Tokyo is a neon-crazed tumult, a high-speed nervous breakdown, a city of sci-fi streetscapes and extreme experiences. It burns up its present in an inferno of modernity and hedonism in its impatience to get to the future, or to hell. Harrison Ford’s Deckard in Blade Runner would have found this place really scary.
As one who used to live precariously but who now lives vicariously, who doesn’t burn the candle at even one end these days, I rely on younger colleagues to relay their more exotic adventures, ensuring I attach jump leads as they do so.
But this is hardly a place for Kafka-like introspection. So it was only on Wednesday morning, when I got on the bullet train for the slightly quieter bedlam of Nagoya, en route to Suzuka, that I thought about Jules Bianchi for the first time in days.
On Thursday, I fancy, as we approach the track that will stage Sunday’s Japanese Grand Prix, thoughts of Bianchi will so flood our minds that we will scarcely be able to think of anything else. For it was here, a year ago, that a likeable and gifted driver sustained the injuries that were to end his life nine months later.
It was on 5 October that he suffered head injuries when he collided with a recovery vehicle, a freak accident which even the FIA’s properly paranoid safety demands had failed to anticipate.
You know the thing I hate about Formula One? Its obsession with engines. And tyres. And DRS. And pit stops. And diffusers and downforce and installation laps and undercuts. And all the techno-babble that pushes the driver deeper into his helmet, further into his machine. It should be about people but it’s not. Going to F1 is like going to a great theatre and see it parade its props instead of its leading actors.
Bianchi was one of the best of those people, and the pity is that so many didn’t know about his great humour and charm until his magnificent family and his team spoke about him; those of us who met him feel privileged.
Young death is always followed by great stories of what might have been. In truth, Bianchi did not provide compelling evidence he would have been a world champion. But he might have been, for we knew he was very good. And as a human being he was always on pole.
The folk at Manor are dreading this weekend more than anyone else. A number have told me they want to get there as late as possible and leave as quickly as they can. Their sense of bereavement is still raw; their eyes still sting with it.
“We will be racing in his honour,” the team principal, John Booth,said in Singapore last week. “It will be very difficult for all of us. We will be remembering him in a very private way.
“But as everyone knows, Jules has been, and for ever will be in our thoughts. His name has been on our car in every race we’ve had since that awful day in October last year.”
I can never talk to John for long about Bianchi because I can feel him welling up.
Manor’s sporting director, Graeme Lowdon, told Autosport this week: “Jules is never far away from our thoughts. We’re now going to Japan, and we have to go there as a team and conduct our business in a professional way, and we have to be strong.
“A lot of the guys in our team were there last year, so we know it’s going to be difficult, but equally we know Jules was a racer and would want to see the team focus on the job of racing. But I’d be lying if I said there won’t be difficult moments because there definitely will be, no two ways about it.”
Emotionally, Monaco in May was a little easier. This is where Bianchi won the team’s only ever points last year, an achievement inscribed on the red wristband worn by every Manor man and woman. But in May Bianchi was still alive, even though hopes for his recovery had faded.
At Suzuka on Thursday all the grief will be felt afresh. And it will be like that on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Worst of all, Sunday.
