Yes, another picture of Sue standing by the van and still wearing her favourite shirt but now at Camping de L'Eau Rouge.

As you can tell we were jammed in like sardines but the food was OK (burger, wurst, chips sort of thing), the beer was a reasonable price, and there was a free shuttle service to and from the circuit except on the Sunday after the race when nothing could move on the road. Fortunately the weather was good and the 3km walk through the forest was quite pleasant.

The Eau Rouge stream, which lends it's name to one of the most famous corners in motor racing (actually more a kink than a corner) runs a few feet behind our pitch.

Click to Enlarge

The shuttle mini-busses took us to Blanchimont, the nearest entrance to the Spa circuit. After having our tickets scanned we had to walk through a narrow, pitch black tunnel under the track (Sue didn't like that bit) and then a road runs through the heart of the circuit giving access to the various vantage points.

We chose the double corner at Pouhon where the cars are breaking hard after the run downhill from Rivage and then dropping down to the s-bends at Les Fagnes. Here's a rough layout of the Spa circuit:

Corner Names

These photos show our view of the circuit. This was also a good location for the food and beer stalls and the loos for Sue. This being Wallonia, the French bit of Belgium, the men didn't bother with such niceties and just used the bushes behind the crowd. They never show that bit on TV!

The crowd on the Sunday, race day, was enormous and despite arriving at our chosen point before 9am we were still several rows from the front and had to stand in order to get a decent view. The Brits were there in considerable numbers and at times all you could hear were English voices, it almost felt like the British GP MkII.

The number of trucks used to transport the teams to the GP is incredible. The photo above shows part of the Mercedes team fleet, all with sequential (UK) personalised number plates and parked in a precise row with millimetre perfect spacing. Obviously German drivers! The other big teams also had similar sized fleets.

That's about it for the Spa GP except for the race itself which was spoilt to an extent by the Rosberg/Hamilton incident. The Germans in front of us seemed quite happy though, they just carried on drinking their beers with Jaegermeister chasers. By the end of the afternoon they'd nearly filled a large bin sack with empties!

Next morning our British neighbours on the camp site were mostly off at the crack of dawn to catch ferries home. We had a leisurely start 'cos we only had a 2 hour run to Koblenz - almost too leisurely, we just got the last space on the stellplatz.

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