Christian’s Autograph Book: Part 4 (International Edition)

Seeing as I haven’t stopped talking about it for the last two weeks, I’d be surprised if readers didn’t know that I spent a long weekend last week at the home of Formula 1, Silverstone, for the British Grand Prix. Welcome to part 4 of a regular feature that I post after our trips to watch motorsport, documenting the great (and sometimes not-so-great) and good that we have cajoled into adding their moniker to Christian’s autograph collection. The great thing about having a seven year old son is that it gives me an excuse to get over excited if I spot a racing driver, and his dimensions make him perfect for pushing him to the front of the crowd.
Highlights so far in this series have included Romain Grosjean, Darren Turner, Daniel Ricciardo and Tim Harvey, and although we were delighted with each of those at the time, the bar, as I’m sure you’ll agree, was set pretty low heading into the Grand Prix weekend.
So here goes, the international edition of Christian’s Autograph Book:

19. David Coulthard – DTM and 13-time Grand Prix winner. (DC was appearing at a Red Bull publicity event at the beer tent on our site, and was supposed to be coming with Christian Horner and Sebastian Vettel, although they were somewhere else trying to stop Mark Webber doing a Basil Fawlty on Vettel’s race car. Tester Ricciardo was also in attendance, but we already had his)

20. Vitantonio Liuzzi – Force India F1 driver. (The Italian was staying at the hotel on the site where we were staying, and spent time signing autographs for the fans)

21. Tony Fernandes – Lotus Racing team principal. (Thoroughly nice chap. Turned up outside the hotel and signed autographs and posed for pictures whilst asking everyone’s name and chatting away like he was one of the lads. Stayed for about twenty minutes, and then got back in his Aston Martin and drove off – he wasn’t even staying at the hotel, just came to meet the fans. Had the desired effect though; I bought a team hat the following day. Legend)

22. Fairuz Fauzy – Lotus Racing test and reserve driver. (I knew I had seen him somewhere before. He was a little taken aback when we recognised him, but didn’t mind signing for the people who wanted one)

23. Lucas Di Grassi – Virgin Racing driver. (Seemed nice, even smiled when my friend’s son asked him if he could have his team cap – then ignored him)

24. Fernando Alonso – Ferrari F1 driver and double World Champion. (Don’t get me wrong, I get just as mad as the next person when I hear his constant whining over the team radio, and when his car pulled up at the hotel, my head was full of pre-conceptions of how he would snub us all and head indoors. I was wrong. He headed for the far end of the queue and proceeded to sign for every one of the 100 or so people in attendance, smiling for photos, and being generally very pleasant, I couldn’t bring myself to dislike him for those ten minutes, there was something very special about being that close to a World champion, something very hard to explain. After he finished signing, he ran the full length of the crowd and remembered exactly whose marker he had taken to sign the autographs, handed it back and thanked them. He shocked me, did Fernando – I still cheered when he got a drive through on Sunday though)

25. Robert Kubica – Renault F1 driver and Grand Prix winner. (I don’t know if it was coincidental that his Renault Megane (I bet he doesn’t drive one on his day off) drew up at the hotel at the same time as poker-buddy Alonso, but it did. As a consequence, what would usually have been the one of the highlights of the evening passed by without much fuss)

26. Nick Heidfeld – Mercedes GP test driver. (Signed inside Christian’s programme, and then signed the cover as he pulled it away – nice touch?)

27. Gordon Shedden – Regular BTCC race winner. (Definitely the most random of the weekend. Parked in the space next to us at Stafford services on the M6 on the way home. He too was on his way back from the Grand Prix with his wife, and we had a good chat. Very nice guy.)

The ones that got away:

Michael Schumacher. (Saw the crowd outside the hotel and got his driver to go around the back).

Vitaly Petrov (and his mum). (Signed a few, but got bored before he got to our end).

Felipe Massa. (Pulled a very clever (if a little mean) stunt, by sending his brother out, complete with big shades, so everyone would think it was him. While everyone was calling over his bemused looking sibling, Felipe sneaked in on a moped (nearly running Alonso over [by mistake? You decide]), and went straight into the safety of the hotel).

Jean and Nicolas Todt. (Resisted some pretty half-hearted calls from fans for an autograph).

Next update will probably have to wait until World Series by Renault, at Silverstone in September, at the earliest, although it will probably be an anticlimax after this one.

Follow me on Twitter: @daimccann
My limited pictures will be up on Flickr page soon: Ifitsgot4wheels.

