For the next four days F1 will remain giddily, unabashedly inside its
self-made cocoon of exaggerated wealth. Or, as the majority of drivers know
it, home. Jenson Button and Paul di Resta have long since embraced the
Monégasque lifestyle, while Mercedes team-mates Lewis
Hamilton and Nico Rosberg even share the same apartment block amid
the principality’s latticework of high-rises.
Hamilton continues to talk breathlessly about inhabiting the Mediterranean’s
most coveted patch of real estate, admitting: “It’s incredible to run around
your favourite circuit every day. I go through the tunnel and I just cannot
believe I am here.”
A noble effort, Lewis. We will soon hear multiple variations upon this theme,
as he and his colleagues seek ever more disingenuous reasons to dress up the
real reason why they love Monaco so dearly. In mitigation, their forefathers
were just as culpable.
Keke Rosberg maintained that he came for the “central part of Europe”, while
Mika Hakkinen identified the prime attraction thus: “There’s beautiful
sunshine and it’s warm.” Why not live in Eilat, then? “Here there’s a better
social life,” Ricardo Patrese replied.
It took bluff Austrian Gerhard Berger, however grudgingly, to acknowledge the
truth: “Nice boats, nice buildings, lots of friends. And now the honest
answer? Tax.”
Yes, if you happen to be an F1 aristocrat with even a fraction of Button’s £58
million fortune, Monaco is almost de rigueur as a nesting site.
Even in 2013, Prince Albert’s gilded fiefdom preserves impressive financial
secrecy, somehow contriving to withhold income taxes from those residents
with sufficient cash to qualify for a permit and afford the exorbitant
property prices. For young stars in the highest echelon of motorsport it is
the perfect bolthole.
They flit around constantly, ensuring they cannot earn a disproportionate
amount of income in any one place, with the added sweetener of no nasty
levies to pay on the vast riches they accrue en route.
So the next time you hear Hamilton gush about Monaco being his “spiritual
home”, you might care to note that his previous country of residence was
Switzerland, where he timed his departure immaculately to coincide with a
tax law that might have caused him to pay millions in backdated payments.
At least JK Rowling had the decency to expose this transparent logic of the
über-rich, arguing: “One of the reasons why I stay in the UK, why I’m not
based in Monaco, is that I believe my country helped me.”
But no sooner does one raise this pertinent notion than it is silenced here by
the scream of a thousand horsepower. We are in Monaco, messieurs-dames, the
land where the sense of collective responsibility has yet to reach.
We are invited not to a political rally but to a party of Moulin Rouge
extravagance, where all reason is suspended and where a strange cornucopia
of characters gather to be coated by the soft confetti of money.