A few days before the Grand Prix, we published yesterday in The Press a letter from Nino Gabrielli, librarian at the Université de Montréal, and François Harvey, professor at Cégep Édouard-Montpetit, highlighting the astonishing contribution of Hubert Aquin to the creation, in Montreal, of this major event.
In December 1962, write the authors, Hubert Aquin, a sports fan and fascinated by automobile racing, launched the idea of creating an automobile Grand Prix in Montreal. Aquin surrounds himself with allies who help him develop his vision, and the context is favorable to ambitious ideas. The metropolis is changing, it is entering modernity at high speed. So much so that the City immediately got involved in the project. Île Sainte-Hélène was designated as the host site and the date of the first race was set the following fall, September 22, 1963. Nothing less! A municipal by-law limiting automobile speed, however, forced the postponement of the project and Aquin turned away from it. Still, argue Harvey and Gabrielli, it would be consistent that we mention somewhere the involvement of the writer in the creation of the Grand Prix.
It was with great pleasure that I watched the films that Aquin devoted to sport when he worked at the National Film Board of Canada. In 1959, he made sports and people, a documentary that puts into images the texts of Roland Barthes on sports performance. There is a long sequence on car racing, where the art of mastering the controls and mechanics of the vehicle is affectionately presented. We are told of the track as a place where “space is against time”; of racing as a story of courage, where the pilot puts everything into play to “transform mass into agility, weight into power”. A real treasure that this cinema, all in intelligence and contemplation, on sport as “a great modern institution thrown into the ancestral forms of the spectacle”.
As far as the creation of the Grand Prix de Montréal is concerned, we are quite right to want to highlight this episode where sport, literature and urban development intersected. That said, we should not prevent ideas from continuing to evolve. While it is important to properly name the built heritage – which will not disappear if the Grand Prix ceases to take place – we cannot help but see a gentle irony in the fact of wanting to give back to Caesar what belongs to him when there are serious reasons to question the very existence of the Montreal Grand Prix.
Agence France-Presse reported in 2019 that the Grand Prix is an orgy of fossil fuels, with that year’s event causing the emission of 256,551 tonnes of CO2. These emissions are only partially related to the engines and the activities on the circuit, but the fact remains that, to turn the cars in circles in front of the jubilant crowd, it is necessary to transport the equipment, to move people, running factories, offices. The whole affair is excessively energy-intensive, and the promises to make the event “carbon neutral” are somewhat absurd.
The idea of making F1 carbon-neutral relies heavily on emissions offsetting, a mechanism which, in principle, is useful above all for saving the furniture when fossil fuel consumption is unavoidable to achieve another objective. However, here, all emissions would be avoidable: it would suffice to stop indulging in this activity, the usefulness of which is hard to see beyond the spectacle. Even world champion Sebastien Vettel admitted recently that he doubts the relevance of his sport, which consists of traveling the world to “waste resources”.
Strangely, we see in Montreal a perfectly consensual choir of politicians and institutions who continue to applaud the Grand Prix and its precious “spin-offs” without questioning the fact of linking the dynamism of the metropolis to such an objectively harmful event. . Even the administration of Valérie Plante, otherwise sensitive to environmental concerns and sustainable mobility, is categorical about maintaining the Grand Prix until the end of its contract with the City, in 2031.
There is something of the order of an anachronism: we unreservedly express infinite gratitude for being able to host “the biggest sporting event in the country”, as if Montreal were otherwise short of assets and imagination. . We hear about shops, restaurants, hotels, which are finally running at full speed — isn’t that marvellous? We are told about the technological progress allowed by F1. You know, the cars are much more efficient, less greedy, thanks to F1, it’s great. The reasoning goes in circles, it justifies nothing. It only reveals our dependence — economic, technological — on activities and industries that rely on the destruction of nature and living things.
The Grand Prix is a symbol of the cruel choice that we are constantly forced to make between “prosperity” (a prosperity that is not even shared) and the rest of the world. Across F1 culture, the embodiment of this dilemma is, admittedly, particularly vulgar and violent. The Montreal Grand Prix should belong to the past and be inscribed in the collective memory as the emblem of an excess that cannot last.