Monaco Formula 1 race is the pinnacle of every F1 season coverage. No matter how many times I’ve been there, the glamour and F1 history never fails to strike me.

A Rolls-Royce – or a Lamborghini or a Ferrari or any other material symbol-on-wheels of the global uber-rich – is the more ‘normal’ transport for a trip around the roads of this Mediterranean principality that combines glamour and seediness like perhaps nowhere else on earth.

The glamour; everyone knows about that – the weather, the boats, the cars, the beautiful people, the lovely Beaux-Arts villas clinging precipitously to the hillsides.

The yachts have become super-yachts – some so big they don’t fit in the original harbour and resemble floating buildings rather than pleasure cruisers. 

Whatever one’s feelings about this, though, they are apt to evaporate for a time when the Formula 1 cars go out on track.

It is F1 at its most raw, the incredible skill of the drivers and performance of the cars forcing a recalibration of one’s sense of the possible. And an experience not to be missed.