A weekend of emotions was expected, until sports went to the background. Italy lives catastrophic days with extreme weather conditions, full of pain, work and thousands of people affected by floods that have immobilized the country. Or, at least, to the region of the Emilia-Romagna, where F1 had landed to contest the mythical Italian GP at the Imola track. However, the rain had other plans: all the workers on the route were evicted as a precaution against the rise of the river and, on Wednesday morning, the images already showed a partially flooded paddock. The decision was immediate and, before an inanimate response, the cancellation of the races was confirmed not being able to guarantee the safety of all attendees.
From that moment on, pilots and teams did their best with messages of support to all those affected in the area. And it is that, although the thickness of the paddock had not yet moved to Imola, some workers, as part of the Alpha Tauri team, experienced first-hand the consequences of the extreme rains from their hotel rooms. For Nyck De Vries the experience was worse. Adverse weather conditions surprised him on the road last Tuesday, on the way to Faenza, the town where the Alpha Tauri headquarters are located, the brand for which he is a pilot. The situation became so complicated that the Dutch driver got stuck with his car, without the possibility of continuing on his way to the final destination due to the conditions of the roads and without being able to turn around because, as he has reported on his social networks, “Going back to the freeway was not an option.”
“Tuesday at 11:30pm, on the way to Faenza before a marketing day at the factory on Wednesday. It’s raining heavily, Faenza is already flooded and I can’t get to my hotel”, He writes on his Instagram account, where he tells how he was “stuck in a small town with a fully booked hotel.” “Luckily McLaren got stuck there earlier and their front jack mechanic Frazer was kind enough to give me his room,” he adds, forced to spend the night in the accommodation which, in the morning, “became an emergency shelter for people who were forced to flee their homes overnight.” Even the cancellation of the Italian GP caught him still stuck in the hotel. “After the F1 announcement, I only saw one option to return home: drive through Florence”, he explains, having to make “an adventurous journey over the mountains” to get “home safely.”