Race day arrived faster than either of us thought it would (no, that’s not a pun on the 200mph speed of the F1 cars!), we were both totally psyched and bounded out of bed at 7.30am ready to head to the track – well ahead of time.

I was ready first, to wait for Col, I headed to the computers in the lobby downstairs and checked my email – but, it wasn’t long before Col was good to go and we headed out to get the monorail to KL central where we had a very healthy and nutritious breakfast at McDonalds.  They have a cool breakfast box thing for 2 people which turned out to fill us up and give us the energy we’d need to face the start of the day!

Whilst we were eating breakfast, two young girls asked me about F1 tickets and if there were still some left as they wanted to go to the race.  They were so polite and their English was better than mine! LOL! I just think it’s a good thing when local people decide on the day that they want to go see the race. The prices are such that it’s possible- it’s one of the only tracks who do that – keep ticket prices low to encourage the locals to attend.  It’s commendable!

We then hopped the train to the airport and the bus out to the track, where we stepped in to the ‘autograph session’ queue at 10.30am.  Here’s how it was supposed to happen,

12.00 – 12.20; Group 1

12.20-12.40; Group 2

12.40-1.00; Group 3

We were chatting to an Aussie couple behind us in the queue and they, like us (and pretty much everyone else) assumed there was some kind of order to it.  Like, perhaps you split the queue so people can queue for the individual teams/drivers they’d like to get signatures from.

However, this was not to be the case – what actually happened, was that they had one queue and whenever the queue got to the signing table, you got the signatures from whatever drivers were sitting there.  Which turned out to be quite the disaster.  One queue, 6 or so drivers at a time – it moved at snails pace and the majority of people didn’t get anything signed.

Including us.

We queued from 10.30am until just after 1pm and they ‘finished’ the session about 4 or 5 people ahead of us.  So, we got to the front just as the last driver (Paul Di Resta) was leaving the building.

Worse than that – they had djs there and the guy from the radio was doing giveaways – which, wouldn’t have been so bad, had they given the stuff away to the people who had been standing in the queue for two and a half hours and who didn’t even get so much as a mug-shot of the drivers, but no, they were giving stuff away to people who had just appeared for photos or glimpses of the drivers, which, we didn’t get either cause we were waiting in the queue behind waves of people and couldn’t see diddly squat!

We were all absolutely FURIOUS and a whole lot of people have said they are going to complain – the queue spanned for probably another half mile or more behind us and we all braved the blistering heat to get absolutely nothing.  GAH.

I’m still mad about the whole thing!! Such poor organisation and nothing for our troubles at the end of it aside from dehydration and sweat-drenched clothes – thank God we bought a big umbrella or we’d both have been lobster-burnt to boot!

The one upside to standing in the queue for that long, was that we ended up having a pretty good chat with the Aussies behind us!

Deb is pregnant, in her 2nd trimester.  She openly disclosed that they’d been trying to get pregnant for 7 years and that her current pregnancy was a result of IVF.  Since she was being so open, I chanced my arm and probed a little deeper (not that that would be like me, eh?).  I asked her if it was her first round of IVF, she shook her head and held up 5 fingers.

It was her fifth round.  It never took before.

I told her we knew some people who’d just had their first round of IVF and who were pretty devastated about the fact that it didn’t take and she empathised.

She told us that in Australia (Darwin, the Northern territories, where they lived) you can only have 1 cycle of IVF per year and that after spending so much money and coming out the other side with nothing to show for it, you feel like a huge failure.

She said her advice is to pretty much keep at it and don’t give up hope – they didn’t and they’re now due in July, with their little baby boy who they are thinking about calling Jenson.

It was such an awe inspiring story and made me really hopeful for those people who we know (there are a few couples we know who are struggling, or have struggled in the past to get pregnant) that they too will have a success story in the end – it just might take a while to get there.

After our insanely long wait in the sunshine, Col and I decided to go and have lunch in the cafe.  They had a set lunch on, RM80 for a 3 course meal and 2 drinks – that works out at just under $30pp.

The starter station had minestrone soup, salad, various dressings and add-ons (like olives and fruit), bread rolls and garlic bread.  The main course comprised of either chicken, beef or lamb – unsurprisingly I took lamb (since it’s a rarity in TX) and Col took beef – both were delicious! The sides were rice, chips and veg and there were various sauces and gravies available too.

Dessert was either apple crumble, or chocolate brownie – both with a scoop of ice cream, but by the time we got to the dessert counter they’d changed the crumble to strawberry – so we both enjoyed some strawberry crumble.  They also had some delicious homemade lemonade and Col loved their coffee!

All in all it was a pretty successful lunch – the best meal we’d eaten in all 3 days of being at the track and it’s definitely the way to go if we were to return to the KL circuit in the future.

