Getting around Monaco during the Grand Prix

The Monaco Grand Prix is not run on a circuit: it is run through a city. From Thursday practice to Sunday's race, Boulevard Albert-Ier, the climb to Sainte-Dévote, the tunnel and the Quai des États-Unis belong to the cars. What remains of Monegasque roadway operates intermittently, to the rhythm of track openings — and a journey that ordinarily takes eight minutes can demand fifty.

Navigation apps make no sense of it, and rightly so: closures shift hour by hour, on a schedule the Automobile Club publishes but only habit teaches one to read. A chauffeur discovering the Principality on a qualifying Saturday loses his passenger there; a chauffeur who has worked it for years knows to the minute when a given access on Boulevard du Jardin Exotique becomes passable again.

On race days, Monaco can only be approached from three sides. The Lower Corniche, from Cap-d'Ail, for those willing to walk the final few hundred metres. The A8 motorway exit, via the Middle Corniche, which remains the most dependable way to reach the heights — Monte-Carlo, the Jardin Exotique, Beausoleil. And the sky: seven minutes by helicopter from Nice Côte d'Azur Airport to the Fontvieille heliport, the one gate the race never closes.

The real craft lies in choosing the gate according to the hour, the direction of travel and the final destination — a palace hotel in the Carré d'Or is not served the way a yacht in Port Hercule is. It is a game of chess whose rules change four times a day.

For a Grande Remise crew, the Grand Prix is not played during the race: it is played beforehand. Vehicles are positioned the previous day, at agreed waiting points — on the Nice side for flight arrivals, on the corniche side for departures from the Principality. Cars stand by for hours, engines cold: that is the price of certainty, and the Maison holds it to be non-negotiable.

This past June, the Maison ran, on behalf of a business-aviation operator, a detail of seven vans and thirty-eight passengers between three assembly points in Nice and the Principality, with a standby phase on site. Nothing spectacular in the execution — which is precisely the point: passengers who noticed nothing at all.

An ordinary VTC endures the Grand Prix; a Grande Remise private chauffeur prepares for it. The difference comes down to three things: hour-by-hour knowledge of the closures, the discipline of pre-positioning, and permanent liaison between the cars of a single detail. The Maison's black motorcars move on those days as they do the rest of the year — without apparent haste, because the haste has been absorbed upstream.

The Principality must be earned in every season; on race days, it must be prepared. It is invisible work — and that is exactly why one entrusts it.