This trip all started with small talk at work. Waiting for a CI pipeline to finish and as usual, F1 was brought up pretty quickly, leading to a conversation about the upcoming races. Before I knew it, a day later I was paying for flights, an apartment and weekend race tickets for the Spa-Francorchamps F1 race in Belgium. Barely four weeks later, I was on a 6am flight, driving 100 miles, taking a 25-minute train under the English Channel, and then driving another 220 miles just to sit in a forest in Belgium and watch cars drive past.

Arriving on the Thursday allowed us to get settled before the start of the race weekend, naturally with some Belgian beers, and talk rubbish well into the early hours of the morning.

Although our apartment was right at the doorsteps of the track entrance (literally!), our grandstand wasn't which meant we had an almost 2 mile hike through the crowds to get to our seats. This would take anywhere between forty minutes to an hour to get through, depending on the general pace, water (or beer) and photo stops along the way. Though this walk led to an accidental, but possibly one of my favourite, pictures of the weekend. I really can't tell exactly what I love so much about it - if its the perfect focus on the car and driver in the background, the colours of the bokeh in the foreground or that it was purely accidental.

Although the walk to our grandstand was a bit of a trek in the heat with the elevation, they were well worth it as we sat at the corner of Les Combes with a view directly down the Kemmel Straight. From there you can see everything from the drivers lining up their overtakes either on the straight or attempting to dummy going into Les Combes.

A perk that came with our specific grandstand, unbeknownst to us at the time of purchasing them, was that it came with our own private, free food offerings ranging from burgers to pizzas to pastas to wraps. The free didn't end at the drinks either, giving us a free source of Heineken beers for the weekend as well as saving us a fortune as the drink prices ranged from €4 for a can of water to €6 for a can of Heineken while food was starting at €9 for a bare, mystery meat burger.

Another advantage of our seat location was the slower speeds the cars would go around Les Combes during practice sessions. Initially I was taking, not bad but pretty static and admittedly boring shots of the cars driving past our seats.

Though when Oscar Piastri's McLaren had a bit of an electrical hiccup at the end of the Kemmel straight, I was able to get a pretty close-up shot of him and his car as he drove through the run-off asphalt.

But the highlight of my gallery was certainly the panning shots of the cars which I felt sitting at Les Combes marginally improved my success rate, though I did still come home with almost five thousand photos of which I kept maybe 30% and of those maybe half of them are actually okay with less actually being worth showing to people.

Finally race day! Lucky for us, Les Combes saw much of the action during the race, including Russel's punt into the gravel by his old teammate which all but guaranteed the win for Antonelli. Apart from that and a few overtakes on the Kemmel straight with DRS (or whatever they've now called it) and into Les Combes, the race was a standard Spa-Francorchamps - more exciting to talk about and experience than to actually watch, especially with this year's regulations.

Overall, it was one of the best weekends I've had in a long time - probably my favourite of the three F1 races I've attended. Between the company I was with and being at one of the holy grails of racing, it's something I'll be recommending for years to come. Now if only F1 would move to nicer sounding engines...

This post has been long overdue and in the backlog, among the other handful of posts I've been meaning to write, but finally after five weeks it's finally here :)