London revs up Formula One bid

What would be the implications for London hosting a regular Formula One Grand Prix event? Richard Brass reports

There was a nasty shock in store for shoppers seeking a little retail therapy in London's Regent Street one afternoon in July. Instead of the click of shop-weary shoes and the rustle of stiff bags full of expensive goodies that are the usual sounds on one of Europe's best-known shopping streets, the elegant Regency buildings echoed with the ear-busting roar of high-performance engines and the screech of smoking tyres.

For a few hours, Regent Street was turned into a mini Grand Prix circuit, with eight Formula One cars piloted by such giants of the motor-racing game as Juan Pablo Montoya, David Coulthard and Jenson Button ripping up and down its graceful curve to the cheers of hundreds of thousands of spectators.

The event was just a one-off and the drivers were, in Formula One terms, merely trundling their supercharged vehicles past Hamleys, Liberty and Austin Reed, but it could be a taste of something much bigger and more serious for the streets of the British capital.

A determined push is taking shape to hold a regular Formula One Grand Prix in London, with powerful figures in the world of motor racing joining forces with local councillors who are convinced that it would provide a dynamic boost to London tourism and the capital's standing.

Westminster City Council, whose streets would be the most likely venue for the race, is setting up a working group to decide how to go ahead with the proposal, while the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, used the opportunity of the Regent Street event to declare his own support for a London Grand Prix, saying he wanted to see the race take place within four years. Livingstone said he began discussions a year ago with Formula One boss, Bernie Ecclestone, who has been heavily critical of the current track for the British Grand Prix at Silverstone and has left the door open to a London event.

But while the political will is there, the great unknown in the equation is, as usual, money. If anything is likely to leave the prospect of a London Formula One race as only a daydream for serious petrolheads, it's the question of cost.

The first big-ticket item for a Grand Prix would be the price of the rights. Formula One Management, controlled by Ecclestone, sells the rights to each Grand Prix to the promoters, but the amount paid is a grey area. All kinds of numbers are bandied about, but a consensus among many observers is that the price is about £10m per race.

Then there's the mammoth task of finding and preparing a circuit. Besides the racing requirements, a course would need to allow for a pit lane and pit area, accessible space for the armada of support vehicles that goes with any Grand Prix, roads wide enough to take a double line of safety barriers on both sides, grandstands, ticket-only access and, perhaps most crucially, good television angles.

Speculation currently centres around Hyde Park. There's ample space for support vehicles on Park Lane's dual carriageway, and the race could head north up Park Lane before turning west along Bayswater Road, south through the park and finally east along South Carriage Drive back to Hyde Park Corner. However, such a course could be too short and may need to incorporate other roads, such as Constitution Hill, the Mall and Oxford Street, to bring it up to competition level.

Whichever course is chosen, a thorough program of roadworks would be needed, including a total resurfacing and having all manhole covers along the route welded shut to prevent them being sucked up by the cars. The cost of this work is likely to be another £10m-£15m, not to mention the costs to the National Health Service from the extra ulcers likely to be suffered by London drivers while the work is being done.

Then there's the question of road closures for the race and their impact on business. The cost to the capital's economy of several days of closures of central London roads would no doubt be considerable, but proponents of a race argue that the resulting surge in tourism would more than cover that, and that a carefully chosen course would minimise it.

If the bulk of the course were around Hyde Park, the immediate effect on business would be limited, but the further it strayed into the expensive streets of the West End the higher would be the immediate cost to retailers whose premises opened onto the circuit. A Grand Prix would need at least three days of practice, qualifying and racing, plus a few more days to set up the course. All told, businesses along the route are likely to be affected for six days, without taking into account disruption caused by road improvement in the months leading up to the race.

Shops on Regent Street had a taste of what that would be like when they were forced to close during the July event due to the sheer pressure of people in the street. Annie Walker, a director of the Regent Street Association, which helped host the event, says that, retail aside, those few hours of gentle automotive parading cost well over £500,000 to stage, plus the same again from the value of services that were provided for free. And that was without resurfacing even that relatively short stretch of road.

'But I think it's done Regent Street an awful lot of good,' she says. 'If there were a proper London Grand Prix, although some shops would have to shut for the duration, pubs, restaurants and hotels would do very well, and the costs to retail would be recouped by the publicity and the visitors it attracts to London.'

Tim Scott of LondonF1.com, which is campaigning for a London race, says the costs incurred in preparing the route would be far lower after the first time, once a decent surface had been prepared and the infrastructure established. He says the history of using Hyde Park for big ticket-only events makes it ideal for controlled-access purposes, and that there would be a huge advantage over Silverstone in the number of spectators London could cater for, making a big contribution to covering the costs.

'At Silverstone you get something in the region of 100,000 spectators,' he says. 'The event in Regent Street alone attracted several hundred thousand. With a bigger circuit, managed correctly, there's no reason why they couldn't get at least a million. With those sort of numbers they could even reduce the ticket price. That would be something for Formula One.'

But there are some serious hurdles to clear before Michael Schumacher starts frightening the swans on the Serpentine. Besides all the questions of cost and local authority approval, there will be firm opposition from Silverstone's owners, the British Racing Drivers Club, which would argue, as many in the motor racing world already have, that the extra money spent on a London circuit would be better off being used to turn the ageing Silverstone back into a truly world-class track. And there's always the possibility that Ecclestone is encouraging talk of a London event simply as a way of putting pressure on Silverstone to improve its facilities and get himself an even better deal.

But if it does go ahead, there's one issue that Livingstone and Co had really better sort out: how to move up to two million people into and out of London in a hurry. Formula One cars may well move at 300 miles an hour, but the same cannot yet be said about London's public transport system.

Richard Brass is a freelance columnist and feature writer, covering general and business issues for magazines and newspapers including The Times of London, the Daily Telegraph and The Observer. He is a former editor of Punch magazine.