F1: Eric Silbermann's Japanese Grumpy Preview

Eric Silbermann at Suzuka 24/09/2015 at 04:24

Dead fish, dragons and horse tranquilisers: we think our resident grumpy old git likes Suzuka, but to be honest, we’re not sure what he’s on about today.

Ohio Gozaymas, Konichiwa and so forth. I’ve been coming to Japan for around quarter of a century and I still can’t manage more than about 25 words. A quarter of a century ago, we had to join a queue marked “Aliens” to get through passport control at Nagoya Airport, but Japan has changed immeasurably in that past quarter century. The people here have now adopted all the best bits of Western culture, fine tuned it, mixed it in with a bit of their own and generally improved on it, with the result that the Japanese Grand Prix is possibly the most pleasant experience on the entire F1 calendar.

This year is special, because for the first time in those 25 odd years, I’m getting my own hotel room. It finally dawned on me that a single room was barely more expensive than the one I shared, so me and my photographer mate are officially divorced now. In recent years, we had a proper twin room, but for the first decade of our tenure in what is one of the scuzziest hotels you’ll find in the whole of Japan, we shared a single room with me sleeping on a camp bed. If one of us wanted to open a suitcase, the other had to leave the room. The owner has never changed and he has consistently added one word of English to his vocabulary every year we’ve been there, which is pretty much on a par with my teach-yourself-Japanese learning curve.

Another Japanese mystery you soon learn to deal with is why the jet lag on arrival is about the worst we encounter all season. One year I therefore decided to take a horse tranquiliser on the flight over. All was going well until Thursday’s Honda party when local delicacies and plenty of Sake were available. Well, I have to say I came over quite unnecessary, later discovering that horse tranquiliser ruins your footwear. How so? I had to be pretty much dragged back to my hotel by two good friends and woke up to find the toes of my shoes had been scuffed right through.

With some people in the paddock you only have to mention that and they get a distant and scared look in their eyes

These days, sadly, there are no parties whatsoever. In the past we had the welcome party on Thursday, the glad-you’re-still-here-party on Friday night and finally, the for-goodness-sake-have-you-not-got-homes-to-go-to-party on Saturday. On Sunday, everyone piled into the Log Cabin bar at the Circuit Hotel for a karaoke night. With some people in the paddock you only have to mention that and they get a distant and scared look in their eyes, because they were there the night that Bob, son of the late Ken Tyrrell tackled that well-known oeuvre “Puff The Magic Dragon”.

To be honest, I’m not surprised the parties have faded away, as we Western media behaved with our usual lack of manners, hoovering up vast quantities of ridiculously expensive sashimi and Kobe beef in the space of a few minutes, while downing gallons of Sake, even resorting to standing inside the vast wooden vat it was served from, in order to get the last dregs out come the end of the evening. Dregs is an appropriate word for our behaviour, particularly that of one photographer who was “ill” in the ornamental carp pond. The irony of this was that he was an obsessive carp fisherman in his spare time but in the case of the Suzuka fish it was not so much carpe diem as carp dying the next day.

Food during the day at Suzuka is a rather more basic affair and it is here that we find another Japanese tradition that can be hard to come to terms with for those reared on Western fast food. The organisers kindly provide us with a “Bento Box” which looks rather like a prison slop plate, divided into sections with different food stuffs in each. I find it best not to ask what they are. In an effort to pander to our tastes, I remember one year, each box contained one cold potato chip, a strange concept, but not as strange as the enticing looking fruit which actually turns out to be a pickle so astringent that it sucks all the moisture out of your face and the back of your eyeballs, so that you end up looking like the character in Edvard Munch’s famous painting, The Scream. A Happy Meal it ain’t.

If we find our hosts hard to fathom, it’s a two-way street. I still remember the perplexed expressions of concern on the faces of Japanese guests in the Honda Hospitality when I once had to interview Ayrton Senna and Gerhard Berger on the Sunday morning. It was the usual event where I asked the drivers what they liked about Suzuka, they pointed out salient points on a giant map of the track, which they would then autograph for posterity. Except that on this occasion, the two McLaren boys, getting frisky as the season reached its conclusion, decided it would be far more amusing to sign the top of my bald head in felt tip. You could sense the guests were not sure if they were meant to applaud or hand me a Wet-Wipe.

It will take more than moist baby tissues to sort things out if an earthquake hits Suzuka, but since we’ve been coming here, we’ve only had one little tremor, which no one really noticed, what with the excitement of free practice and all – did you spot the irony in that remark? Apparently Japan lives under a constant 20% chance of the ground going all wobbly on us, which probably explains why the locals are all crazy.