F1 from Istanbul

Well, here we are at the first ever F1 race to be held in Istanbul, Turkey. It's a new track added for the F1 circuit this year, and we're glad we're here to witness it! Actually, having the F1 tickets for the race this year, really helped speed our way thru customs at the airport, and in addition, helped us save 90 us Euros on the Turkish visa requirement - it was completely waved for F1 ticket holders. Almost didn't work for Vicky and I though, cause we didn't have our tickets yet...not even a confirmation number of payment. Karri and Renato had confirmation numbers, but for some reason I didn't get any after purchasing the tickets. The only piece of paper I had was a printout I had of an email I had sent to the ticket purchase agency in Istanbul asking them to deliver the tickets to our hotel. This was all I had...but it was enough to get the F1 Turkey stamp in our passports! Sweet! At the airport the F1 organizers were great - lots of information about how to get to the track, 70kms outside of Istanbul, and the people tending the various booths were helpful. Once we got into instanbul however, this seemed to change and not many people seemed to know much. Luckily though, it was not difficult to get to the track - we simply caught a city bus a few blocks from our hotel and it took us directly to the track.

When we got to the track, we looked around and picked an area in the green section that our tickets matched, to watch the race. This happened to be on the far north side of the track. It had a view of two corners, with a chance to see the cars both decelerate and accelerate, but not to top speed. There was only 1 corner where you could see them get to top speed of about 320km/hr, and this happened to be near Renato and Karri's seats. Our tickets were general admission which means we didn't have "bleacher" type seats - we sat on the ground, which was supposed to be grass, but because the track areas weren't quite complete, were actually dirt. Good thing we brought our rain jackets to sit on!

Before the race started at 3pm there was a parade with all the drivers in old style sport cars, as well as a few flybys by the Turkish Air Force, shown below.

By 3pm though, it was race time, and we were ready to watch. The clouds had parted and it was starting to get pretty toasty out there. Good for the cars though, as the heat would assist gripping on the corners. The track is huge ...over 5kms long but it was amazing to see how fast the cars would make it around this 5km circuit. Shortly after the race started, maybe 3 laps had gone by, and the cars had already split up enough that it was almost a constant buzz of doppler effect.

Cars were passing in front of us on average, every couple of seconds till the end of the race. Raikkonen who drives for McLaren-Mercedes, managed to get the pole the previous day with the fastest lap and also won the race on sunday - details here: http://www.formula1.com/archive/grandprix/2005/745.html. We didn't see alot of place changes from where our seats were, but we did manage to see one car spin out off the track. It definitely would have been fun to see them in the last S turn before the grandstands, since the cars were carrying so much speed, and it would have resulting in seeing more passing. But overall it was fun to have seen the race...and we managed to get a free sun hat as modeled by vicky below, on our way to the race - courtesy of the winning team this year, Renault.