A Long Race to Absolutely Nowhere

More than a week after the last sozzled stragglers limped off the field, some people are still feeling the negative side-effects of Budapest's two big summer events - the week-long Sziget music festival, which wrapped up on August 10, and the August 13-15 Marlboro Magyar Nagydij, better known as the Formula 1 Hungarian Grand Prix.

Like all great open-air popular music festivals, the Sziget Festival, the largest such event in the region, is one big Petri dish swarming with various viruses and germs, and many attendees end the week sick as well as sunburned and deaf. "The Sziget has never been famous for hygiene," one friend emailed me last week from bed, where he was recovering from one strain of the "Sziget typhus" that cuts through the festival crowd like cholera through an African refugee camp. "There are two variants: one making you sit on the toilet for days, the other, which I have, is like a flu with a terrible headache."

While some Formula 1 fans may have suffered from similar maladies due to improperly-stored or handled food at the Mogyoród racetrack, most Grand Prix casualties are reporting different symptoms. These include anxiety, depression, lethargy, queasiness, and then shock and blind rage.

The variant I am suffering from includes all these, plus a terrible headache. This is because, unlike many people you may know who trekked out to see Michael Schumacher walk over his feeble competition, I actually paid for my ticket. Coupled with the fact that I am actually an auto-racing fan, this gives me the right, if not the obligation, to honestly tell you how God-awful the whole thing was.

Not pictured: the backpack

No offense to God, but "Gow-awful" doesn't even begin to describe how totally boring, useless, overpriced and corrupt Grand Prix racing has become, especially in Hungary. At no point during the weekend was there any real doubt about who would win the race. Schumacher led from the first lap to the last, and lapped everyone in the field except the top five finishers, ending up almost a minute clear of his nearest non-Ferrari rival, Spanish Renault ace (and last year's winner) Fernando Alonso. Meanwhile, the only way one could legitimately blot out the misery was by drinking overpriced Foster's beer and chain-smoking Marlboro cigarettes, the official vices of the grand prix weekend. If I hadn't had the pleasure of some outstanding company and a backpack of contraband alcohols, I probably would have jumped the fence and thrown myself under one of the red cars, just to liven things up a bit.

Now, some may still find it hard to believe this year's Hungarian GP was really so dreadful, either because a) they are race fans, and thus think any racing is exciting, or b) they are not race fans, and think all racing is boring. If so, just compare it to another race which took place the same day. No, I don't mean the Renault Clio Cub, the amateur race which preceded the GP and was indeed fun, at least compared to the main event. I am referring to the NASCAR "stock car" race which took place later in the day on the former grand prix circuit in Watkins Glen, New York.

Consider the following: While 20 cars started and 15 finished in Budapest - local non-hero Zsolt Baumgartner rounded up the field, a humiliating five laps down - at the end of the NASCAR race 32 of the 43 drivers who started crossed the finish line, 24 of them on the same lap as the winner. And it gets better (or worse), because at Watinks Glen winner Tony Stewart's Home Depot Chevrolet took the checkered flag barely a second and a half ahead of Ron Fellows' second-place Nutter Butter/Nilla Wafers Chevy, compared to the 44.5 seconds that separated Schumi and his nearest opponent. The capper? Stewart won while suffering from severe, Sziget-style stomach cramps, while the 45-year-old Fellows had stared from dead last, meaning he passed more than twice as many cars during the race as were on the grid in Budapest. The capper of the capper? Tickets for the Watkins Glen race were a small fraction of those in Budapest, which started at €100 for a standing room pass for Sunday to €330 for a weekend seat in the main covered grandstand.

Now, that's what I call entertainment: Afghan Buzkashi players (top) go for the throat; a typical scene from NASCAR, three deep in the corner

Okay, you may say, NASCAR might be a great show, but it isn't the showcase of technology and international talent that Formula 1 is. No doubt, F1 cars are more state-of-the-art than the souped-up jobbers that run in NASCAR. But guess what? The average photocopying machine is more technologically advanced than the most cutting-edge racing car, and even the most fervent Finn fan of Kimi Räikkönen wouldn't pay €330 to watch him race a photocopying machine, whereas it is well-known fact that the best spectator sport on Earth is the exquisitely low-tech Buzkashi, or "goat-grabbing," in which crazed mounted Afghan tribesmen savagely battle each other while trying to pitch the headless carcass of a goat into the goal. And as for F1 being "international," all I will say is that the two young sons of a friend of mine have watched the dominator from Deutschland mount the podium so many times they thought the German national anthem was the Grand Prix theme song. The situation is dire, and getting worse by the lap, and it is no wonder attendance at the Hungarian Grand Prix has slipped by 40,000 over the past few years, while NASCAR is the fastest-growing sport in America.

