French GP traffic problems 'ridiculous'

With the infrastructure around the French circuit not ideal for a major sporting event, traffic queues stretched for several miles, and many fans gave up attending the track at all after being stuck for hours while Formula 1 practice was on.

Force India COO Otmar Szafnauer said he had a cancel a business meeting after a guest ran out of time to get to the track.

"It took us two hours to go 10 miles," he said. "It was ridiculous.

"We had a guest who was flying in to have a meeting with me and then flying back.

"He never made it to the meeting. He had to turnaround and go back to the airport.

"He phoned me and said: 'Sorry, I've moved 7km in two and a half hours, my flight is at 5pm. I have to turn back'."

Szafnauer said the traffic issue should be a worry to F1's bosses because fans could be put off entirely by the problems.

"For me it is not a big issue if it takes me two hours to go 10 miles, I am going to come here anyway," he said.

"If I was a fan and on Friday it took me two and a half hours to go seven kilometres I might think twice, and that is the problem.

"The fans have choice, and they will probably choose events where it doesn't take two and a half hours to cover seven kilometres."

It wasn't just fans and team members facing problems, though, because Sebastian Vettel and Romain Grosjean had to be forceful at a police roadblock after they were told they could not go any further.

Grosjean said: "We were driving, riding with Vettel and we got stopped by the police and we wanted to go again and the police wouldn't let us go.

"I had the pass, I had my T-shirt, I had everything."