road users, so the drivers would have to stop at the lights in their racecars and queue amongst the traffic melting their engines.

you wouldn’t get that anywhere else but monaco.

beyond what Ollie has already said, the barriers, the impossibly tight hairpin, but the tunnel always has a trick or two – in good weather, the drivers are suddenly plunged into relative darkness, in bad weather it’s a sudden break from the wet track and a sudden change in grip…

…it is such an un-natural environment to race F1 cars. The circuit is tight and twisty and surrounded by armco barriers. I love the fact that the tiniest of errors can result in the clipping of the barrier and total destruction of the rear end.
The place is simply beautiful, and photographers must love the shots they get, particularly with the harbour.
Monaco also has a lot of history. Whilst the new tracks like Shanghai and Bahrain are fantastic, they don’t capture the imagination like Monaco. It is almost like they are the new and efficient – but sterile – breed, and Monaco is the old wild dog that is unpredictable and likes to ruffle feathers when no one expects it.