We went up to Casino Square, and it was like a zoo up there - a lot of obviously EXTREMELY wealthy people, putting on a show for the ordinary punters - it was hilarious how many old men were with young supermodel looking women... We were sure these girls were with these blokes for their sparkling personality and charming wit... heh heh.
Not long after this we headed back to Nice for the night, and found somewhere to have dinner again. There was an overabundance of tourist restaurants (over-inflated prices, average food and poor service...), so it was always difficult to find a decent place to eat, but things didn't end up too bad for us most of the time luckily.
We spent another very bad night in the stifling heat and excessive noise of the rat-pit that pretended to be a hotel room, however Damo put earplugs in this time and ended up getting a fairly decent nights sleep.
Damo woke up early the next morning and made his way towards the train station for qualifying. On the way he found a boulangerie that sold some of the nicest french pastries he'd ever had. After grabbing a handful of these and a cup of coffee, the walk to the train station continued. Our hotel was about 20 minutes walk to the train station, so a few pastries later he was there! The train to the track only took about 10 minutes, and is very easy. With it organised like this, you definitely don't need to spend the money to stay in Monaco for the race, that's for sure.
Once arriving at the track mega-early, Damo set about trying to find a Red Bull Racing team shirt to buy, and also going and getting Kangaroo TV which is a really cool handheld tv that you hang around your neck on a lanyard and it gives live timings of all the events (ie. Porsche Supercup races, Renault World Series and GP2 as well as F1...). The racing action kicked off at about 8:45am, and Damo was well and truly settled into his seat by the time the first engines fired up.
The Porsche Challenge was first....
Followed by the Renault World Series...
Damo loved all of the racing, but after all this, was the F1 morning practice session! It was awesome, however just before it started, it started raining, and left things in a very strange state - over the session, the Spyker driver of Adrian Sutil ran the fastest! They say that rain is the great car equaliser, but based on this Adrian Sutil is the star of the future!
This was followed by the GP2 (which is the driver feeder series for F1 these days - Lewis Hamilton and Heikki Kovalainen both graduated from there last year....) which also has Bruno Senna racing this year (Ayrton Senna's nephew).
The practice session was great, but the qualifying was better. Kimi Raikkonen hit the wall at the exit to swimming pool, which was right near where I was sitting, and I could see it from my seat! In Monaco, if you don't qualify well, it pretty much means that your race is screwed. So that was pretty much the end of Kimi. Apart from this, all else pretty much went as expected with the Mclarens on the front row.
The day all in all was excellent, and after the F1 qually there was another Renault World Series race and another GP2 race, and by this time it was about time to head back to Nice.
Whilst Damo was off gallavanting around Monaco, Nikki spent her time shopping around Nice. A pretty good day for both of us really! Damo met up with Nik in the afternoon at about 6pm and did a little more shopping, and then we both headed for dinner. We spent a little time watching some street performers, and then we settled in for a meal. After dinner we were both pretty exhausted, so we pretty much headed back to the hotel for bed. By this time it was fairly late anyway, so we sort of just flaked.
The next day was race day, and we both headed off for the track pretty early. We stopped at the same place that Damo stopped for brekkie the day before and got a few handfuls of french pastries and a couple of cafe au lait's again. We got to the train station and there were hundreds of people dressed in all sorts of different team gear - it was brilliant to see, and just a hint of what lay ahead!
We made our way to the track early and found our way to our seats. As we were on our way to them, we walked past the Ferrari dealership in Monaco - very cool. A couple of F430's parked out the front, amongst other things - they were sensational.
We entered the circuit, found our seats and got ready for the action to begin. Once again, we had all the support races in the morning, which were all great, but really we were only there for the main event.
As it turned out, the race was excellent, and the atmosphere in Monaco during a race weekend is very difficult to describe apart from that it is electric. The backdrop is amazing and they yachts incredible. Not to mention that Monaco itself is a very pretty place.
Alonso ended up winning, with Hamilton coming 2nd and rounding out the podium was Massa in the Ferrari.
After the race we decided to go for a bit of an explore around Monaco and decided a walk up to Prince Rainier's castle in Monacoville was on the cards. It was a lovely sunny afternoon, and this part of Monaco was very pretty - a lot older - we wandered around up here for quite a while after the race, and then found somewhere to have a glass of wine and a bite to eat - the food in Monaco/Nice/Cannes (Cote d'Azur) was all very Italian influenced, and pizza was fairly high up the list of things to eat. Damo was unhappy with this.... ;-)
Monacoville is set very high up in the cliffs overlooking Monaco, and the view from there over the track and harbour was spectacular. We spent a good couple of hours checking out this area and admiring the view of the track and the harbour. It was good to see a different perspective of the whole area.
After we'd finished up here, it was about 6.30pm, so we decided to make our way back down to the track to the La Rascasse corner where there was a massive dance party happening with Hed Kandi playing. It was awesome, and they had the music absolutely cranked up, and the party was happening with the DJ on the decks up on a balcony outside with absolutely gigantic speakers thumping music out across all of Monaco - it was THAT loud! We were enjoying some of the wicked music, and just chilling out for a bit when we start seeing all of the team transporters pulling up near the pit lane entrance (which is right next to La Rascasse). Of note was the Vodafone Mclaren Mercedes transporter - and all of a sudden we see a Mclaren F1 car getting wheeled out the pit lane entrance right in our general direction - if we didn't move we would have gotten hit. Damo grabbed out his camera and started clicking - he'd never been so close to a real F1 race car in his life, and this was Fernando Alonso's car - The race winner! AMAZING!!!! We watched as they hoisted it up into the transporters, and we thought that would be that, when all of a sudden Lewis Hamilton's car comes next. What an amazing end to our time at the Monaco GP. Here we were standing at the pit lane entrance at Monaco, listening to the sublime beats of Hed Kandi, looking at the race winning car and 2nd place car and they were no more than 30 centimetres away from us! It really couldn't have gotten any better than that.
(The rest of our Nice trip to follow....)
