Background info:
My uncle won a charity auction at a Japanese Themed event at the back end of this year for 2 weekend passes to the Japanese F1, flights and accommodation. As a keen F1 fan myself, he's a rugby league and footie fan, I was asked to go.....I nearly bit his hand off!
The trip was obviously a long time off but as the time got closer the excitement grew!
We flew out from Heathrow on Wednesday 26th October arriving in Japan (Narita Airpot) in the middle of Thursday afternoon. A quick 2 hour taxi ride from the airport and we where in our hotel in the Shinjuku area of Tokyo. I have plenty of pics but won't bore you guys!
We already decided we would only attend Practice 3, Qualy and the race to give us some time to visit other areas of Japan.
Anyway weather on Thursday was a humid high twenties and cloudy, Friday was fantastic sunshine and 30's, we where looking forward to a spectacular grand prix weekend!
Onto the F1 bits:
The race organizers had restricted access to the Fuji speedway to just shuttle buses. Depending on the stand you where in determined where you needed to get your shuttle bus from, for us that was Mishima. We therefore needed a cab to the nearest train station (Shinjuku), a subway triain to Tokyo Central Station and then a train down to Mishima, In total that was around 1hr 30 mins so we started from our hotel at 7am. From Mishima there was a constant fleet of coaches to take us the 1hr to the Fuji speedway.
Once you apprach the speedway there was a tailback of about 1km which seemed to take around 40 minutes to get us to the drop off area:
Drop off area:
We then had walk a snake up through the speedway plaza to get to the actual track and our seats.
Queue:
Our stand was D which was on the outside of turns 1 and 2, great place to see some first lap action we hoped!
Stand:
Here was a view of turn 1:
And turn 2!:
All these pictures where taken before practice 3 and you can see the wonderful weather!
More to follow....
