Having been to races in the past including Silverstone I found myself in a really exiting situation. Our site had been granted media accreditation for the Grand Prix Masters race of Great Britain . Ok so it wasn’t the F1 race at Silverstone, for me this was even better. I was going to be in the presence of such greats as Mansell, Fittipaldi and Patrese. So with this in mind we set off with our laptop, further more I wanted to record this great day for posterity so along came my little Fuji FinePix camera to capture as many shots as I could manage whilst at the same time keeping up my journalist obligations.

Part 1 (On Our Way)

We got to our hotel on Saturday in the early evening. Engine problems with my car had meant that we had missed the Saturday’s events. Ironic really, as that day Nicholson Mclaren had also experienced engine failures with their racing units.

Knowing that we had to pick up our media passes from Whittlebury Hall we arranged to have breakfast their instead of our own hotel which was is Northampton city centre. After a poor nights sleep due to music booming on the streets of Northampton and a lack of aircon we crawled out of bed at around 5.30am and checked out of our hotel.

We got to Whittlebury Hall and knew we were arriving at quite an exclusive hotel as it was flanked by its own 18 hole golf course and Spa. It was at this point when we saw a couple of large people carrier vehicles with blacked out windows, if that wasn’t a big enough clue as to what we should expect inside one of the vehicles had the official GP Masters logo splashed down the side of it. Upon our arrival we walked into the restaurant and saw Murray Walker and Nigel Mansell together having a conversation , I remembered thinking this was one of those moments where I could has easily walked up to them and asked for their signatures but it would have blown what little credibility that I had and bearing in mind that I could be interviewing them later I decided it wasn’t the time nor the place.

During breakfast the drivers and their wife’s just kept on coming, Jan Lammers, Christian Danner, Emerson Fittipaldi, Stefan Johansson. I remember thinking this is only the tip of the iceberg “I’m going to be with these guys all day”. By Andrew Cranswick.

Part 2 of this story (Pits, Media And Book Launches)can be read next week here on Grand prix masters Online.com