Suzuka Photo Extravaganza

My journey to get to Suzuka has been fun but also quite frustrating at times. I arrived at Nagoya airport after a night time flight from Korea. I desperately needed a cigarette after getting off the airplane and I took a picture of the security man as he glided, silenty past me. I have seen them here using Segways before but this something new to me.

Security police at Nagoya airport in strange electric transport

 I decided to take the ferry boat from the airport to Tsu. This was quite easy to do as the ferry terminal is located next to the airport, but trying to find a bus to the train station was very, very difficult. All of the signs on the buses were in Japanese and hardly anyone speaks English. Eventually, I made it to the train station and had exactly the same problem trying to find the train to take me to Suzuka. When I arrived in Suzuka, I could not find a taxi so I had to go to a shop and ask them to telephone a taxi to collect me and take me to my hotel. I think my journey from the airport to the hotel would take a Japanese person 2 hours. But it took me 4 hours.........but at least the Truckie was not late.

School children watching us from the grandstand.

When I arrived yesterday, the sun was shining, but as soon as I got to Suzuka circuit, today, the rain came down quite heavily. As the teams set up the pit wall stands in the rain, local school children arrived at the circuit to watch. We were given some good news and were told that our containers would remain in the paddock, behind the garages. Last year, we had to put everything from the containers, into our garages which just meant a lot of unnecessary work for everyone. But this concession by the circuit owners comes with a strict set of rules. We were given this paperwork that you can see in the picture.

Ford team inside their container.

I can appreciate that the circuit want to project a certain image and the teams realise this as well. Maybe if the circuit owners had realised this before the containers were put onto the ground, they could have made sure that the containers were placed in a nice straight line, rather than waiting until all of the cranes and manpower had finished and left the circuit.
As the rain continues during the day, the hard work of unloading the containers and setting up the garages goes on. Truckies are hard at work as the mechanics prepare the cars after the USA race. The containers only arrived on Monday and the circuit were not allowing teams to stay and work late on Tuesday evening. Everybody was frantically checking all the equipment, repairing damaged cars and servicing engines, ready for the first test session on Friday.

Radio check, radio check !

A new edition to the paddock was the Honda team who seem to have done some very quick lap times in their test sessions.

WILL THEY BE ABLE TO STAMP THEIR AUTHORITY IN THEIR FIRST WTCC RACE   ????????

The tyre man from JAS Honda was given all the information from the Yokohama tyre company on how to complete the scrutineering process and whilst I tried to get you some early pictures of their car and garage set up, I was asked to wait !!!!
I am sure that they will find my blog very interesting and it will certainly help them if they continue into next year.

JAS Honda garage.

JAS Honda tyre man gets busy.

As Suzuka circuit celebrates 50 years of racing, the Truckies continue the race by race work of ensuring that the mechanics, the engineers, the data engineers, team owners and the drivers have all the equipment needed for the smooth operation of the team. To the fans of motor sport, I really do not think that they realise the hard work and dedication that is put into the WTCC championship.

I know we do not have the money that F1 has but I know that there is so much heart and soul given by everybody who is involved and as Andy Warhol, the famous artist said, "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes" For the teams in the WTCC, our races are televised and watched for a bit longer than 15 minutes. Maybe we are famous for the short time we are on television but the hard work to get there is a BIG TEAM EFFORT.

Back of the garages at Suzuka on a wet Wednesday afternoon.

 

My friends from MST who supply the timing equipment for the WTCC races, invited me to see how they operate at each race and I also had the chance to go to the main race control tower at Suzuka, I thought I would share this picture of the race circuit TV system.

MST timing equipment area, under construction

Mission control....Suzuka Circuit

 The work will continue tomorrow and I will be busy making some video of some more behind the scenes action of the WTCC.

This last picture is of a counting device that is fitted to every front and back door in the garages, to monitor how many times that the doors are opened and closed. I have NEVER seen this at any other circuit in the world
                                                         WHY ???????   I do not know.

And finally, due to financial problems for one of the teams, one of the Truckies was not in Brazil, the USA and  will not be at Japan, China or Macau. Myself and many others will  miss him very much.

The sign says, MOTORSPORT IS DANGEROUS