Don Messerli’s Blog |

An exercise in self-indulgence.

The Best Christmas Present Ever!

Monday Sep 11, 2006

You may wonder why I’m talking about Christmas in September. Two reasons. The first will become self-evident. The second is that I haven’t posted in a while and that added about 2 1/2 months to the delay.

My wife, Regine, gave me what amounts to the best Christmas present I’ve ever received last Christmas. She gave me a trip for both of us to the Formula One Grand Prix of Canada in Montreal. The races was in late June, so I had to wait 6 months to actually get my present, but the wait was well worth it.

We had great seats. Right across from the pits. Renault, McLaren, and Ferrari were right there. We went to practice on Friday, qualifying on Saturday, and the race on Sunday. We took a ton of pictures and had a great time. It was a package tour. The company running the tour was Formula Tours. They are new to the business. Things didn’t run perfectly smoothly; but I’d still recommend them. They had a cocktail party on Friday night and we got to meet Jarno Trulli and Ricardo Zonta of Toyota.

BMW Sauber had a cool setup downtown called Pit Lane Park. It was a recreation of pit lane with interactive displays and demonstrations. They only do it at 6 Grands Prix per year. We are lucky Montreal was one of them.

I even had two celebrity sightings on the trip. I saw my favorite F1 driver, Jacques Villeneuve, walking down St. Catherine St. and Tara Reid in the airport.

When I get a chance, I’ll post a bunch of the pictures we took.

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