2010 Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters Season Preview

Hockenheim will this weekend host the season opening round of the 2010 DTM, the eleventh season since the series was resurrected in 2000, where Mercedes will be hoping to end the dominance enjoyed by Audi, who have won the title in each of the last three years. Due to the cost reducing development freeze which restricts the teams from updating their 2009-spec contenders, the cars will remain unchanged, although there are new drivers, circuits and a rules package designed to give older 2008-spec cars a more level playing field on which to challenge the newer models. This change to the regulations allows 2008 cars to run 25 kilos lighter than 2009 cars, a tweak which has led to three of the four official pre season test days being headed by drivers of the older cars.
Leading the charge for honours this season will be Audi’s Timo Scheider, the German has won the last two titles and will be favourite to add an unprecedented third in a row, but it is difficult to decide who will be the biggest challenge to his attempt at rewriting the DTM history books. His main competition may well come from his own Abt Sportsline Audi team, who will run four other 2009-spec A4’s for 2007 champion Mattias Ekstrom, Briton Oliver Jarvis who moves up to a newer car after impressing last year, young Spaniard Miguel Molina and a new slim line Martin Tomczyk, fresh from shedding five kilos in a pre season attempt to bridge the gap to his compatriot. Team Rosberg will run a final 2009 Audi for Katherine Legge, as the 29 year old attempts to be the first female points scorer in the series. Three 2008-spec A4’s will be piloted by Audi prototype regulars, Mike Rockenfeller, Alex Premat and Markus Winkelhock, who will all be hoping to displace Mercedes’ Jamie Green as the top driver of an older car, after a remarkable season in 09 which saw the Briton triumph at the Norisring round. Mercedes will also field 08 C-Klasse’s for Susie Stoddart, Maro Engel, China’s Franky Cheng and David Coulthard, Britain’s all time record F1 points scorer and BBC pundit, who returns to competitive racing after a sabbatical in 2009, much to the delight of Mercedes motorsport boss Norbert Haug: “David is a great race driver, a likeable person and very competent. He perfectly fits to us.” The latest Mercedes cars have a formidable driver line up, bursting with F1 experience including 2005 DTM champion and long time McLaren test driver, Gary Paffett, Force India test and reserve driver Paul di Resta, Canadian nearly man Bruno Spengler, and six time GP winner Ralf Schumacher, whose rapid pre season showings have belied the underwhelming form of his tin top career to date.
The racing format remains unchanged with a four part qualifying session preceding a single race of around 170 kilometres, and the series will feature six rounds in Germany including the traditional Hockenheim curtain raiser, although the series will not finish at the circuit this year as a finale around the streets of Shanghai has been shoe horned in after the second Hockenheim event. Brands Hatch retains the British round, but Dijon loses out to accommodate the trip to China and Valencia’s Ricardo Tormo Circuit replaces Barcelona as host to Spain’s round. The series continues to draw bumper crowds, with 110,000 fans attending the launch event at Wiesbaden at the weekend, and over 90,000 again expected to descend on the Rhine Valley on Sunday.
German title holder Scheider is focussed on the task in hand, and explained what it takes to win the coveted title at the recent test session in France, “The first few races of the season are particularly important. There you have to do well and score points. After that, the right spirit, a good car and a top team are decisive. And I have all of these”. Round 1 this weekend should be a good barometer for the prospects of the two manufacturers for the season, after all the manufacturer who has won the season opener has gone on to clinch the driver’s title in each of the last five seasons, but it is by no means the be all and end all, expect a fight to the wire before we will get to find out who will become 2010 champion in the Europe’s premier touring car series.