Since our seats were away from the main grandstand, we decided to take one last pass at the merchandise stands to make sure we didn’t miss anything.  One of the stands (where Col had gotten his sharp Brawn shirt) was doing a 3 for RM225 (shirts were originally RN90 each).

As it turned out, two of the shirts in the deal were shirts I’d told Col I thought would look good on him the other day when we did our first round of merchandise trawling.  The third shirt in the deal, Col already bought, so we ended up with 2 shirts for Col and we picked up a smaller size in one of them so I could have it! lol! Just under $80 for 3 F1 shirts isn’t a bad deal at all!

We abandoned the Sepang track shop, as it was packed – which is a shame cause I wanted a circuit polo top – and headed over to our seats on the little internal SIC bus.  When we got there, we stocked up on water for the race and Col bought us both the nestle version of a cornetto to enjoy pre-race.

The race itself was intense! It was such a different experience to watching it on the BBC or Speed.  The noise, the smell, nothing prepares you for it – but, more-so than that, it’s a lot more exciting ‘in the flesh’.  I found myself getting so much more tense (and have sore shoulders as a result) and worked up while I was watching it.

Something else that’s also lost in the translation from live race to TV coverage is the sheer difference in speed between say, the top 6 and the bottom drivers/teams.  It’s crazy! You don’t really gauge, in full, the difference in speeds between them.

As I’ve already said, this whole F1 weekend, buying the merchandise (and in response to the sheer volume of freakish Vettel Worship and the overwhelming number of Kiwis sporting Red Bull stuff), kind of forced me to ally myself with a team and a driver.

Before, I’d been more of a fan of different drivers, in different teams – and, to a large extend I still am.  I just firmly planted myself in the McLaren Mercedes team and spent the entire weekend naming Hamilton/Alonso as my No 1 and 2 drivers (respectively).

So, it made for a very intresting race when my no.2 driver decided to be a little over-aggressive (even for him) with my no.1 already over aggressive driver.  I couldn’t believe it – and it left a real sour taste in my mouth, given that both of them could have done a LOT better had they just not gotten carried away!

The gem of the day had to have been Nick Heidfeld getting a podium – he looked strong all weekend but a podium was better than we’d hoped for! What an outstanding race for the returning driver, we were pretty chuffed for him.

I was sad for Reubens, I consistently hope that he has ‘the’ race and he consistently has bad luck followed by worse luck – poor guy!

Another hi-light for me, has to have been the young Scottish Paul di Resta keeping Mr God-like Schumacher at bay for the last point-giving place.  I was screaming for him to defend his position at numerous parts of the race – quality.  It really was a quality race!

What wasn’t so quality, was the 5 hour trek back to the hotel.  It took us 45 minutes to jump on an already practically full bus from our gate back to the main car park.  Once at the main car park, it took us another hour or so to get through the winding snake of chain-link keeping everyone in an orderly queue.

The worst of it is, if you read my previous post about the day before – you’d know that this was about half the time it took then!

What was a million times worse than the day before, however, was the traffic from track to airport – and that took FOREVER! Thankfully I’d brought my book with me and sat reading on the way back and Col broke out the Race weekend programme and read through that to keep him occupied!

At 9.10pm, we finally get through the airport and on to the train only to be told that we’d a 25 minute delay before we left.  GAH! Thankfully though the train track was the fastest way in to the city (the tailbacks from all of the roads leading to the city from the circuit told us that much) so we didn’t complain too much!

Back at KL central, we did the half mile to a mile walk to the monorail station to find the monorail was only a minute away from picking us up – yes!

We were almost home!

We got back to our room utterly knackered, sore all over, sweaty and starving, so we ordered two club sandwiches (they had no burgers left) and set about trying to get the red ink stain out from my new white McLaren shirt.  AGH! Thanks to the KLIA (Kuala Lumpur Intl Airport) lanyard, the red ink from it had rubbed off on to my shiny new white collar – so I scrubbed it with shaving foam (which, I’d seen on a TV show, is a highly concentrated cleaner) and scrubbed it gently with a toothbrush and I got most of it out!

The food arrived about 20 minutes later and, it was stone COLD, not only that, but they’d forgotten our bucket of ice – AGAIN! Col called them, they apologised and said they’d replace it – the second time was much better, but the quality of bacon in the club sandwich was pretty much fat, fat and more fat.  Gag.  Definitely not what I expected from a 5 star hotel!

We ended up watching some trashy TV show called True Beauty and headed to bed just after 1am – the latest we’d been up in ages!

A mixed day all-round, however, the awesomeness (yes, it’s a word) of the Grand Prix definitely trumped all the other crap that happened.  My only sad points are that we didn’t get to meet DC (one of the couples we met got pics taken with him!) and I didn’t get any autographs or upclose pics of the drivers – but, I can work on that next time!

Meanwhile, all I can do about this time, is send in complaints to the appropriate people and hope the other fans who got shafted do the same!