Formula One Discussion

Everyone who has followed F1 since the 80’s or longer will be aware of Hungary’s status as the first GP to be held behind the Iron Curtain. It was Winston Churchill who first used the phrase “Iron Curtain” in a post WW2 speech commenting on the collapse of the war time alliance between East and West and the eventual creation of the Warsaw Pact.

The Hungarian GP, first held in 1986, represented another thaw in the Cold War which, by the early 80’s and the first term of Reagan presidency had seriously escalated towards all-out war at one stage.

It’s difficult to imagine now, just how close we were to triggering all out, global nuclear war in the early 80’s. Some history books have claimed that it was the Reagan doctrine that eventually forced the collapse of the Soviet Union through the economic and technological might of the US strangling the economy of the USSR in to submission. While this will remain the popular view in some parts of the West it is far from the reason why the Soviet Union collapsed. In the end it fell to people of the USSR to bring it down from the inside. From the strikes and riots across Eastern Europe, a more confident resistance to the regulation of Communist Rule spread relatively unchecked until a few, small but critical events toppled the whole empire.

One of these was the decision on May 2nd 1989 by the Hungarian Government to remove the electric fence border between Hungary and Austria. By the end of July 25 thousand East Germans had made the crossing from East Germany, through Czechoslovakia, into Hungary and then on to Austria and into the West. While the Austro-Hungarian border remained closed, there was now little to stop people crossing. Finally, on the 10th of September, the Hungarian Foreign Minister announced that the border between Hungary and Austria would be unrestricted. In just two days another 22,000 people crossed the border into the west. With growing demonstrations against the East German government and more civil unrest many more thousands followed suit and left for a new life. Czechoslovakia opened their border with West Germany on the 4th of November and finally, on the 9th of November the Berlin Wall opened.

Who knows what role if any, the Hungarian GP had in opening Hungary to the West and helping to give the country a wider outlook at a time when there seemed to be no end to the cold war? It certainly was worth having though.

Let’s hope for a fourth great race in a row.