Bombers and Bikes, Day 9. Sachsenring Day 1

 Up and ready for brekkie a glance out of the window provided some amusement for me. Watching one of the Brit knobs work out how to get boots, etc, into his tiny panniers. With a lot of persuasion, he got the boots in but then the stuff he'd taken out wouldn't all fit in the other pannier. As I said, amusing.

Trying to fit a quart into a pint pannier.

The ride to Sachsenring was easy and pretty quick. I'd been unable to get a response from the circuit about motorcycle parking, despite 2 emails, and the only info I could see said to use the free public car park with shuttle bus. The route looked straightforward. It wasn't, as the German plod had other ideas, diverting us in a huge circle around the circuit and town. Still the signage was ok. Finally, we arrived at the car park, which I knew to be a field. I couldn't see any bikes, only cars, but a guy waved us in. 100m away, another guy told us we should turn around and head to the other side of the field. He didn't speak English but I gathered he was saying there was somewhere where the sidestand wouldn't sink in. So, we turned around and made our way to the other side of the field, where it turned out the shuttle bus went from. People were videoing us as we turned onto a concrete area, me not realising, the entrance was further along, nor that the shuttle was just about to pull away! I guess the punters thought bendy bus and BMW were about to have a head to head. No harm done.

We parked up, on the grass, as it turned out and got our plastic sidestand pucks out. Had we gone through the proper entrance, we would have been given an inch thick piece of wood for the sidestand! Class. In Austria they gave you big orange KTM plastic pucks.

We crammed onto a shuttle for the 10 or so minute ride. I would say to the circuit but the drop-off point was probably 500m away from the entrance. Scanned in, we then had another 5-600m walk to get to our stand, in the middle of the circuit. Phil wanted to buy some MotoGP stuff, so we stopped at the stall and whilst he was trying on a t-shirt, I bought a cap, something I'd always been meaning to do.

Finding the stand was easy enough, the seat not so. The row labelling wasn't where you would expect, so we actually ended up in the row behind. It wasn't busy, so no worries. The view from the stand was pretty could, being able to see the riders come through turns one, two and down to three, before they appeared below us, before turning left.

Turns one and two, middle of pic

We sat through most of the free practice sessions, before deciding to head back. Arriving at the shuttle stop, there was a bit of a queue and we probably had to wait ten or fifteen minutes before the shuttle arrived. The way back was different to going but we realised that it wouldn't be able to turn around at the car park. Still, we expected the plod to help the bus along its journey, instead of standing watching it trying to get out of a side road, whilst eating their sandwiches! There were a lot of plod on duty, all seemingly, doing feck all! 

The route away from the car park/circuit was a lot more straight forward than the arrival, with traffic flowing freely. We know it won't be the same tomorrow or Sunday.

We were back in the hotel in time to catch some of the Germany v Spain game. The hotel bar had the match on and was full of Germans. They were noticeably quiet until their team scored, when in the room, we could here them shouting and screaming. That didn't last long though, did it? 😂

With the game over, we made our way into town to find somewhere to eat. We found a restaurant with an outdoor seating area and about six TVs. The place was pretty busy but we found a table and sat down, looking at all the sombre faces. Easy to think, that could be us tomorrow night.

I had currywurst, chips and sauerkraut, washed down with 2 of the Altenburg brewery ales, one at 7%. Nice.

The seven percenter

A German staple, probably!

Back at the hotel, we're setting an earlier alarm, as it is bound to be busier than today, with qualifying and some races, including the MotoGP Sprint race. Forecast is for high 20s and sunny. Wow. About time.