At the previous race, the European Grand Prix at the Nurburgring, I knew that Almasi would be attending in Hungary. I decided then that I would try to find someone important in the Formula 1 paddock who played chess, in order to set up a rapid match between the Grand Master and the Formula 1 person, preferably a driver. No highly placed person at a team would have the time to do anything longer than a rapid game anyway, as the long games last hours and the short games may last only minutes.
It turned out to be a weekend long quest, and it left me wondering why in a sport where strategy and tactics are of such vital importance, there are not more chess players.
Until recently there had been such people. Ross Brawn and Michael Schumacher, two Ferrari team members occasionally played chess together. Brawn was the technical director and no surprise, the chief strategist of the dominant team of the last decade. Schumacher was both Brawn's pawn driver and King of the road....
But neither was present at the Hungaroring, as Schumacher has retired and Brawn is on sabbatical.
The Quest for an F1 Chess Fan Began:
We spoke with the Ferrari team director, Jean Todt, however, to whom I introduced Almasi. I asked the Frenchman if he played chess. "I only play backgammon," Todt said.
In fact, Schumacher's manager, Sabine Kehm, had informed me at the previous race that Schumacher himself had switched to backgammon.
"I was hoping to get a photo of you and Almasi playing chess," I said to Todt.
The diminutive Frenchman looked at me and said, "He would just beat me too easily."
In the back of my mind, however, I was thinking about the game of chess off track that Todt was playing against Ron Dennis, the owner and director of the McLaren Mercedes team as the two teams fight for the championship on track and through maneuvers off track in a bizarre spy scandal.
In fact, Almasi would beat everyone in the paddock. That was not the point. Early in the weekend, Almasi told me how much he wanted to try one of the racing cars. I then thought that I might have had more luck if I tried to set up an exchange race/chess match. That way the prospective F1 personality would not feel embarrassed losing a game of chess - if in return Almasi tested the driver's car, setting a laptime barely a fraction of what the driver was capable of doing.
On the other hand, that might be a conclusion I was jumping to, I learned, because it turned out that Almasi's love of cars is so deep that he wants to do something related to cars when he retires from professional chess.
Marc Gene Likes Chess:
Perhaps my idea would have worked with Marc Gene, the Ferrari test driver who told me at the previous race that he loved chess and played it a lot with his family. Gene agreed to play with Almasi, if the Spaniard was able to go to Hungary. Marc is also a driver in the Peugeot endurance racing team, however, and he had a test on the Friday of the Hungarian Grand Prix. In the end, he did not show up in Hungary.
It passed through my mind that perhaps Marc was afraid of playing the Grand Master....
For it turned out that all of the people I spoke to about Almasi at the previous race failed to show up in Hungary. I asked the press attaches of three different teams to find someone within their respective teams to play chess with Almasi. Each of these three people said they would look into it. Each of the three people failed to show up at the race.
