Stick it in a box and open after Christmas.

Hugh Dennis

Dover docks, 1pm. Huge queues greet us. Sea France has gone bust, so there are less ferries to take all of the trucks, vans and cars across to France. Whilst buying a very overpriced coffee latte, I spot comedian, Hugh Dennis, sat in a corner with his friends. For a man who is very funny on tv,s  MOCK THE WEEK, I can,t help but wonder why I haven,t heard his friends laugh!!  When he gets up to leave, I,m giving him that "you,re famous" look. He surprises me when he says "hello". Maybe he,s a petrol head and he,s seen us on television?

Time spent waiting for an available ferry is a good time to ponder how seagulls get to be so big, when all they do for food is eat our leftovers and a few fish.
Compared to some car ferries, the cross channel ones are a pleasure to use. Drive on one end, straight off at the other end. No nasty, steep ramps for you to navigate with your minimal ground clearance race transporter. More on this subject at a later date.

Ibis Calais hotel, 7.00am the next day. Time to head up to Antwerp. A quick check around the truck for immigrant stowaways reveals nothing. I,m sure that sometimes, they have ended up going back the way they came. No tolls are necessary on the French autoroute as this short stretch is known as "the corridor" But as a foreign registered truck entering Belgium, we have to purchase Benelux road tax, to keep within the law. This seems to be harder to buy each year as they switch from selling it in petrol stations to selling it online.
Perhaps we should do that in future.

containers at midnight

You can spend alot of time in a working day, slowing down to turn into a service station, find a space for the truck, park up, walk to the shop, buy something, walk back, and continue your journey. Couple that with toilet breaks and over the course of a day, it all adds up.. And you can,t just go faster, to try and make up for, it due to the 90 kmh limiter fitted to your truck.

containers being loaded

It has been well over a month since the last race of the season and it,s time to collect the cars,spares,pit gear,etc,etc.from Antwerp. All of this was packed up in containers in a highly co-ordinated, careful and efficient manner by all the team members, in 25 degree heat. Even hotter inside the huge 40ft ovens. With a fair amount of humidity thrown into the mix as well. Just enough to make you sweat in places that make your life massively uncomfortable. Time to reach for the talcum powder and the baby wipes.

After watching your containers craned through the air by an army of locals and swiftly driven away, it is hard to believe that you can forget about them over Christmas. Until now.....

keep your car warm

The pick-up point is a shipping warehouse that would accommodate quite a few jumbo jets  and still have room to hold a fork lift truck race. It,s huge inside......and rather chilly. Lucky we have all the equipment loading to keep us warm.

All of this logistical headache is controlled by the efforts of a couple of Germans, who are there to help us with all aspects of shipping, throughout the season. With teams being based around Europe, everyone has their own governments rules for shipping stuff globally. If the European Union fails in its efforts to stay together, we will go back to the dark ages of long border waits and enough paperwork to decimate another rain forest. I,m sure that you have heard about German efficiency. These guys definitely don,t let the side down. Teams are allocated a time slot to arrive and collect their stuff. Articulated race trucks smarten up the warehouse with their paint schemes while Belgium forklift drivers, weave and pirouette around them, speeding up the loading process.
The warehouse is full of thousands of brown boxes, which all seem to have "made in china" printed on them. Is there anything that the Chinese don't make? Or do they only make the boxes? Contrast that to some of the cars which should have "wrecked in china" on them.
 
The long sea journey, heat and humidity can cause rust at an alarming rate, Hence the smell of WD40 in the air(other water repellents are available). It,s the only way to slow down the corrosion brought on by the containers being at sea. But watch out for those little mofo,s, lurking somewhere in a corner of a box or in the car, That spider or other sub tropical critter has made it all the way back to Europe. Albeit with a mild  case of hypothermia.
It always seems strange, but quite warming, when you start seeing familiar faces of other team members in Antwerp. These faces, that last year, were dirty, sweaty and tired when you saw them last. We could stand and talk in our best Eurish,Spanglish, or whatever we communicate in. But work takes over, hands are shaken and farewells said.

too much kit for their trucks!!

Leaving Antwerp at a reasonable time. We decide to try to get back to England. The queue that we saw when we arrived at Calais was soul destroying. Bigger than the one in Dover. A long day is about to get longer. Rather than do the sensible thing and check into a hotel, we waited, and waited, and waited.  Not the best decision in the world to make. If anyone has a spare car ferry, I know where you can put it to use and make some good money!!

The docks at Calais are slow at the best of times due to the British Customs and Immigration. Most trucks entering the port have to go through a rigorous checking system for stowaway immigrants. Not a bad thing. But no matter how many times you do this trip, the waiting time gets to you. And you will nearly always be asked if you have a race cap going spare. They must have cupboards stuffed with caps at home. The irony of the cap is that it really doesn't speed up the process of the so called "checking sheds". The electric roller door opens, and we are free! Only for the orderly lines that we were in, turn into a big truck bottleneck as we jostle and squeeze our way towards the 4 ticketing booths. Creeping forward as the trucks filter through takes up even more time. One more check at some other booths after that for passport purposes and finally into one of the holding lanes. The ferry ticket says 7.30pm loading time. One and a half hours for the crossing and then we gain an hour back due to the British time zone.

Another hotel in the evening, and some rather tight parking in their car park follows. If you drove a normal freight truck into a hotel car park, they would tell you to bugger off. Amazingly, we are normally welcomed. It must be all that shiny paintwork and the graphics on the truck that helps. BLING,BLING.  The following day, we drive back to our base. Get unloaded, and start checking everything before reloading the trucks at a later date.