European Grand Prix – Valencia Street Circuit (2008-2012)
OK, so the European GP moniker has a long and varied history in F1 and indeed it was supposed to return in Baku in 2016 (though the most recent calendar simply has it down as the Azerbaijan Grand Prix) but in this instance we are speaking about Valencia’s ill-fated stint as the Euro race host (by dint of Spain’s race being held in Barcelona).
In truth, there were only ever two problems with the Valencia race:
- The track was terrible
- It was terrible and it was long… which led to some pretty tedious races
Actually, there was also the fact that Valencia’s local government was living in the same luxuriously appointed financial cloud-cuckoo land as inhabited by the governments of Iceland, Ireland and Greece.
Not far from the glittering new airport that rarely, if ever, saw any flights, close by the shining domes and arches of the €1.1bn Santiago Calatrava-designed City of the Arts and Sciences and just around the corner from the €2.4bn marina with its monolithic Americas Cup base was the city’s F1 street circuit, a 5.419km monument to the racing arts that was the location for an F1 race that cost the locals the not insignificant sum of €20m per year to host.
Trouble was it turned out that they really didn’t have the cash necessary to service the contract and when the region went spectacularly broke, with debts of more than €20 billion, the race went the way of the city’s extravagant ambition – to the scrap heap.
The collapse of its F1 dream was emblematic of the city’s woes, and its hubris, and just a year after the final race in 2012 the permanent parts of the circuit were reduced to rusting stretches of fencing, cracked paving with weeds growing through and flooded access tunnels filled with refuse.
Although the city itself was great fun the racing was always pedestrian. The track was wide but not wide enough to promote overtaking but not narrow enough to make it a safety car-fest. We’ll draw a veil over its shortcoming with the words of Adrian Sutil who in 2010 simply said: “the problem is there are no challenging corners.”
Did it have any memorable races? Let’s see: Felipe Massa won the first one but I can’t remember anything about that. Then Rubens Barrichello won in 2009, which was quite good as it was his first win in about a hundred years and he did that teddy bear dance on the podium and cried a bit. The following year Seb Vettel won, which wasn’t that exciting, though his team-mate Mark Webber’s massive crash with Heikki Kovalainen was, though maybe not so much if you were Mark. Vettel won it again in 2011 in fairly unmemorable style and then Fernando Alonso won the last one as those ahead of him dropped out, which was quite good, if you’re Spanish.
