The only downside to a home Grand Prix is that your city gets filled with people who don't seem to know how to use it. For 362 days of the year you can walk up and down escalators because everyone not walking will stand on the right and leave the left side free. But come Grand Prix weekend every American travelling with a friend will invariably come and stand side by side on an otherwise empty escalator. This used to piss me off. For one of my first Grand Prix I would tell people to get out of the way in french. I'm sure they all went home saying that the race was great but the french locals are assholes. Now I just accept it and use the stairs for the weekend. Usually I avoid downtown for the Grand Prix weekend since I usually try and avoid downtown for every other day of the year. But this year I headed down to Crescent st for a Friday night drink. Holy crap it was full. The only other time we get the road so full is for free Stevie Wonder concerts during the Jazz Festival. I was heading to the Winston Churchill pub which is about 3 doors down from the corner I arrived at. It took me 20 minutes of shuffling to get to the door!
Lots of people in the city don't like the Grand Prix. I'm sure this doesn't come as a big surprise. People say that Formula 1 motor racing is ecologically irresponsible and noisy. Because the Grand Prix is in the city and accesible by public transport, though, I would venture to say that the Grand Prix is a lot greener than it appears. Sure 24 cars run around and burn off 100 litres of fuel in a couple of hours but on the other hand 100,000 people turn up at the track by Metro having not burnt much fuel at all. The circus flies around the world every couple of weeks but a hockey team flies around the continent every couple of days and F1 teams send gear by ship and truck when it's possible. I bet that keeping a hockey rink frozen at the Bell Centre would use up plenty of energy as well. Maybe the locals should embrace Formula 1 as the pillar of environmentalism and gt rid of these polluting hockey players.