Naturally, like all failing businesses in Hungary, our Grand Prix receives lavish government subsidies, in this case a cool Ft 3 billion (€12 million), or roughly €75 per disappointed race fan. No doubt, this is partly aimed at convincing F1 overlord Bernie Ecclestone to keep the Hungarian race on the grand prix calendar, which he reportedly promised last week to do until 2011. But everyone in the racing world knows that the Magyar race is doomed, if only because the Hungaroring itself is such an awful venue for grand prix racing. "[The Hungarian circuit] has always been useless for overtaking and if it can never produce a good race it should not have a place in the championship," noted the authoritative website www.grandprix.com in a post-race report that compared the day's non-event to synchronized swimming.

As much as I love racing, and hope that Formula 1 gets better, at these prices no one - whether race fan, government minister, or corporate event planner - should put one thin forint into next year's grand prix. But if the state feels it absolutely necessary to underwrite motorsports, why not make a splash and pay NASCAR to come over and show Europe what a real race looks like? It may not be easy to schedule: unlike Formula 1's overpaid divas, who whine about having to race 18 weekends a year, NASCAR's good 'ole boys race 32. And at least we wouldn't have to worry about them quitting just because they had a touch of Sziget.

In other motoring news, last week brought a jam of traffic-related items, especially in the area of parking violations.

To start with, the three companies responsible for handing out parking tickets in Budapest are apparently stepping up their war against local scofflaws, sending out 15,000 payment requests. If you haven't followed the long saga of illegal parking in Budapest, it wasn't until 2002 that these companies were given access to any personal information on the drivers of the cars they were ticketing, meaning that no one in Budapest except stupid foreigners like me ever actually paid a parking ticket. (One such driver had allegedly collected more than 400 tickets.) But now they know who owns what car, and they are coming to collect.

I know what you're thinking. What about all the cars you see around town parked illegally but which never seem to get a ticket or a tire clamp? If you really want to know, I'll tell you, but it's not going to make you feel any better about Budapest, or mankind in general.

It works like this. Say you have a job in the fifth district, but that job doesn't come with a parking space. Instead of taking public transport to work every morning, or taking Ft 40,000 to the garage near your office every month, you take your business card and put it under one of your car's front windshield wipers. A few hours or days later, you get a call from a person asking if you'd like to meet for a cup of coffee. Over your coffee, this person tells you what you will pay every month, and where you can park. After you make your first month's payment (usually between Ft 10,000-Ft 15,000) your name goes onto a list which keeps you from getting a ticket or a clamp.

Just having a quick coffee

Actually, it is a little more complicated than that, because parking in the city is the responsibility both of the three aforementioned parking companies and the police. The companies watch the places it is legal to park in, and the police watch the places you are never suppose to park in. This explains why you often see cars audaciously parked in zebras (crosswalks), loading zones and other obvious no-go areas, even though there may be open parking places a few meters away. These drivers are taking a bet that the police are less likely to show up before the parking attendants (who cannot ticket cars outside of their allotted slots), or if the cops do show up, they have something better to do than ticket illegally-parked cars, or at least those illegally-parked cars belonging to people they know and occasionally have coffee with.

If nothing else, all this may help clear up the confusion of one Dr. Umberto Bocus, who cc'd me last week on a letter he sent to various city authorities complaining that his car had been unfairly booted after he parked in a poorly-marked handicapped space near in 15 Marcius tér, near the bottom of the Elizabeth Bridge.

"I have to paid 15.000 hungarish forints at minimum," the aggrieved Venetian wrote. "You have to considered that [in] the place beside mine they had parked two young who are not certainly handicapped person."

Well, Dr. Bocus, perhaps the answer is that, in this particular case, it was you who was handicapped. But look at the bright side: instead of an Ft 15,000 parking ticket, you could have paid €330 to see the grand prix, and still be in bed with a ranging case of Szigetisis. So cheer up, and come back soon!