Bigpower

As I mentioned on another thread before I went, I went to the F1 testing in jerez on 11th Feb as a guest of Williams. My company is one of Williams main sponsors so I took some clients on the pretence of some hospitality but clearly was keener to go for my own benefit.

It was an awesome day because unlike a race meet you can actually get amongst it all and talk to people. We had hospitality in a large round glass room over the start/finish straigh, access to the pit lane etc and also talks from the team/drivers etc about what they were testing, how it was going etc.

Highlights:

Being in the pits while they practised pit stops - EVERYTHING is carbon, even the guards on the the wheel guns and the pole on the BRAKE lollipop - which is cool.

Being in the pits while they practised their starts - absolutely awesome noise and quite a sight when they take off.

Talking to Mark Webber - i'm no star spotter but he's a truly down to earth guy and was happy to talk for about ten mins even tho I was with williams.

The secrecy - as it was first test session covers got lobbed over rear spoilers as soon as the cars stopped in the pits.

The return of the black and gold paint jobs on the Lotus cars.

My client telling me he couldn't find our pit garage and asked a guy walking amongst the transporters who when he turned round was one M schumacher (he's gotta want to spend money with me after that!!)

The transporters - totally awesome rigs and the paint jobs on the torro rosso trucks was proper airbrushing,!!

Anyway, some pics


















plug for my outfit












All in all a great day!!

Is thomson reuters your company ?

Cool pics BTW

well not mine personally but thats who I work for

cheers, i'm no photographer though

Monster wrote:well not mine personally but thats who I work for

cheers, i'm no photographer though

Ah i see i thought wow he owns a global leading company !!!! lol

was almost fishing for a job .

must be nice to be so close to all them F1 cars.

Nice insight into the day, the noise must have been amazing

[quote="A2ON"]Ah i see i thought wow he owns a global leading company !!!! lol [quote]

Ha, yeah that would be nice....

Rob S wrote:Nice insight into the day, the noise must have been amazing

Yeah the noise was something else, especially when they were doing the practice starts

Insight wise the funniest thing was when the new Williams driver Pastor was talking to us at lunchtime he was saying that the Kers button was the biggest thing he needed to get used too.

I found out later by talking to one of the Williams guys (this wasn't made common knowledge but as I was the representative of the sponsor our chat was off the record) that when he stuck both ends in the barrier at about 4pm it was while he was trying it out!! They were hoping to get new bits over from the UK to fix the car and carry on testing the next day but as it was all new it was a bit of a shocker for them. Still, fair play, we've all been in the kitty litter after trying something new