For all that it is a sport with its foundations in risk-taking, Formula One is also a world of habit. The combination of long working days and annual visits to the same circuits mean that, for many, eating out at a race is a matter of returning to reliable old favourites rather than seeking out pastures new.
For the bars, hotels, and restaurants that benefit from this business of repetition, grand prix week is a financial highlight of the year - rural restaurants are overbooked every night, tables are turned at speed, and the tills ring out the song of profits made. But sometimes a once-perennial favourite slips off the merry-go-round, and deserving owners see their businesses struggle.
Such was the case last night, when instead of going back to the Catalunya shortlist formed of habit a small group of us went out to a family-run restaurant a few towns over from the traditional stomping grounds.
La Masia is housed in a beautiful old building in the village of l'Ametlla del Valles, and serves all of the Catalan favourites - pan amb tomate, piles of jamon, deftly-cooked fish and meat, and a selection of hearty wines. The quality of the food was top-notch, and it was just the sort of place that would ordinarily be heaving with paddock people.
After dinner, a colleague and I got chatting to the owner, who had insisted that we enjoy a bottle of wine on the house while waiting for our taxi to arrive. When it emerged that we were here for the grand prix, he started waxing lyrical about the years when his restaurant was one of the regular stops on the F1 merry-go-round, and a former favourite of both Ferrari and Michael Schumacher.
Leafing through a decades-old guest book filled with photographs, autographs, and even the odd painting as the owner narrated his way down memory lane was quite the experience, a brief history of the last century in Catalunya. Familiar faces leapt from the pages, some long gone and others much changed by the passage of time.
It was an evening of nostalgia and reflection, but one which became tinged with melancholy when we reached the pages dotted with photos of drivers and teams who, a generation ago, filled the restaurant every night of the race weekend.
Over the years, the paddock's creatures of habit had fallen into new routines, new restaurants, and as once-loyal customers move on to other jobs, other worlds, a place that had once been a home away from home for the F1 crowd faded into undeserved obscurity. Perhaps it was the wine talking, but it felt like a sobering reminder of the ease with which we are all forgotten by a sport constantly on the move.