5 am Thursday morning and the alarm clock sounds. Normally it would take an earthquake to get me out of bed at this time of the morning, but today is the morning we leave for Hockhenheim, home of this years German Grand Prix.
I’ve been a Grand Prix fan for a number of years, starting in the time of Senna and Mansell, back when most would say the Grand Prix excitement was at its height. I tend to agree with the people that say this, but I think they are missing the point of Grand Prix racing. In mine and my colleagues opinion, I don’t think the racing is necessarily the best part of being a Grand Prix fan, we think being a ‘fan’ is what its all about, and to truly appreciate being a ‘fan’ you have to have slummed it in a real ‘fan’ campsite. I’m now going to try to explain by sharing some of this years experiences with you.
Following the early start, we all gather and get loaded up into the VW Passat. The driver, another family member proudly quotes as we pull away “80,000 miles this car has done and not a single problem, amazing eh?” Yes, amazing we all say…(As you may have worked out by me adding this quote there is more to this story, but more about that later.)
As an avid reader of Road Magazine, I suspect you are really into your cars and road trips. What I’m trying to get across with this article, is that you don’t need to have a supercar or a hot hatch in order to enjoy a good road trip. Don’t get me wrong, I’m lucky enough to have a supercar and enjoy it on many trips like the Le Mans 24hr, last years Cannonball 8000 etc, but the road trips I enjoy most and look forward to most are these road trips to Grand Prix’s (So far we’ve been to British, French, Italian, to name a few…). I’m trying to understand the reason, but I think its because of the people you end up chatting too on a Grand Prix campsite and the random people you can suddenly be best friends with because they support the same team as you, or you have just asked to borrow their tin opener or hammer to bang in your tent pegs!
Speaking of crazy tent neighbours, this year we befriended a German named Dierk…He kindly lent us his hammer for our tent pegs, and later on came to see us with a bottle of local ‘firewater’ and five shot glasses. He was quite pleased with himself as at that point as he’s just come from the Finnish guys tent where he won a battle of who had the best ‘fire water’! (Although I’m sure the Finnish guys would have probably told us the same story the other way round!)
So whats it like on a Grand Prix campsite? At this point I need to explain that this is a description of campsites in mainland Europe, not Silverstone. As much as I love Silverstone, the campsite facilities are rubbish, the campsites are miles from the circuit and the atmosphere in the campsite is to be frank ‘boring’, try making a noise after 10.00pm on a Silverstone campsite and see what happens. Grand Prix campsites in Europe are a crazy and potentially dangerous places, Much better!
Imagine a place where there are thousands of drunk French, Dutch, Italians, Germans, English, Finnish and many more ‘species’ of fan all congregate in one place trying to compete for the prize of best campsite BBQ, biggest tent and Gazebo, best firework display, biggest PA system…need I go on?
OK, I only have a few more words left so were skipping to Sunday’s events, raceday. Predictably its another early start. When we arrived at the campsite, we’d realised later that night after we’d settled in and with some explaination from Dierk (and some laughter and shots to make sure) that we had actually pitched up in a campsite that was the complete opposite end to the stand we’d bought tickets for! Doh! Raceday is always an early start because when your in the cheap seats, like we always are, you need to get your pitch in the stand early, otherwise you’ll be spending the race looking at the back of someones head….
Leading up to the race there is actually quite a lot of entertainment on track including Classic BMW M1, GP2, Porsche SuperCup etc. When the F1 race finally came at 14.00 we were ready. We had our good seats, we had our beer, we had our Bratwurst. Its always a surprise to me how loud the beginning of the race is, as all the cars go past in one almightly burst of noise and energy, the onslaught just continues for the next one and half hours – awesome.
So race over, its time to go. We’ve already packed the tent in the morning so the car is ready to rock and roll as soon as we get back to the campsite (which as you remember is quite a long walk from our stand!) we get moving. We hit the usual end of grand Prix traffic but being Germany we move surprisingly quickly.
Once we clear the traffic we hit the Autobahn. Things are going well, spirits are high. About a hundred miles into the journey our driver suddenly comments “Boys, I think its all over.” Confused by this statement we all suddenly realise that the car is actually slowing down and nothing seems to be working….
“80,000 miles this car has done and not a single problem, amazing eh?” Remember that? Well unfortunately we picked the optimum moment in the cars 80,000 mile history to drive in through Europe…
