Sylvester Stallone was nicely relaxed and gazing in awe across the yacht-filled harbour of Monaco's millionaires' playground.
"Wow, there's nowhere like this on the planet," beamed the Hollywood megastar. "Nothing can match it. I'll never forget it."
We were sharing a table for lunch at Bernie Ecclestone's invitation in the Formula One kingpin's waterside hospitality unit at the Monaco Grand Prix...with a view of one of Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich's vast ocean-going motor yachts and its helicopter traffic.
Sly — as he insisted I should call him — betrayed no attitude of superstardom as he enthused about a motor race movie he was planning to set up, hopefully with some funding and co-operation from double-billionaire Ecclestone.
That the arrangement floundered later during shooting, for reasons so sensitive I won't go into, is now history — but over our exquisite meal Stallone's sense of excitement at the scenario overcame his hunger for gourmandising and he revelled, albeit from a privileged situation, in the money-belt atmosphere.
"I have never known a guy to be as powerful in sport and connected business as Bernie is," said Stallone. "It is phenomenal and motorracing is the real beneficiary of his power play. This is all a real spectacle, absolute showbiz and anybody who gets to sample it is real lucky."
That, I have to confess, is my own overall feeling about Formula One, my scene with international travel as a UK national newspaper sportswriter for 40 years. Drama, excitement, heartbreak, hope and sheer bliss are emotions that run rampant through a sport unparalleled for its entertainment value on a worldwide scale.
Mercifully, with strict safety rules in place and factors built into 220-mph F1 cars that cradle and protect drivers from injury or worse in crashes that 25 years ago would have resulted in certain death, tragedy nowadays is a rare occurrence at this, the highest level of motorsport.
I saw Brazilian champion and legend Ayrton Senna killed in a fateful crash at Imola, Italy, in the San Marino Grand Prix in 1994, his helmet freakishly pierced by a spike of metal — but thankfully, despite some truly scary, car-wrecking smash-ups with somersaulting results the casualty rate has fallen away into a series of miraculous escapes from hurt except to the ego.
Dirty challenges
The daredevil risk-factor to the 24 committed drivers who make up a Grand Prix grid is magic to those of us who cannot imagine what it must be like to be wheel-to-wheel in a melee of equally determined men who refuse to surrender a metre of track under the direst, sometimes dirtiest, of challenges.
And this brings me to another name-dropping account — thanks to former gutsy world champion Nigel Mansell and a trip I took with him to California when he abandoned Formula One to take up IndyCar racing in America.
He called me in my five-star hotel room with an invitation to go downstairs to dinner, to be taken at his usual time of 6.30pm, but didn't tell me there would be another guest, too.
That was Paul Newman. The movie star who wanted to be a race driver more than an actor and who clinched a second place in the gruelling Le Mans 24 Hour event and, whenever he had time, much to the fright of the film makers who employed him, raced flat-out at tracks across the US.
He was a delight over a two-hour dinner, a humble man, a totally hooked and unashamed Mansell admirer whom, he told me, he had signed for his own top-flight IndyCar team after bumping into the famed Englishman at Chicago airport.
"If I could claim I had won one ....just one....of the Grands Prix that Nigel has won I would die a happy man," he confided. "No kidding, I would give up all of whatever awards I have ever been given for my movies over the years to be able to look at a Formula One trophy on my mantleshelf and say that it was mine."
The following day Newman, who had flown by private jet from a film location in Miami to be with Mansell for his first IndyCar event, introduced me to another motor race fan and part-time team owner....Gene Hackman. And, once again, I was in the company of an idol of touching modesty and diffidence around his own heroes....the drivers.
Gruelling test
The F1 trail in full flight is a stamina testing series and while, mostly, at journey's end there is a plushy hotel in an exotic location waiting to put on its show the fortnightly schedule can be wearying to the point of one wondering whether it is all worthwhile.
Imagine, for example, flying from Britain to Singapore for a four-day stopover, returning to London briefly, then hopping aboard another aeroplane for four days in Japan, coming home then off once more to Korea with Brazil and Abu Dhabi just a week apart.
I guess if it were all that wearisome I would have quit seasons ago - but, as Ecclestone now still wandering the world at eighty years of age, points out: what else could we do to give ourselves such joy and satisfaction?
I do miss former team owner Eddie Jordan, now a BBC TV pundit who sold out his set-up and pocketed £60 million. The Irishman was party-going personified and his Monaco thrashes for upwards of 100 guests, superbly fed and then chauffeured to the casino Monte Carlo with a pocketful of gifted chips for the roulette tables or poker sessions were memorable evenings.
That standard of party-time hospitality no longer exists on the wide scale that it once did, but paddock facilities for the chosen, media and VIPs like Stallone and Newman, has reached five-star levels with Red Bull, and their transportable, £10 million entertainment suite on three-levels ....pool included in the Monaco version....top of the must-do stopovers.
In one weekend at the Monaco GP I was in the yacht-bound company of film star Hugh Grant, Manchester United's Ryan Giggs, pop singer and writer Chris de Burgh, cricketer Ian Botham, jockey Frankie Dettori and models Elle MacPherson and Heidi Klum.
Ecclestone, sitting in his London HQ, reached into a drawer in his desk, pulled out a sheet of paper and said with a grin: "I'm not going to tell you who's on this list ...it's a secret...but they are all famous, very famous, personalities who have applied for a VIP pass. It gets them to areas behind the scenes, like the paddock, where even they cannot go without my say-so."
And that happens for just about every Grand Prix....and it will be the same Abu Dhabi-time....
"It says a hell of a lot for our show, doesn't it?" smiled the ringmaster.
