iWitness in Japan: Sunday

Posted on Tuesday 06 Oct 2009 and tagged with iwitness, japan, suzuka.

Thirty nine members of AT&T Williams are flying home from Tokyo’s Narita Airport on Monday morning. To make the flight in good time, they are heading to Tokyo straight after the race – a journey that will necessitate four changes of train. To complicate matters further, race team coordinator Paul Singlehurst has tried to book train tickets for 39 people, but he’s ended up getting one ticket for 39 people. Will they ever make it?

Why, you might ask, is the team flying from Narita, when Nagoya is just 40 minutes up the road from Suzuka? The flights were booked months ago in the belief that the Japanese Grand Prix was taking place at Fuji Speedway …

There will be other travel dramas this evening. Finnish journalist Heikki Kulta was expecting to get a lift to the airport in Kimi Raikkonen’s helicopter, but Kimi told him prior to the race that he’d been bumped off the flight. It’s now touch and go as to whether Heikki will make his flight to Helsinki this evening.

Japan is an expensive country at the best of times, but Toro Rosso got stung more than most this weekend. They estimated their accident damage after practice and qualifying to be in excess of $300,000. That was before Sebastien Buemi and Jaime Alguersuari trashed their cars in the race as well…