Motor racing-Hungary a very different place 20 years on

Sports/Olympics / Feature and Column

 Motor racing-Hungary a very different place 20 years on
(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-08-04 16:37

BUDAPEST, Aug 3 - Monaco without the houses is one popular way of
describing the twisty Hungarian Grand Prix circuit.

Forget glamour and glitz. If some drivers stifle a yawn when they
contemplate a visit to the hot and dusty Hungaroring, it is because of
its reputation as the second slowest track in the championship.

Races can be processional, due to the extreme difficulty in overtaking,
and dull in comparison to others at more flowing circuits.

"Watching paint dry, counting the grains of fluff in your belly
button...filling in your tax return form; all these things can be rather
more exciting than watching the Hungarian Grand Prix," declared a Red
Bull handout on Thursday.

It was not ever thus.

There was a time, 20 years ago, when a visit to the Hungaroring
represented, in the words of the Times newspaper's then Formula One
correspondent, 'motor racing's boldest experiment for many years'.

When the travelling circus arrived in Budapest for the first grand prix
behind the then-Iron Curtain in August 1986, there was a palpable sense
of excitement about the place that seems unthinkable in the current era
with its new races in China, Malaysia and Bahrain.

Hungary, now an EU member state, was then firmly in the embrace of the
old Soviet Union and light years away from the free-spending extravagance
and luxury represented by the high-tech world of Formula One.

Eastern Europe had seen nothing like it.

SMOKE-BELCHING

The governing body put the race day turnout at 200,000 spectators, many
of them stripped down to their underpants in the scorching heat on an
afternoon unlike any other.

"I recall standing on the grid and being aware that there was something
very different, very strange about the scene," Briton Martin Brundle, who
finished sixth for now-defunct Tyrrell, wrote in his book "Working the
Wheel".

"At first I couldn't work out what it was. Then I realised it was the
silence.

"I felt like a gladiator in the ring. All those people were looking on in
almost complete silence, not knowing what was going to happen
next...there were a lot of people present who had never seen a grand prix
live before."

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