The Grand Prix at Imola was just great fun! Ok, the driving down there and back was a bit to much for me, but being at the Grand Prix was quite relax and fun! We drove to Milan on Friday, stayed at a porn-motel along the highway… well, maybe not officially a porn-motel, but sleeping in a room with mirrors on every wall and on the ceiling (!!) and lots of people dropping by to rent a room for just an hour does make one wonder… :-)
Anyways, Saturday morning we drove to the Imola circuit. And to our great surprise we got there quite quickly… we expected big traffic jams towards the circuit, but non whatsoever! It might have been because it was Saturday and most people often only show up at the race on Sunday. We found a nice spot on the stand at the corner of the track we would be sitting the next day as well and watched the first qualification training, which showed us an hour of something like this:

Saturday Qualification (1.8 MB)		Räikkönen		Schumacher

Quite nice! Lot’s of noise, but as only one car at the time passed us, it was bearable and I didn’t need my earplugs. After this there were some less interesting races and we walked around the circuit for a bit. Quite a nice place, with one really extraordinary place, the memorial statue for Ayrton Senna. Very nice statue and also very confrontation… This was the place the good man died in 1994… I still remember seeing the horrible pictures on TV that day… the waiting for news… is he still alive? How could someone be after such a crash… It was a weird feeling being at that place, seeing the flowers in front of the statue and a crying fan in a Brazilian shirt… Touching…

That evening we found an hotel at about an hours drive from the circuit. The plan was to go to bed early, get up early and drive to the circuit early, so we would beat the traffic to the circuit again. Two out of the three plans worked out fine… going to bed early didn’t… We had a really fun evening and ended up drinking in the hotel bar so I didn’t get to bed until 02:00 AM… Luckily I didn’t feel to hangover when we got up at 06:00… No need to say I felt tired…

When we arrived at the circuit after another smooth ride in, the air didn’t look very promising… or maybe I should say it did look promising! Races with some rain are almost always more fun then “dry” races, so some part of me was hoping for a little rain, but at the same time I wasn’t looking forward to sit in the pouring rain for 8 hours… My hope and worry were for no reason; there were a few drops of rain, but the whole race was dry as could be. One thing was very different from the day before… our place in the stand. The first day we had a perfect spot in the corner, but when we tried to get to the same place on Sunday, we were told our spot was somewhere else… Our place was on top of a hill, with small seats, a slippery long steep stairway and packed with Ferrari fans…

Promising sky!		To many Ferrari fans…		Kimi fast in qualification (0.6 MB)

After the 2nd qualification and the Porsche race it was finally time for the GP to start! Exciting stuff! We could see the start of the race on the big screen in front of the stand and before we know it we could see the whole pact fly by! WHAT A NOISE! :-) Unbelievable!! The race turned out to be a bit boring, but seeing the cars fly by made up for a lot! Quite annoying moment in the race was when Kimi… that’s a funny thing by the way, how fast you turn to talking about the drivers and using their first names! :-) *hahaha* it’s almost like I have been to school with them! :-) Anyways, annoying moment when Kimi’s McLaren broke down and all the Ferrari fans started cheering when he was slowly passing us… Bastardo’s! :-)

What a noise! (8.1 MB)		Big screen close-up		Kimi breaks down… (2.9 MB)

After about 25 laps out of the 62 I had a little problem… I had to pee… Well peeing is not a problem of course, but getting off the stand was! Our seats were quite in the middle of the stand, so after getting up (the easy part) it was about 20 meters of rather heroic (if I may say so myself) and acrobatic balancing on a very small and slippery wooden underground between two very closely situated rows of rather angry looking race-fans… I was happy to survive! :-) But scared to go back… so after, what at that moment was definitely named, “the best pee ever” I decided to walk around a bit … a smart decision!!! I walked around the stand and got to the fence close to the track! WOW!!! I should have done that much earlier!!! Ok, you miss a lot of the race there, you can hardly see the big screen, just a very small section of the track, but WOW!!!! A truely amazing feeling to stand so close to the track when a Formula 1 car passes by! It’s not just the sound, or that close I should talk about pure noise! :-), but it’s also the feeling! You can feel the cars drive by! They go so fast that they seem to move a lot of air as well! So exciting! I think I stayed close to the fence for about 25 laps or so! :-)

Cars in the corner		Close to the track! (8.7 MB)		Williams

The last laps of the race I saw on top of the mountain again. Alonso had the lead and Schumacher was faster and pushing to pass him. To my great joy he didn’t! :-) After the race it was a long crowded walk back to the car. We turned out to be very lucky as the car was quite close to the circuit and we were able to leave Imola quite fast. A fun weekend was over, just a long ride home left…

Alonso and Schumacher		The crowd leaving

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 26th, 2005 at 23:42 and is filed under Sport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.