The Road To The Hungaroring

In 1893, over a thousand years after the industrious Hungarians first
carved themselves a country out of this politically turbulent region of
Eastern Europe, Hungarian engineers, Janos Csonka and Donat Banki,
patented an engine carburetor for the recently invented horseless carriage.






Ferenc Szisz, a Hungarian in a Renault, won the first automobile Grand Prix (Wikipedia)

In 1904 another Hungarian made motorsport history when Ferenc Szisz,
driving a Renault on public roads at Le Mans in France, won the first
car race to be called a Grand Prix. After that not much of a Hungarian
nature happened automotively-speaking (the people suffered greatly
in the two World Wars) and beginning in 1955 Russian army tanks
ruled the country's roads.

When the F1 circus first came here, in 1986, Communism's Iron
Curtain was showing signs of rust, but there were still armed Russian
soldiers lurking on the rooftops of downtown Budapest.
Suspiciously clutching their Kalashnikovs they peered down
through the pall of choking black smoke that hung over the city.
The noxious emissions were belched skyward by sputtering
Wartburgs, Yugos, Trabants and other primitive solutions to the
horseless carriage from Communist eastern Europe. In the window
of a rundown department store a tiny TV set, its flickering black
and white screen showing indistinct images of prohibited
Capitalistic behaviour, attracted a large crowd. The TV screen
was showing scenes from the Hungaroring, the newly constructed
circuit located in the hills 20 kilometers from Budapest city
centre. At that first Hungarian Grand Prix an estimated quarter
of a million spectators, from all the adjacent Eastern Bloc
countries, watched spellbound as the most expensive sport in the
wayward western world spewed millions of decadent dollars out of
its collective exhaust pipes.

The idea of the race organizers, backed by the Hungarian
government, was to use the 1986 Grand Prix to show the rest of
the world that the Communist oppressors were on the way out and
that the country was open for business - and it worked. The
Russians left in 1989 and Hungary and its Grand Prix went from
strength to strength. On Budapest's streets the belching, backfiring 
forms of automobility have long gone, replaced by the latest smooth-
running models from BMW, Mercedes and Audi. The Hungarian Grand
Prix usually makes money, and so did its founding father. It was
Bernie Ecclestone who conceived the idea of that first Grand Prix
in 1986, and he also provided most of the money to stage it. To
commemorate his contribution to putting the country on the F1 map
the main access road into the Hungaroring was signposted 'Bernie Avenue.' 
In 2017, with the sport of F1 under new ownership, the sign disappeared.



Road To The Hungaroring(formula.hu photo)