I had my first F1 media pass in 1985 – but things didn’t really get going until a decade later
This weekend’s Formula 1 race in Qatar is the 600th Grand Prix that I’ve been lucky enough to attend with a media pass.
Throw in a dozen that I went to as a youthful fan before I kicked off my journalistic career and I can say that I’ve been present at 53.3% of all the events held since the World Championship started in 1950, which is quite a fun stat.
Looking back at 10-year-old me, watching F1 cars in action for the first time at the Race of Champions at Brands Hatch in March 1976, I find it hard to believe that I managed to translate a childhood passion into a career. It’s a privilege that I never take for granted.
I had my hands on an F1 media pass for the first time at Silverstone in 1985. However over my first decade in this job, including a five-year stint on the staff of Autosport from 1987, it was slow progress in terms of GPs attended – just 15 in 10 seasons.
Instead I covered everything from club racing to WEC via the BTCC, F3, IMSA and NASCAR, attending hundreds of race meetings from Mallory Park to Macau.
That period also included a couple of memorable years covering the racing scene in Japan in 1992-’93, and then one following the Indy Car series in 1994, with Nigel Mansell, Mario Andretti and Emerson Fittipaldi in the field.
With the CART schedule over at the end of that year I went to the Japanese and Australian GPs, and witnessed two memorable F1 races – Damon Hill beating Michael Schumacher in the rain in Suzuka, followed by their infamous collision in Adelaide.
That winter I had a think about what to do next. I enjoyed the USA and would happily have returned and built a life there, but I couldn’t find any work. Meanwhile top level sportscar racing – my mainstay for many years – was basically dead. The only real option left was to try my hand fulltime in F1, something that had always seemed out of reach.
At a time when anyone can now become a bedroom blogger it’s hard to believe how hard it was to break into F1 journalism back in the nineties. There was no internet, only newspapers and magazines. The guys who were doing it had been there for years and were well established, and in effect it was a closed shop. It didn’t seem possible to get a foothold.
Nevertheless I bought a ticket and headed off to the first races of the 1995 season in Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires. I found just enough work to justify my trip, including writing press releases for the new Forti Corse team for a little pocket money – although in the end I didn’t get paid.
From there I went on to Imola, Barcelona, Monaco and Montreal and beyond, and then I carried on into 1996. At the start of that year word was sent to us from Bernie Ecclestone. Any accredited journalists found to be supplying stories for this new thing called “the internet”, something I’d barely heard of, risked losing their passes. The F1 boss regarded it as flouting his broadcasting rules…
The web would soon became a thing that even Bernie couldn’t control. Meanwhile the F1 seasons flew by, and I continued to travel to all the races. It never really occurred to me to skip one.
Thus 31 years after that famous Hill/Schumacher fight in Japan in November 1994 I’ve now attended 585 GPs in a row without missing one. Adding in the aforementioned 15 races I attended earlier in my journalistic career makes for that total of 600.
It also equates to 2400 days at circuits, and while I missed the odd Thursday long before it became the regimented media day it is now, I can counter that by including Monaco Wednesdays from when the race had its own schedule, plus the many days of F1 testing and circuit-based new car launches that I’ve been to over the decades.
The final total means that I’ve spent roughly seven years of my life attending F1 events at circuits. I’ve seen GPs at 44 different circuits in 30 countries, spent endless hours on European motorways, and flown a few million miles. And I’ve missed four flights – and been upgraded from economy once!
Apart from a handful of races when I was on the fulltime staff at Autosport, I’ve done it all at my own expense, which means organising and paying for flights, hotel rooms and hire cars and everything else as soon as I leave my front door. I do it on the proverbial shoestring, but nevertheless the total cost of all that over the decades is a number that I don’t want to calculate…
Inevitably normal life has at times taken a back seat. My wedding was squeezed in between Monaco and Montreal, so the latter served as the honeymoon, while the funerals of both of my parents had to fit into my schedule. The biggest regret was missing the birth of my daughter by three or four hours as I drove across Europe in the early hours of Monday morning after a Monaco GP. Even I have to admit that I haven’t always got the work/life balance right…
The toughest time in terms of physically getting to the races was the Covid-19 era. The cancellation of the 2020 Australian GP on the eve of first practice remains one of the most frustrating events I’ve witnessed (and no, I don’t count it in the 600!).
When the 2020 World Championship was rebooted behind closed doors in Austria after a three month break only 10 journalists were invited, and I have to thank the FIA for giving me the opportunity to keep my attendance record going.
However, we were confined to the media centre and couldn’t speak to anyone in person, and all interaction was done online. We could at least still see and hear the cars.
The year or so that followed was a difficult period, with endless (and costly) Covid tests required both before travel and at the races. The nightmare scenario was getting stuck overseas with a positive result, especially in somewhere like Sochi, potentially with your visa running out two days later. Fortunately I made it through safely.
I’ve been lucky enough to get to know hundreds of drivers over the years, and to spend time with many of them away from the track. I’ve sung karaoke with Michael Schumacher, partied in Kimi Raikkonen’s Tokyo hotel suite, and helped to calm down a random punter who’d just bashed an F1 driver on the nose in a Shanghai bar. I once shared a room with Rene Arnoux, which was a good story even before he brought a lady friend back with him…
When I started the drivers were my age or older – Jean Alesi was the last man born before me to start an F1 race – and now some of them could be my grandkids. However down the generations the most talented have shared the same driven personalities that make them so successful.
I agree with Andrea Stella’s recent suggestion that the current crop is the best ever in terms of overall quality all the way through the grid, and there’s been a similar improvement in the level of the teams. The days of a Forti Corse stranded at the back of the field are long gone.
As much as I appreciate the sport’s past – and there are always lessons to be drawn from what’s gone before – I’m always keen to focus on the here and now, and while not everything is perfect in modern F1, in many ways it is a golden era.
Indeed, this year’s title battle is one for the ages. Let’s hope that it goes all the way to my 601st GP!
Adam Cooper F1 