The first impression of Istanbul was cold! I was expecting it to be pretty hot there, how wrong I was…! The second thing I noticed on the way from the airport to the hotel was the traffic, it was one of the busiest places I’ve ever been too. And some nutty drivers!
On Wednesday we went to the circuit in the morning, stayed there for all of about 5 minutes and then left to go back to the hotel! The rain was torrential and there wasn’t a lot of sense in walking the track in the pouring rain when we could do it the following day, so we turned around and went back to the hotel in Istanbul which on a very good run was 30 minutes and in the traffic could be up to 2 hours!
We didn’t do much the rest of the day, just stayed in the hotel and watched the rain. Also I was pretty tired from all the travelling and the time difference.
On Thursday it was a brighter day and we went to the circuit early in the morning and walked a lap. I have got the handheld Playstation PSP and have got the
Formula One game for it which has the Istanbul circuit on it so I generally knew the basic outline of the circuit but it doesn’t show the hills quite like real life!
It was really impressive and looked like an awesome circuit with a bit of everything in it, I was looking forward to getting out there. It was also good because Casey (Stoner) has the
Formula 1 game and you can have some really good wireless link-up races, a good way to learn the track!
We went back to the hotel in the early afternoon after I got everything organised at the circuit and then went to a shopping centre for about the 100th time on this trip and saw the same old stuff!
On Friday morning it was very cold. We left the hotel at 8.30am so we could watch the 125 and
MotoGP and we were due to be out at 11.30 with an extra 15 minutes added onto our morning session because of the new track. In the end we didn’t end up getting out on the circuit until around 1pm because of a delay for the 125s in the morning due to it being too cold!
