World CUP of Motor sports

Watching an A1GP series race is always a good thing. This great new open wheel racing class is a absolute winner. All teams get the same material and basically all that decides who wins and who doesn’t is the setup of the car and the quality of it’s driver.

Watching this fantastic show live, including a brand new Dutch driver, on a Dutch circuit is awesome, absolutely awesome. And boy did we watch it live. Over the past weekend we got spoiled with two whole days filled to the top with superb motor sport events, live at the track of Zandvoort.

Team Netherlands had a last minute driver change when their number one driver, from now on referred to as ‘looser’, decided to screw all his fans over and stay away. To hell with him, never liked him anyway.

Their (or rather: our ;-) new number one driver was Jeroen Bleekemolen who more than proved to be the right man for the job. That guy is my new hero, it was such an absolute joy watching this man at work.

This series is divided into 2 races: one short sprint race and one longer race, called the feature race. I’m still not entirely sure on how the qualifying system works but the results of the sprint race count for the starting order of the feature race.

Our guy Jeroen was starting the feature race from tenth position and finished in an amazing fourth place. But it wasn’t the final results that will stay in everybody’s mind, it was the way how he did it. I don’t think I’ll ever forget watching this one. It was fantastic to watch.

In the old days when you watched a race live you could see the cars go by and than had to wait until they passed again to see what happened that lap. Nowadays we have the aid of big screens around the circuit which allows us to see just about everything that happens.

So whenever Jeroen overtook a car (and he did so a lot folks :-) simply everybody could see it and at those moments all hell broke loose on all the stands around the track. The roar of the cheering crowd was sometimes even louder than the noise the race cars made. It gave me goose bumps all over, I’ve never experienced something like this. The sound then thousands of people make when they cheer on their favorite driver is very intimidating.

After a number of laps he worked his way through to second place and when he then passed the car in front of him to take the first position they must have been able to hear the cheering all the way in that TV helicopter. That was such a incredibly cool moment. Every time he passed by everyone was at their feet and cheering him on.

In the end it was an unfortunate tire choice that prevented Team Netherlands from winning the race but it was a brilliant drive from Jeroen nonetheless. And boy did he get his share of applause and cheering when he stepped out of the car. It couldn’t have been any better when he had actually won the race. The crowd went nuts, completely nuts.

Apart from the A1 there also were a couple of other racing lasses present from which the Porsche GT3’s and the BLR class were my favorite. Specially the last one was fun to watch. They had no less than thirty seven cars on the grid, divided over two types of chassis.

When that many cars come storming over a hill towards both you and a pretty tight corner you have trouble deciding where to look, there’s just so much happening at once. And I’m such a big fan of large grids. When after a couple of laps the field spreads over the track a bit there are cars passing by constantly. It’s great to watch.

Looking back on the weekend the only thing that wasn’t too much fun is me straining a muscle early Saturday morning causing me to limp around the place during the entire weekend. Walking from the camping to the track and back again at the end of the day, and doing that again the next day. Right now I’m completely busted. Yesterday my right leg hurts just about as much as the left one, from trying to spare the other. It’s getting slightly better though, all I need is to take it easy a bit … I hope. ;-)