I don’t normally follow Formula 1 at all. I know what it is and I know that it’s incredibly prestigious for racing, but I don’t know much besides that. That being said, once I found out that I would be in Italy at the same time as the Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix, I couldn’t really say no. Earlier in the semester, some fellow automotive engineering students (Ben, Thies, Kelvin, and Joel) and I had purchased the cheapest general admission tickets we could find for race day, which still totaled 99€. Monaco by itself is a very expensive place to live. Even worse, the city raises its prices so that it’s nearly impossible to find affordable accommodation in the city while the Grand Prix is taking place. To try and save some money, we decided to buy camping gear and stay at a campsite in the nearby city of Ventimiglia, Italy. It was easy enough to take a quick regional train just a few stops along the Côte d’Azur (French Riviera) through France and into Monte Carlo. We left after classes on Friday, and Thies’s car Pepe (if you’ll remember from the Switzerland Trip) got us to the campsite later that evening.
Race day wasn’t until Sunday, so we had all of Saturday free. The group decided to split up for the day. Some of the guys decided to go hiking through the local trails while Joel and I decided to go explore other nearby cities. Nice, France is only a few train stops past Monaco. Joel and I spent our morning leisurely wandering through the city with no set plans or intentions taking in the sights.
After exploring Nice, Joel and I took a bus a little further down the coast to Cannes, France. It just so happened that the Cannes Film Festival was occurring the same weekend. It looked as though most of the events required being a movie star or a VIP with an invitation. We were none of those. We settled for walking around the festival wondering how easy it would have been to sneak in if we had been wearing fancy suits and walked with confidence. We later found that there were technically free open-air events later that night, but we had decided to grab dinner and take the train back to Ventimiglia.
Early Sunday morning we again boarded a train and headed off to Monaco. After finding the general admission area, we embarked on the daunting task of finding a place to stand where we could actually see the track. The GA area is essentially just a road built into a hill overlooking the harbor. When we arrived, the entire road was filled with people several rows deep. Our chances didn’t look good finding a decent view from the street so we began climbing up the steep hillside trying to find a better vantage point (as several others had begun to do as well). We ended up actually finding a really nice spot with good visibility and adequate comfort. The entire weekend was filled with both qualifying races as well as races for other racing leagues. We had arrived early enough to see both the Formula Renault 3.5 (a Tier 2 European racing league) as well as the Formula 1 race. If we had been much closer to the track, I would have needed to put in earplugs (especially for the larger 3.5L engines in the Renault race). Those engines are incredibly loud, especially when they accelerate coming out of a corner. It’s a beautiful sound to someone like myself. It also helped that all of us had been taking an Aerodynamics class at Politecnico that described several of the aerodynamic components that enable these technological masterpieces to drive so fast and handle so well. One of the qualities of the Monaco circuit that makes it so unique is how difficult it is for a driver to overtake the car ahead of him. This means that every potential overtake is incredibly exciting and extremely dangerous. Due to a crash near the end of the race and Lewis Hamilton (driving for Mercedes) pulling into the pits for new tires, Hamilton’s seemingly locked-down first place lead dropped to third and his teammate Nico Rosberg (also for Mercedes) took first place (followed closely by Ferrari driver, Sebastian Vettel). It was an exciting end to the race.
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Another unique feature of the Monaco Grand Prix is that there isn’t a closed track. The circuit is actually just the normal roads of the city. The country of Monaco is so small in fact (being second only to the Vatican city), that the track actually spans most of its length. This means that after the race, the track opens up to normal traffic. It was really cool getting to walk the circuit (albeit at a significantly slower pace than the F1 drivers) and see how closely the tire marks get to the corners, all the while still exploring the country.
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