Monaco

For one weekend in late May, Monaco closes its streets and becomes the most famous race in the world. The cars climb from Sainte-Dévote to Casino Square, drop through the tunnel and brush the swimming-pool chicane, and crawl the Fairmont hairpin, the slowest corner in Formula 1, with the Armco close enough to touch on either side. The whole principality is barely two square kilometres, which is the point: nowhere else does the track run this close to the casino steps, and nowhere else is the margin for error this thin. By Saturday the harbour is wall-to-wall with yachts, and the gap between the cars and the crowd is measured in feet.

We fly here because a race this old deserves a better arrival than the one most people endure. Those two square kilometres mean the crowd that fights the roads on Sunday night spends the best part of the weekend simply trying to leave. There is a version of Monaco that is all queue and compromise, and a version that is the harbour, the tunnel and a clean way home, and only the second is worth the trip. Come for the most famous race in the world; skip the exodus.