Motorsport Analytics

I recently travelled to Monaco to watch the Monaco ePrix double-header. Monaco as a city, and therefore as a street circuit, is somewhat of a unique experience in motorsport. Travel writing is enormously outside of my experience as a writer and arguably outside of the purpose of this blog; on the other hand, the secret hidden purpose of this blog is for me to practice my writing. So I asked on my bluesky account if people would be interested in reading about the experience and they said yes. And here we are.

Getting There Is Half The Fun

I’m still trying to decide how sarcastic that subheading is. The first part of getting there isn’t fun at all. Monaco doesn’t have an airport, so if you’re much further distant than Paris or Turin, for most people the initial waypoint is Nice-Côte d’Azur. (Starting from eastern England, I did consider the TGV, but the combination of the journey time, higher cost and having to make my way across Paris with a suitcase made me decide against it). Already this depends on how nervous a flier you are. The approach to Nice comes in straight over the Med, so maybe generates a few more nerves than normal…

Anyway once you can see this the boring bit’s done. There’s a bunch of ways you can get from Nice to Monaco. If you’ve got money to burn, well, in the row ahead of me on my flight I overheard a Monaco native casually mention that it only cost about £20 more to get from Nice to Monaco by helicopter than it did by taxi. Given which, I’d have to recommend the former, though I admit it’s not really within my experience. For the more ordinary of us, well, you could hire a car, but I’d advise against it because then you’d have a car in Monaco. More on that later. The other options are the bus and the train. I went for the train, because a) it’s faster, and b) it runs along the coast whereas the bus runs inland. It does technically cost twice as much but at £6 for a single from Nice Saint-Augustin (the railway station 5 minutes walk from the airport) to Monaco it’s not breaking the bank either way. You’ll want to sit on the right-hand side of the train, so the views out the window look like this:

At any rate after half an hour you’ll be here, and about to get lost for the first time:

The Natural State of a Tourist in Monaco is “Lost”

There’s a few reasons why you’re about to get lost. The first one is that you don’t have a phone signal any more. Being a person of the world, you were aware that Monaco is basically just France with less tax. And since your phone plan has cross-EU data roaming as standard, it’ll be fine in Monaco, right?

Yeah, good luck with that. Monaco Telecom isn’t, for whatever reason, part of most EU-wide agreements, and so at least for me Monaco was out-of-plan and my phone declined to pick up a French signal even when I was technically in France. In theory there’s a country-wide free Wifi, but actually being able to connect to it was somewhat spotty.

Now maybe this isn’t a problem for you, if, say, you’d had the presence of mind to write the address of the place you’d rented down, rather than just having it in your Gmail. (Guess who didn’t). But even if so, you’re not in the clear yet. The walking directions you’ll get in Monaco are also a trap. You get told “turn right in 30 metres”, look ahead, and see three potential alleys, all of which will turn out to lead to completely different roads. What’s going on?

The Vertical City

Well, some idiot (Prince Charles III of Monaco, who had a good excuse tbh, we’re not writing a history article) decided to build a city into the side of what isn’t quite a cliff but is making a decent shot of it. Everything is up the side of a series of pretty steep hills:

You may be familiar with the traditional approach to building roads up very steep hills; it looks like this:

But zigzags don’t leave much room for houses, so this means that, practically, most roads in Monaco run parallel to the coastline for most of their length and unless you want to walk significantly further than you have to go between them via alleys. Except that’s not quite right. They’re not alleys, they’re usually flights of steps. If they’re not you’ll generally wish they were, as the gradient is rarely comfortable to walk. Sometimes they’re lifts or escalators. Monaco’s transport agency says the city maintains 79 lifts and 35 escalators.

And the problem with this is that your brain – and your mapping app – aren’t really designed for three-dimensional navigation. In Monaco probably the most important thing – particularly if, like me, you’re staying at a higher elevation than the racetrack – is your altitude. Because all these staircases come out on different streets, and picking the wrong one will cost you five minutes on a normal day. Picking the wrong one on a race day might cost you half an hour – Google Maps sent me down a route on ePrix Saturday that’d have worked fine if it weren’t for Ste Devote being in the way.

The other problem, of course, is that there’s barely any space for the people who are trying to cram themselves onto this hillside, let alone their cars. Even the thought of trying to drive around this place scared me. Sorry, but your Lamborghini will be stuck in traffic. And even if it isn’t, mostly what you’ll be doing is turning very sharp corners you can hardly see around. The most practical vehicle for transiting Monaco is definitely a moped, and you can tell the Monegasques know this as there are thousands of the things. (I’m informed this is true of most of the South of France, but I lack experience of this).

