The Sochi Autodrom has been poised for a party all year but Russia entered its first Formula One weekend on Friday in a sombre mood.
The paddock ached with a sense of dread that the news about Jules Bianchi, already bad, might become much worse before the long day darkened.
Formula One’s close-knit community yearned, even prayed, for good news but in the morning there was not a snippet of it from Bianchi’s bedside in Japan, just a report his family had gathered there.
His brother and sister, Tom and Melanie Bianchi, arrived in Japan late Thursday and joined their parents, Philippe and Christine, at the hospital in Yokkaichi, where the driver was taken following his crash in last Sunday’s Japanese Grand Prix in Suzuka. The 25-year-old’s Marussia hit a recovery truck which was preparing to remove Adrian Sutil’s damaged Sauber.
At the track in Sochi, as if joining the Bianchi family in their vigil, the driver’s car sat silent and immobile and strangely proud in the Marussia garage, beneath his name. In the morning, shortly before practice, the team had decided to run only Max Chilton’s car in Sunday’s inaugural Russian Grand Prix.
It was the first time for 20 years a team had entered a solitary car – the Williams driven by Damon Hill at Monaco in 1994, the race that followed the death of Ayrton Senna at Imola.
“We wanted to do something useful and supportive for Jules and his family,” said Graeme Lowdon, Marussia’s president and sporting director.
“At times like this everything else becomes unimportant,” said Christian Horner, the Red Bull team principal .
And then, in the afternoon, when the F1 cars had fallen silent after practice, there was some good news. Or at least, there was an absence of more bad news, which in the anxious atmosphere sounded vaguely promising.
Philippe Bianchi said: “Jules is fighting as he always did, the same way as if he was racing. He is strong. There are no significant changes. Everyone knows he is in a critical phase.”
By a paradox, the luckiest people were the drivers. Driving around an unfamiliar circuit at 200mph concentrates the mind like little else. McLaren’s Jenson Button said: “When we are in the car, we feel most at home. You get away from everything else to go into your own little world. When you put the visor down it’s the most peaceful place to be.
“Most of us have been doing this since we were eight years old and it is something we love. Nothing will change with our families and friends because this is what we love doing, it’s our job. This is where we feel most alive. We are trying to tame a Formula One car with 850 horsepower.”
The Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton said: “The whole sport is clouded right now because our thoughts are somewhere else. When you get into the car you switch into gear and think racing. It wouldn’t be good for anyone to get in the car and thinking about anything else but getting themselves around the track.”
Bianchi’s desperate plight has taken attention away from the thorny argument about the sport’s presence here after Russia’s involvement in Ukraine and with sanctions beginning to bite.
The consultant Richard Cregan is expecting crowd close to the capacity of 55,000. “People were waiting to see if the race would happen but recently we’ve seen ticket sales of 600-800 a day,” he said.
Formula One blathers about keeping politics out of sport but the grand prix will be a politicised event, with Vladimir Putin expected to attend.
The Toro Rosso team principal, Franz Tost, struck a jarring note. “There are always negative critics,” he said. “We should be concentrated to do our job. We do Formula One. There are problems in Arabia, there are problems maybe in Brazil, there are problems in Europe as well. There are problems in China, there are problems in Russia. To be honest I don’t care about this . The only thing I’m interested in is that we have a fast car. The rest is politics. We are here for doing sport.”
People smiled sadly but any smile on this despondent day was a bonus.
