Nagoya, the big city just northeast of Suzuka and a gateway many race fans pass through, has a cuisine of its own, rich, sweet and unapologetically bold, and its most famous bar snack is tebasaki. The story begins in 1963 at a Nagoya restaurant called Furaibo, where a surplus of chicken wings, the result of an ordering mistake, was fried, brushed with the house's sweet soy sauce and sprinkled with pepper. The mistake became the city's signature, which is a lesson to anyone who has ever ordered too much of anything.

Tebasaki are fried without batter, twice, so the skin turns thin and crackly, then glazed while hot with a soy, mirin and sugar sauce and finished with a generous amount of white pepper and sesame seeds. They are eaten with fingers, ideally with a cold drink in the other hand, and they are as natural a companion to an evening of qualifying as anything we know.

The glaze

Ingredients

• 3 tablespoons (45 ml) soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons (30 ml) mirin
• 2 tablespoons (30 ml) sake
• 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 garlic clove

The wings

Ingredients

• 2 1/2 lb (1.1 kg) chicken wings
• 1/2 teaspoon fine salt
• 3 tablespoons potato starch
• 6 cups (1.4 liters) vegetable or canola oil
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground white pepper
• 1 tablespoon toasted white sesame seeds

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