Planning a Monaco Grand Prix weekend. Book it backwards, starting with the bed and the berth.

Monaco is a little under two square kilometres with a population smaller than a London borough, and for one week each year it absorbs a crowd many times its own size. There is no elastic in the supply of anything. Rooms in the principality for Grand Prix week are typically taken a year or more ahead, and what remains carries minimum stays of several nights over the weekend. Berths in Port Hercule for the race week are spoken for even earlier, and a significant number never come to market at all because the same owners take them every year.

So the order of planning is the reverse of a normal trip. Settle where people are sleeping and whether there is a yacht, then work out how they get to it, and only then buy the flights. Clients who do it the other way round arrive with a perfectly good aircraft slot and nowhere to put anybody. If you are reading this in the autumn before the race, you are early enough to do it properly; if you are reading it in April, expect to stay outside the principality.

Staying outside is not a defeat, and a large proportion of the people who go every year do exactly that. Cap d'Antibes, Cannes, Beaulieu, Cap Ferrat, Eze and Nice all put you on the coast road with a car, and the calculation becomes a question of the drive rather than the room. That drive is the part that needs real thought, and it is the subject of the next section.

The circuit is not built in a weekend. In recent years the Quai Albert Ier has been closed to traffic from late February until the middle of July, the single longest restriction of the year, with further closures coming into force through the spring on the Boulevard Albert Ier, the Avenue de Monte-Carlo, the Quai Antoine Ier and the Quai des Etats-Unis. By May the principality is already driving around a half-built race track, and anybody who has visited in March and formed a view of the traffic should revise it.

During the event itself the roads inside the circuit perimeter close early in the morning on each day of running and reopen when the day's sessions have finished. Access to buildings on those roads, and inside the perimeter, is for residents and workers on production of identity or a work permit. The practical consequence for a visitor is blunt: if your hotel or your restaurant is inside the circuit, you are walking to it, and you should know in advance which pedestrian crossings under and over the track are open and which are not.

Outside the perimeter the pattern is a restricted zone that tightens as the week goes on, with unaccredited private vehicles excluded from it from the Friday and diversions that can add 45 to 90 minutes to what is normally a twenty minute drive. The authorities run free public transport during the event for exactly this reason. Our Monaco Grand Prix travel page carries the current arrangements as they are published each year.

Port Hercule sits inside the circuit, which is why a yacht is the most effective way to be at the Monaco Grand Prix. The port has around 700 berths in total, of which roughly 110 take yachts over 24 metres, with about thirty visitor berths requested through the port authority and pilotage compulsory for vessels over 30 metres. For race week those numbers are the whole market, and demand is not close to being met by them.

The two routes in are a charter with a berth already held, or a charter with a berth to be found. The first is far more common among the yachts that appear on the harbour wall every year, and the second is the reason a charter can be agreed in January and still be uncertain in April. When we arrange a Monaco charter we are explicit about which of the two you are being offered, because the difference is the entire value of the week. Odyssey arranges yacht charters, so the berth is confirmed by the yacht's own management and the port, not by us.

A yacht that cannot get a berth in Port Hercule can still work. Vessels anchor off, in the bay towards Cap Martin, and run tenders in, or berth further along the coast at Cap d'Ail, Beaulieu or Antibes with a car or a tender bridging the gap. Ask what the plan is for getting twelve people ashore at eleven at night before you sign anything. See how yacht charter works and your first superyacht charter.

If the racing matters less than the setting, the Monaco Historic Grand Prix runs on the same streets earlier in the spring, with the same circuit and a fraction of the crowd. It is the weekend that people who go to Monaco every year quietly prefer, and rooms and tables are obtainable at ordinary notice.

If the yachts are the point, the Monaco Yacht Show in late September fills the same harbour with the largest collection of superyachts assembled anywhere, and the logistics are calmer because the roads stay open. And for the fortnight before the Grand Prix the whole coast is in its best condition, which is why so many clients build a week on the French Riviera or in Saint-Tropez around the race rather than flying in and out for it.

Whatever shape the trip takes, the cars on the coast are arranged through operators we know, on the same itinerary and through the same contact as the aircraft and the yacht. Our own cars and employed chauffeurs are in London and Manchester, which is usually where the weekend begins.