Burning up the city streets

50,000 people lined the streets of Rotterdam last weekend for the latest F1-style city race – a huge spectacle that is wheeling its way to Dublin and bringing lots of noise, glamour and ego with it

IT’S A HOT Sunday afternoon in Rotterdam as a man in a white jumpsuit climbs out of his car through a window. He hops onto the roof as the car does tight figures of eight. The engine shrieks and suddenly the smell of burning rubber is everywhere. He jumps onto the tarmac, leaps over the bonnet of his driverless car, which is still locked into its insanely tight circular pattern, and races toward another high-powered machine parked nearby. Then he leads both in a potentially fatal, synchronised high-speed dance that lasts for about 90 seconds.

Welcome to Bavaria City Racing. It is amazing. It will take your breath away. And it’s coming to Dublin next June.

The driver who wowed the crowd with his demented antics in the Rotterdam City Racing last weekend is called Terry Grant, but he was not the headline act. The Formula One racing cars from all the major teams were the big draw as the Netherland’s second city was once again converted into a Formula One track.

The impossibly sleek and incredibly fragile cars did not race against each other, but they put on enough of a spectacle and did enough screeching doughnuts on the track to satisfy the 500,000 spectators.

Until it screams past you at more than 300km an hour, you have no idea how loud a Formula One racing car is. It may sound loud on the television but up close the noise is ear-splitting. And when the sounds of those roaring engines blend with the smell of burning rubber, the smoke and the wild cheers of the crowd, you have an experience that is as close to Formula One as most of us are likely to get.

Rotterdam was my first taste. Footballers, models and racing heroes were all crammed into the paddock and mingled freely with punters who were more interested in the cars than the stars. The awe clearly evident in their eyes was replaced by bitter jealousy when I got into one of those cars, a €450,000 Ferrari, and prepared to take part in the opening parade.

It was slightly unnerving to see my driver, one of the mechanics with the Ferrari F1 team, neck a can of Red Bull before starting the engine. Surely the last thing he needed was more energy? But there was no need for concern. We didn’t even get out of first gear as we drove in a regal rather than racing fashion around the 5km track.

More than 50,000 people waved and took photographs of me (well, me and the car) as we glided past. It was hard not to feel like Queen Elizabeth. Impossible really.

Former Formula One boss Eddie Jordan was in town wearing his rock band hat weirdly and he endeared himself to everyone by playing the drums in one of the event’s sideshows. Wearing an oriental-style velvet coat and pink deck shoes (pink, Eddie? Really?) he cut a relaxed figure as he took a break from drumming to talk to the Irish press. He said he was looking forward to the event coming to Dublin but cautioned that it would not be a precursor to a full-blown Irish Formula One race.

Dublin is not Dubai and with the country up to its eyeballs in debt, there is no way it could afford to host such a race. “It’s not really feasible for Dublin,” Jordan said. “It would place an unfair burden on the taxpayer.”

He was right when he described City Racing as the next best thing. He promised that it would give people a flavour of what the real deal was like. “And the great thing about it is, it’s almost entirely free, which makes it accessible to everybody,” he said.

The motor-racing circus is being brought to Dublin by Bavaria Beer and, while the organisers have said they expect about 100,000 to turn out, that number could double if it captures the public imagination, as it has in Rotterdam and Moscow, the only two cities in the world to host it.

Lotus Renault, Vodafone McLaren and Ferrari have all appeared at the events, as have drivers including Fernando Alonso, Jenson Button, Vitaly Petrov, David Coulthard, Nelson Piquet Jr, Heikki Kovalainen and Adrian Sutil.

The first city race took place in the Netherlands in 2006 and two years later Moscow joined the street party. For the past three years, Red Square and the Kremlin have served as a surreal backdrop for all the F1 teams, and the city has got huge international coverage. Last year the Moscow City Race attracted more than 600 international journalists and camera crews to the Russian capital.

There will almost certainly be as many journalists from all over the world in Dublin for the day-long racing on June 3rd next year.

“It has been 16 years since Ireland witnessed the excitement of a current F1 car but Bavaria City Racing is about to change that,” said Gavin Collins, the managing director of the event. He is quick to sing the praises of Dublin City Council and the Garda for way they have embraced the idea.

Collins really loves cars and is passionate about the event, which he says will give a significant boost to the local economy.

He said the track had been designed to showcase some of the city’s landmarks to a global audience. The track starts at the Central Bank on Dame St before passing Trinity College, going down Burgh Quay and crossing the Samuel Beckett bridge, passing the Convention Centre before finishing up at Custom House Quay.

While Collins said the track was designed to showcase Irish landmarks, a letter writer to this newspaper on Tuesday had a different take. It could equally be said to take in the “site of farcical fiscal irresponsibility to within spitting distance of a potent symbol of the Celtic Tiger, via a bridge named after a man who knew an absurdity when he saw it. Will the race be classed F1 or IMF1?”, he wondered dryly. It is going to be big, loud and very possibly brilliant.