While most of the team are staying in fairly generic lodgings this week, one member of the Red Bull F1 team is having a rather more traditional Belgian Grand Prix, roughing it with the fans on a campsite.

Of course ‘roughing it’ is a term open to interpretation: we have a restaurant, a bar, a swimming pool and – courtesy of our friends at www.vwescape.co.uk – a Volkswagen California camper van with more bells and whistles than you can shake an exceptionally shaky stick at. Actually, we’ve probably got the better of the deal.*

 

We’re not the only ones happy with our set-up for Spa. Since the remodelling a couple of years ago, the circuit now boasts a new F1 paddock, complete with a beautiful truck-sized access road. The old paddock used to be a poky nightmare, capable of reducing even the most hardened truckie to a neurotic mess; today it’s simple. Or at least as simple as anything can be when navigating a 44-tonne articulated lorry filled with several million dollars worth of race kit into a precise space surrounded by a bunch of other expensive, fragile and/or irreplaceably priceless things. Suffice to say the truckies claim it’s easier now, and we’re not going to argue.

Of course, once the teams’ trucks are parked, the truckies get to use their other core skills: rigging things, polishing things and moaning about their feet. Despite a job description suggesting an awful lot of sitting down, truckies spend most of their weekend running around doing the million-and-one jobs that keep the teams going.

And they never, ever, have comfortable feet. And Spa is one of those races with a high probability of being a double shoe day – ie the boys bringing a spare pair of trainers to change into when the first pair are simply too wet to continue with. At some races it’s a product of heat and humidty; here it’s usually the other thing.

So far this weekend we haven’t had a real Ardennes howler but as they say around here, if you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes and it’ll give you something else…

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