monaco pics

Well, here's the good stuff - pics of the Monaco trip. Really it was only about two months ago, but it already feels like ages.

You should be able to click these pics and it'll take you to the full photo album if you want to go through them there. The versions in the photo album are 1024*768 res.

So, first off, here are some establishing shots of where we were sat on the Thursday morning. We were at a place called Tabac, which is called that because there's a tabac (a tobacconists) under the road in a subway walkway.









From where we were we could see the top of 'the rock' as it's called. I understand there's a palace up there:



And we could see the harbour pretty well:



Monaco's pretty damn compact, and I guess they always need to save about as much space as they can. This is a little golf buggy that's done up as a fire truck!



So anyway: the important stuff!

Here's a Brawn coming around the corner:



And a Renault doing the same:



Not sure who this is, but then I was more focused on trying to get the "whizzing past" effect. This also demonstrates just how close you are to the track and the cars at Monaco. You don't get anywhere near as close as this at any other circuit.



And here's a shot of the rear-end of a car as it blasts down past piscine. I think this was a Renault:



But Formula 1 is not all that happens on race weekends. Here's the rear-end of the GP2 cars as they go around on their parade lap:



And here's a front-shot of a GP2 car. Notice just how similar they are to F1 cars - it's meant as one of the feeder formulas for F1.



And off they go away from us:



But wait, who's this:



Why, it's Martin Brundle and David Coulthard of the BBC's commentary and formally of driving about in F1 cars fame:



And here's Coulthard staring 'right down the barrel' as it were. There's a good chance he was looking right at us, rather than this being a coincidence, because my Dad was almost totally unable to see them.

I don't mean that he couldn't see them because his view was obstructed, I mean he was looking, but despite both me and my sister pointing them out, he couldn't spot them. Since me and my sister were pointing at them, he may have noticed and wondered what was going on :/.



So anyway, that was morning practice. After lunch we moved to the next door stand, which was one of the good things about the whole harbour area - the seating wasn't assigned, so you could sit basically where you want, and there were about 6 or so stands.

These are some establishing shots. As you can see, we're much closer to the piscine area here than tabac.







And here's more of those yachts. Millions and millions of pounds worth of yachts. And these are the small ones :/.



This is a long shot of the tabac corner now, because of how far we've moved down:



And the cars whizzed past in the afternoon session:



And that's your lot for today. Hopefully I'll be able to bring you day 2 either tomorrow or the day after. Day 2 is actually the Saturday - Friday there's no F1 action, so that was when we went to Cannes. Although I took my camera, I was sufficiently unimpressed that I didn't take any photos.