Japan polarises the Paddock. People either love the efficiency, cleanliness and completely alien (to us Europeans) culture or they hate the lack of working phones and Blackberries, the virtually carb-free diet and the fact that no-one, well very few people, speak English, the defacto language of Formula One. The love of the place is not enhanced by this being the second week of a back-to-back flyaway, one on which sleep seems to be the major topic of conversation as bodyclocks try to adjust to the travel and Singapore schedule.

Our team hotel is half an hour’s drive from the circuit in Yokkaichi, which is probably a better place for night-time entertainment than Suzuka, but a longer commute. The hotel itself is situated in an area where ladies stand for a little too long on street corners for the good of their reputations, but it does boast right next door possibly the best bar in the world. Out of a tiny bar the size of a hotdog kiosk, it sells about three items of food (noodles, spicy noodles and a meat dish you cook yourself on portable miniature barbecues they supply), its furniture consists of planks of wood stretched across upturned beer crates and… it sells draught whisky. Yep, they pull halves of scotch, add ice and apple flavouring and sell it as their speciality.

Needless to say it has become our local. This in spite of the slightly inebriated non English-speaking resident who kept trying to get the female members of our team to eat his snails (this is no metaphor).

The hotel itself is your typical Japanese business residence. The rooms are a mattress plus six inches wide, there’s no cupboard or closet and the bathroom is a single piece of injection-moulded plastic which contains the regulation heated toilet seat and a shower which has more in common with a garden sprinkler than luxury bathing.

Other local highlights have included the vintage vinyl and clothing stores for those born before 1975 (although a copy of Nevermind for ¥4,550 [35 euros] is pretty steep) and Starbucks for those people who fall into the bracket marked ‘It’s Not Like At Home, Is It?’

And if you don’t have ¥4,550yen…

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