Oooft where do I start?
Public transport was pretty terrible all weekend, though I guess the circuit cannot help the strikes on Friday. But by Sunday train provision was abysmal, with so many cancellations - it just wasn't fit for purpose for 150,000 people trying to get out of Monza and get back to Milan. I've been to the Monza race before and I'm sure that was better. The shuttle buses from Monza station to the circuit were pretty bad too.
But the organisation at the circuit was truly atrocious. It was very hot all weekend, but you could only bring in a small bottle of water and at the entrance they confiscated the bottle cap. You could also not bring in food or other drink (even soft drinks), and reusable bottles were taken off people. The bottle cap thing might had made sense had they not been happily selling you capped bottles at the circuit. But that's if you could buy them... which is where it really gets messy.
So none of the food/drink stalls took cash or contactless cards; you had to buy tokens in order to purchase these. The two options were physcial tokens (which meant people were walking round with huge bags of these damn things), or they were promoting an NFC bracelet system where you top up online and pay with the bracelet from your credit. Even though I went on Friday morning, it still took two hours of faffing and queuing to get this - the system kept going down. It was chaos. Luckily I got one though, as they gave up with this later in the weekend, which meant that there were huge queues for tokens, before you could then queue up for food and drink. There were not enough token stalls for the sheer number of people, so many people just spent much of their weekend in queues. By Sunday tokens were running out, so people could not buy food or drink. The only other option for water was free water points, but the queues for these were horrendous. It was absolutely scandalous. People were buying bottles with caps from each other so they could have something to hold water.
There weren't enough stalls for the people there, so any kind of purchase of food or drink took forever.
Toilets were disgusting and overflowing (luckily as a bloke I could go into the woods, and eventually a female friend was doing the same as she couldn't face the sanitatary situation).
Getting into the circuit took over two hours every morning. There weren't enough ticket barriers, and apparently the organisers just gave up and opened them. I'm not sure if there were many non-ticket holders in, but general admission was full to bursting. Sight points had been further restricted this year, and I met many GA people (I had a lot of conversations in the queues!) who said they didn't see anything on track. One Canadian guy I spoke to had paid a four figure sum for a scalped raceday grandstand ticket as he saw nothing of qualifying.
For the 'free roaming' Friday, I went with my Parabolica ticket up to a virtually empty grandstand at Serraglio, but was denied entry. However, by race day, there were too many people in the grandstands - they seemed to have given up on restricting entry. People were sat on stairs, taking others' seats, and there was no proper stewarding. It was very messy.
I could go on, but it was hands down the worst organised big event I've ever been to, and certainly the worst Grand Prix experience (this was my ninth I think). I tried to tot up how many hours I'd spent in queues at Monza over the three days and got to around 14, but it could well be more. For about five and a bit hours of F1 action I can't say it was worth it.
If you want to see other horror stories, just search for stuff like 'monza organisation' or 'monza tokens' on Twitter. Hopefully someone in the F1 media will pick up on it. https://twitter.com/...src=typed_query
I only went on Friday. Had tickets for inside Parabolica. All of the above is true. But I can add a bit more...
We had an apartment in Milan, about 45 mins by subway from the central station. We got to the central station and we asked many people working in coffee stands how to get to the GP. No one knew. We stood in line for the info desk, but the guy didn't know anything. There were no signs anywhere. It started to feel like we were in completely the wrong city. We asked many fans wearing Ferrari caps and no one had a clue.
After trying many different ticket machines we finally found one that had the Monza destination on it. But it said no seats available. Well I didn't mind standing but I just couldn't buy a ticket until after F1. Finally we found a Ferrari hat that said he heard somewhere that maybe there was a strike. It took us 45 minutes to find this out. It didn't say that anywhere and no one had told us.
We decided to go back to the hotel and take the car. So that was 45+45+45 mins wasted to get back to square one. It was 25 km to the track. Upon entering Monza we stopped moving for a long time. There were no, I repeat, no signs. No traffic controllers. Nothing. I had to rely on google maps the entire time. When we finally made it to the road parallel to the main straight we saw a big parking lot, but it turned out to be reservation only (which we only found out when they asked for our reservation, no signs). We had no idea where the other parking lots were. We were incredibly lucky to find a spot and we just parked and got to the entrance. No idea if it was allowed to park there (we weren't fined so I guess all good).
We already heard about the bottle caps so we put them in our pocket and put them back on after passing security while holding our plastic drinks bottle. There were indeed massive amounts of those expensive aluminium bottles confiscated. Passing security and getting in was the easiest part of our journey. We had to walk to the inside of Parabolica and we just followed the signs which took us into a tunnel under the main straight. But of course at a certain point the signs stopped and we had to ask. We could almost see our grand stand but just couldn't get there. Turned out we had to go under the back straight, take a right, walk a bit, go back over the back straight again, follow the inside of Parabolica till we got to our seats. We took our seats at 14.15. We started our journey at 9.45.
And only after FP1 I found out about the stupid coin system.
We left after FP2 and got back to our hotel at 21.00. That's 3 hours for a 25 km journey. Luckily we had plenty of water in the car.
On Firday it wasn't even busy. Grandstands I could see maybe 25-40 % full. Sunday must have been horrible.
Some very easy improvements would have been:
-We booked our tickets directly. If the organisation had sent an e-mail informing us about the train strike we would have saved a lot of time.
-If the organisation had told us which gate to take onto the track I could have parked at the other side of the track and saved a lot of time walking, and perhaps also in traffic.
-They should have given us gps info on where to park.
-Stop confiscating bottle caps. You're messing with peoples health. Alcohol I can understand but taking water from people is just criminal.
-Get rid of the token system. If i can tap my card on your toll routes I can also do it for a drink. In fact I could tap to buy tokens.
Some other improvements that are usually present at other events:
-Some traffic control would have been nice. Both for the residents as well as the visitors. Now everyone was suffering in the free for all system.
-Put up some signs at the main station on where to go. Inform some of the workers there.
It can't be a lack of personnel that caused all this because I saw a lot of people doing absolutely nothing. It was the management of the event that was terrible.