With no written code of its own, Ferrari will have Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc race under the fourteen-article Saturday rulebook of a gravel court beside the Madring circuit.
Ferrari still has no written rules of engagement for Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc after their Monza contact. So the team has borrowed the fourteen-article code of a pensioners' petanque club beside the Madring circuit. The club's Saturday tie will start fourteen minutes late, and nobody there is happy about it.
The Saturday morning fixture at Club de Petanca Manzanares will start fourteen minutes late. Read that again. Fourteen minutes. In a sport where the angle of the sun decides whether a boule sits or skids, that is not a scheduling note. That is a declaration of war on the front nine of a very old man's morning.
The cause is a car race. Ferrari has confirmed it still has no written rules of engagement for Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc, after the pair made contact at turn two on the first lap at Monza. So the team has gone and borrowed some. It has taken the fourteen-article code that governs a strip of crushed stone about four hundred metres from the new Madring circuit in Madrid.
Hamilton had asked for rules. He said Mercedes wrote theirs down. Ferrari, by its own account, has never got round to it. The Guardian reported that the two drivers have since cleared the air. Fine. Air is cheap. Paper is what wins wars, and the paper belongs to the petanque club.
Club president Amadeo Ruiz-Carrascal, 78, confirmed the arrangement from a plastic chair at the end of the court. He did not stand up. Men who have held a line for fifty summers do not stand up for a car company.
"They came to us with a whiteboard and a feeling. We have a rulebook. Article Nine says you do not force a man wide. You never force a man wide. That is not petanque. That is a car park."
The battlefield
Understand what the Ferrari drivers are walking into. The Manzanares court is eighteen metres of gravel, bordered by railway sleepers and a hose that has not worked since 2019. On Saturday it hosts the second leg of a two-legged tie against Club Retamares. The first leg finished level. Nobody in the second leg is under seventy-two.
This is not a friendly. Retamares brought a cooler bag to the first leg and refused to share it. Manzanares responded by refusing to acknowledge the cooler bag. The tie has been described locally as bitter. It has been described by Ruiz-Carrascal as "the whole season, and probably the one after."
Into that theatre, Ferrari will send two racing drivers to sit on a bench and listen to the rules being read aloud. All fourteen articles. In order. Article One is about spitting. Article Fourteen is about complaining about the gravel, and the punishment is raking it.
The reading is why the fixture is delayed. The club would not start a tie of this magnitude with strangers wandering about in red. Ruiz-Carrascal called the fourteen-minute concession "the biggest thing we have ever given anybody, including the council."
Ferrari's position
Ferrari sent a spokesperson to explain the deal. He gave his name as Gianluca Ferrante and his title as Head of Driver Harmony, a role he said had existed since roughly Tuesday.
"We looked at what we had, which was a conversation," Ferrante said. "Then we looked at what the club had, which was a document with numbers on it. The numbers persuaded us. Charles has admitted the Monza move was his fault. Lewis has accepted that. Now we want something to point at when it happens again, and it will happen again, because they are racing drivers."
Sky News reported Leclerc took the blame for the incident. Under the borrowed code, that admission triggers Article Six, which requires the offender to buy the round. The club has clarified that the round is coffee. It has further clarified that Leclerc is not permitted to buy it with a card.
Asked whether a petanque rulebook could realistically cover a car travelling at 300 kilometres an hour, Ferrante paused for a long time. "Article Nine does not specify a speed," he said. "It says wide. Wide is wide."
Also, some cars
For completeness, a Grand Prix is also taking place in Madrid this weekend. It is the first at the Madring circuit, which is a street track built around the exhibition centre. Qualifying is Saturday afternoon, several hours after the petanque has been decided. If you are the sort of person who enjoys a motor race, there will be one.
The stakes there are modest. A few points in a championship, some plastic bodywork, a pit wall full of headsets. Compare that with Retamares' anchor player, a retired bus driver known court-side only as El Cerrojo, who has not thrown a loose boule in a competitive tie since the second Zapatero government.
Ruiz-Carrascal was blunt about the difference. "Their thing has brakes," he said. "Ours does not. You throw it, and you live with it."
Hamilton and Leclerc are expected to remain on the bench for the full first end of the tie, per Article Eleven of the code, which is about respect and is not to be discussed. After that they will be released to whatever it is they do. The gravel, according to the club, will be raked before they leave. By them.
Footnotes.