How it all began: Part 2

After Spa in ’86 (and having spent the early hours in tears after Mansell’s Australian GP puncture – where he lost the title at the final round), our next F1 adventure would come a year later with another coach tour, this time to Hockenheim, to watch the German Grand Prix. My recollection of this trip is even cloudier; I remember that it was won by Nelson Piquet and that we had watched from the stadium section at the end of the lap. When we returned home from the race and watched the highlights, you could quite clearly make me out, wandering around the concrete steps towards the end of the race, the stand looking remarkably empty, I looked bored, that was probably because I’d been spoilt at Spa and Mansell was not winning this one. In the years following on from this, we started to take a tent and then a caravan and make weekends of it; we did Silverstone in ’88, followed by, in no particular order, a few trips to Le Mans, some more visits to Spa, lots of British Grands Prix and lots of national racing at Oulton Park. I have some wonderful memories of our travels, seeing Senna dominate in the wet, both at Silverstone in ’88 and his now legendary drive through the field in the European Grand Prix at Donington, and was in the Silverstone paddock at a Formula 3000 meeting watching a visibly shaken David Coulthard being interviewed about a possible Williams drive on the day the great man lost his life. I was at the Northamptonshire circuit to see not just Coulthard, but also Mansell, Johnny Herbert and Damon Hill win their home race. I watched on a large screen at Pouhon as more than half of the cars piled up at Spa on the run down to Eau Rouge in ’98, allowing Hill to lead a historic Jordan 1-2, Halcyon days indeed.
Seven years prior to the Hill victory, in the days when F1 and its protagonists were accessible to its audience, my Dad and I were in the pit lane at Spa on the Thursday before the race, and my Dad called to Eddie Jordan, asking who would be replacing Bertrand Gachot, who had been incarcerated in the UK for a mace spray attack on a London cabbie, EJ replied that he wasn’t at liberty to say, but that it was a young German; we assumed it would be Heinz-Harald Frentzen, we were wrong, it was of course, Michael Schumacher, who went on to qualify seventh, only to succumb to a clutch failure on the first tour. I realise how this story may, to more contemporary F1 spectators, seem romanticised at best, but it was a totally different ball game then, Ferrari were seen as unfriendly because they had a tarpaulin over their cars in the garage. You could wander around the garages of most teams on a Wednesday and Thursday, I had many pictures taken sat in F1 cars of the era, in their pit garages. The paddocks were totally accessible, we would have to dodge the back of the trucks as they backed up to the garages, and then sit and watch them be unloaded and washed, it only really changed about the time that Bernie Ecclestone tightened his grip on the F1 purse strings with the ’97 Concorde Agreement. I didn’t realise at the time just how lucky I was, my Dad loved it as much as I did, we spent ten days one year between World Sportscars at the Nurburgring and F1 at Spa, we camped two years in a row on the outside of the Mulsanne straight at Le Mans, and joined the hordes invading the track to welcome Martin Brundle et al home in the Silk Cut liveried Jaguar. Looking back, if I had to pick a favourite memory, it would almost certainly be the first race I saw at Spa, I was only six, a year younger than Christian will be when I take him this year. My Dad was taken too young, just weeks after Christian was born, and I only hope I can do as much to help him enjoy it as my Dad did for me. Mansell and Hill have been replaced by Hamilton and Button, the tickets have seen inflation that the Zimbabwean Finance Minister would deem excessive, but the bond between a Father and his Son, is timeless.

Christian's autograph book: Part1

You may have already noticed what I am trying to achieve on these pages, or you may not. If you are looking for a comprehensive motorsports results service, you are probably looking in the wrong place. If you're looking for a detailed analysis of the impact Red Bull's pull rod suspension has on lateral graining on Bridgestone's Super-soft tyre, again, I will be found wanting. What the blog is about is a) trying to give a unique slant on motorsport, particularly British motorsport, and trying to promote some of the best series' that the UK has to offer, and b) for as long as I have the editorial freedom to write what I like, I will insist on boring you with some of the mundanity that comes with being a motorsport fan, and wannabe motorsport journo. This is the first such instalment.
As I travel the circuits of the UK and beyond, watching the best that the sport has to offer, I will more often than not be accompanied by my Son, hot shot photographer, Christian, 7. Accompanying him to all events will be his digital camera (I will post his photo's, along with mine, on a soon to be created I.I.G.4 W. Flickr page), and his autograph book. I will be compiling a dynamic list of the autographs that he collects, along with any observations that we have about the person in question. I will first make a list of the few that he has collected prior to this season.


Oulton Park April 13th 2009
1. Daniel Ricciardo, British F3. (Comfortably Christian's favourite non-F1 driver, made a big fuss over him, Christian calls him his 'mate')
2. Max Chilton, British F3. (Looking bleary eyed by the Carlin transporter, after jumping the start from pole before the red lights had even come on, leaving him point-less)
3. Daisuke Nakajima, British F3. (Closest he has come to meeting an F1 driver)
4. Oliver Oakes, British F3.
5. Carlos Huertas, British F3.
6. Walter Grubmuller, British F3. (Christian refers to as Walter Grumbler)

Oulton Park May 30th 2009
7. Tim Harvey, Carrera Cup GB, 1992 BTCC champion. (Brought back some memories for me, I met him at OP at about the same age. Had a good chat with him, genuinely nice chap)

I'll post about my childhood experiences travelling around Europe with my Dad, watching mostly F1 soon. If only I could find my autograph books from then. F1 was a different ball game then with reasonable access to the stars, my autograph book included, to name a few, Michael Schumacher, Alain Prost, Sir Jack Brabham, Eddie Jordan, David Coulthard, Mika Hakkinen, Damon Hill, Martin Brundle, Derek Warwick, Rubens Barrichello, Riccardo Patrese, Andy Rouse I could go on all day, and I probably will one day.

Part 2 of Christian's autograph book will come early next week, after this weekend at British F3/British GT at Oulton Park.