The Temple of Speed

I love saying Monza; I drive Mr Pandammonium up the wall with it: Mmmmmmmmonzah!

Monza is north of Milan. I’d decided there were two things I wanted to do when we were in Milan:
1. Do parkrun
2. Go and look at Autodromo Nazionale Monza, where they hold the Italian Grand Prix

Parkrun is tomorrow; Monza was today.

Before we went anywhere else, we ran almost three miles round the nearby park, where there’s a castle and the Arch of Peace.

I won’t bore you with the public transport fiasco we had to get to the city of Monza, but we had a lovely walk through the royal park to get to the racetrack. Such bold squirrels!

It turned out that there is a racing event – Fanatec GT World Challenge Europe – on this weekend – and today was free – bonus!

We went in, sat alongside the straight, where we could see the cars come out the pit lane.

Whatever race was on when we arrived finished after about ten minutes, and a new one, lasting an hour, started. We agreed to watch that then go.

We couldn’t see any of the action on the corners, but we got to see the cars tear up the straight as fast as they could.

Weirdly, they started from the pit lane and ended in the pit lane, so we didn’t see who won – probably no.77. Perhaps it was some sort of rolling start and finish.

I timed no.77 doing a lap – it did it in 1:55.32. We didn’t know how long the track was, but we reckoned a few miles. Speedy!

There were three red flag incidents, so the cars had to go into the pits again. None of them seemed serious (not that we saw them happen), although one car was carted off the track.

It was exciting watching the cars – NYOOOOOM! – and it brought out the girl racer in me – brum brum!

Seeing them come out the pit lane made what David Coulthard says about tyres gripping the track and all that make more sense: they’d come out relatively slowly, then they’d almost stop while the gear changed and the tyres did their thing, all working to propel the car forwards as fast as possible.

Great fun, and so much more than I expected.

On the way back through the park, we saw terrapins – alas, an intrusive species: the yellow-bellied slider – sunning themselves with the ducks on the pond bank. We saw some terrapins in the pond, but I don’t know what kind they were.

We got the train back, sitting upstairs in a double-decker train. We may have double-decker buses in the UK, but we don’t have double-decker trains; they’re still quite a novelty to us, although we’ve seen plenty in other countries.

We recced where we’d get the Metro from tomorrow for parkrun (gated; we thought maybe it was closed for the evening like some London Underground stations, but Google Maps said later there’d been a strike, so perhaps it was that that closed the station).

We were pooped out after all that, so we went home via the shop. My step count is over 37,000!