It’s a bit like those sci-fi stories about cities where the rich live at the top and the poor in the slums at the bottom where there’s no daylight. Except that’s backwards for Monaco – the tax exiles are down near the harbour. Which is actually a bit easier to navigate – there’s a small bit of fairly flat land.

Anyway so you’ve got to Monaco and you’ve even managed to find where you’re staying. What now?

The Motorsport Experience

First off, I’m going to assume you actually want to see the track action in the series you’ve gone to visit. I’m not entirely sure why anyone really wants to see Formula 1 cars attempt to race at Monaco. But some people don’t understand why Formula E is even a thing so let’s not get into it. There’s certainly some good things to report here. One of them is that you’ve probably got a good view. The ACM’s website is one of the absolute best for ticket sales. Not only can you pick your ticket from a circuit map, but they’ve got panorama shots from each point in the stands showing what the view’s like. So you’ll know what you’ve got into. Having checked the views out I bought tickets for these two:

One thing you’ll notice is both locations have a big screen to look at, and if you’ve not been to a race that’s surprisingly important. Otherwise you’re going to have relatively little idea what’s going on. One of the standard fan experiences is that the screen is just too small to be able to read it. I did have that at Casino Square but didn’t at the Swimming Pool, for what that’s worth.

Another good thing is that on setting up day, you can kind of sneak down the pitlane even if you don’t have a pass. (At least for Formula E, I don’t know how it works for F1). This is because, well, it’s a public road. They do close the road to vehicles, but not the pavement to pedestrians. While you can’t get in touching distance without a pass, you can definitely get within earshot. For example, I was able to overhear Mitch Evans giving an interview in front of the Jaguar garage. Visually, this is the distance:

In terms of the general nature of existing as a fan at a racetrack, it’s roughly normal to a bit above average. Didn’t have a problem with toilets and as for food, well, you’re in a city. They’ve got an app where they’ll deliver to your seat, but a) the menu’s fairly limited and b) the minimum order’s a bit too much for one person, so I didn’t actually try it. But also, you’ll probably be barely more than half an hour’s walk from wherever you’re staying so there’s always the option of going back. Prices at the track were….well, weird. A pint of beer cost more than a smoked salmon bagel. I ended up drinking rosé wine, which is not a usual favourite but did only cost €5. Assuming my memory is right.

There are some bad points. Getting around Monaco on race days is even more annoying than getting around Monaco on normal days. Everything that’s racetrack is (obviously) closed, and the railway station, which is one of the obvious ways to go from higher to lower levels, has a one-way system in place which defeats this. Or as far as I could tell it did anyway. I almost missed FP2 because I believed Google Maps and went down a set of steps that would have worked on a normal day but instead terminated in a barrier by the Church at St. Devote. This is again somewhat better once you’ve reached track level, but it’s still not that great and you’ll be walking the long way around a bunch. I walked over 10 km on both Formula E race days.

A bunch of the reason for that is that Formula E’s fan village is on the quayside, in about the most inconvenient place it could be for anyone not in a grandstand on the harbour side of the circuit. I have no idea what the situation there is for F1 or historics, mind. But for anyone in the “K” grandstands between Tabac and Piscine you’ll be doing a bit of walking to get there. Casino Square, of course, is even worse, and it’ll take over half an hour to get anywhere near any of the other grandstands. Maybe not a problem, unless, say, you wanted to meet friends at the track.

The other thing to say is that the seats are definitely not the most comfortable place I’ve ever sat down. Primarily, because they’re not seats but benches. As you can see in the photos, they don’t have backs. Additionally for the “K” grandstand (swimming pool) but not so much the “B” one (Casino Square) they’re also not really the right width for your legs. But it wasn’t so uncomfortable as to be noticable while you’re distracted by on-track action. I’m short and fairly light, though. It might be worse for somebody taller.

But overall, I would definitely recommend going to watch motorsport at Monaco. Assuming, of course, you like the motorsport! And that you can afford it, I guess. Formula E tickets were €30/day, but you can add a zero and then some for F1….

A PostScript on Other Attractions

I’m not a travel writer, and tripadvisor exists, so this is going to be short. But I figure if you’re read this you’re quite possibly a car person. So it’s worth mentioning that the Prince’s really quite impressive collection of cars is open to the public and tickets are just €10. (If you’re a fan of opulence, then you can add the Prince’s palace for an extra €7). It’s closed on race days, but it was open on setup day (Friday for FE) when I was there. A scan says I took 71 photos, but I’ll limit myself to just the one to play us out – and I’m going for this Porsche 908. Got to keep some sportscar connection after all.