Friday 27th March 2009 -First F1 free practices of the season!

Breakfast consumed, showered, cases packed and now being looked after in the luggage room, tagged for when Barbara comes to pick them up.. myself and dad walk from the hotel to Southern Cross station for the last time, catch the VERY crammed tram to gates 2/gate 1 of Albert Park... once there we join the queue.. as we wait, TV cameras come by filming footage, and even some some TV presenters walk past.. like BBC F1 presenter Jake Humpheys.. once the gate opened at 10:30am, the first stop, was the toilets!, gave dad a quick 'tour' of the place (apart from the other side of the bridge)... yeah well I knew where everything was from yesterday!, then we went to our seats.. and prepared dad about the best view in the house!... yep once up in the stand he agreed!, The first race was the Australian GT championship race 1 consisting on 8 laps... then it was the Aussie racing cars race 1, with 6 laps -but we decided to take it in turns to go to the loos and grab some lunch...then.. 12:30-14.00 was the Formula one practice session 1...

The practices have now become the setting up options for race day, and trying to find the right balance etc, so drivers were going round for instalation laps then going into the pits.. eventually the drivers were doing full laps... I can't remember much on the free practices, I remember being fooled by BrawnGP drivers.. I kept saying to dad oh theres Rubens.. and Rubens again.. it wasn't until I zoomed in on the photos that I realised Jensons changed his helmet to yellow with black JB and st.georges cross in black round it.. and his car has the red 'T bar' where are Rubens has the yellow 'T bar' and yellow helmet too!
Nelson Piquet and Kazuki Nakajima took a trips into the gravel traps!

Heres the results of Free Practice 1:

After the free practice 1, the red arrows did a display.
Of course one the F1 practice had finished it was busy of fans getting down the stand for food and the queues for the loos would be long, so we decided to hold back...
Up next was the BMW Ultimate Speed Comparison round 2.
Paul Gover won in the BMW 135 Coupe, with Christian Klien in the BMW Sauber F1 car coming 2nd, and in 3rd place was Greg Murphy in the Sprint Gas V8.. everyone in the stand got up on the feet as they came down the main straight..

I then left the stand and phoned my cousin Barbara to make arrangements for tonight.. turns out she'd got a sore back, so meet us back at the hotel with Euan, and get the luggage at the same time!

After that they had the Historic Demonstration, then the Mini challange of 6 laps, and then the Sprint Gas V8 Supercars top ten shootout.

Then next Formula One free practice 2 started at 16:30, and WHO walks out of the Ferrari Pit garage to their pit wall...MICHAEL SCHUMACHER...everyone was cheering at him!

(9142) Sebastian Vettel took a little spin at one of the corners, even Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello had a moments off the track!And I was cold as sun was dropping, I was shivering so my photos became VERY bad and I couldn't get the right settings!!

Heres the Free Practice 2 results:

After the second free practice, myself and dad made our ways to the toilets, as as the army helecopters did there disply overhead.. so snapped a few photos, and headed to the food area, as dad wanted a cuppa tea, and a band was playing on the little stage to the side of the big screen.. It was Eddie Jordan and his band...
So had to change my camera lenses over, and snapped a few photos... before I took dad over the bridge to the other side and to the autograph barrier to show dad what I did for almost 4 hours yesterday.. of course no drivers turned up, as they would be having there team meetings about the qualifying results...the security guy spotted me and waved! asked him any drivers recently -nope.. hung around for about 15 mins, but dad wanted to go.. ah well I saw them yesterday!

So headed for the trams, but was a long queue heading for the trams.. so phoned Barbara to say we'd be a little later than planned..
Once on the tram, we witnessed a lovely sunset, so I got out my camera and started to snap away.. and had a comment about my camera from another father sitting oposite me and that they bet it took great snaps.. so snapped a shot before showing it to him... he was impressed!

Finally arrived at hotel about 8.30pm, met up with Euan and Barbara, put luggage into his truck, picked up Krilly from university on the way.. and headed to their house, stopping on the way at the local pizza place.. got back to there house, and was shown to our rooms, where we dumped down our stuff and sat in the lounge to much through the Pizzas, and drinks, had a good old chat with everyone including Lucinda and Ashley, before everyone retired for the evening, but first I had to burn my photos to disk!, then retired to bed!

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