iWitness in Istanbul: Thursday

Posted on Friday 05 Jun 2009 and tagged with iwitness, turkey.

Congratulations to Joe Bruce, who works in AT&T Williams’ acquisitions department. He has just cycled from John O’Groats to Land’s End (the tip of Scotland to the bottom of England) with his nephew Rob. They completed the 900-mile journey in only 10 days and raised more than £10,000 for the Alexandra Unit in Dumfries. Blazing saddles, or what?

You swine! Passengers flying into Istanbul’s Attaturk Airport have had to fill out medical forms confirming that they haven’t contracted Swine Flu in the past 10 days. There are no reports of the disease affecting the F1 paddock at the moment, but had the immigration officials asked about greedy pigs, well that would have been a different matter…

Claire Williams and Silvia Hoffer almost got lucky this evening when Turkish F1 broadcaster TNT invited all the team press officers out to dinner. The PRs from the FOTA-affiliated teams had to back out at the last minute in order to attend a meeting, which left Claire and Silvia to dine alone with their Turkish friends, following Williams’ recent suspension from FOTA. In the end, though, the dinner was cancelled and the girls dined alone.

What Claire and Silvia didn’t do, however, was head to the bar of their hotel for a Bridget Jones-style tete-a-tete. A bottle of beer costs 24 euros at the Intercontinental; clearly it hasn’t bought into F1’s cost-capping idea.