As is always the case with a back-to-back, the flights between Shanghai and Bahrain were zoo planes, packed to the gills with engineers, bolties, riggers and other assorted team people.
You pity the couple of non-F1 folks who will never quite understand how 350 snoring, farting and mumbling gorillas got onto their plane – or why it ran out of Heineken before the Himalayas.
More worrying for Spy was the massive, bearded tyre man, parked in the aisle seat, replete with sailor tattoos who unexpectedly spent the whole flight enjoying a Twilight movie marathon. There just isn’t a demographic for that.
But here we are in Bahrain in the desert, where it’s very hot, even for someone as skilled as Spy at seeking out the quiet shady spots for a nap.
What you’d like to do is dash between the team building and the garage as swiftly as possible but the Formula One organisers have put a stop to that.
Concerned that the drivers weren’t on show enough to guests in the paddock, we’re all housed out-of-sequence this week: rather than having the hut opposite the garage, you have to criss-cross.
It stops the drivers doing their normal head-down, no-eye-contact dash from office to garage. They could try it anyway but they’re going to end up with a face full of palm tree.
Speaking of team-building and drivers, space is short in the paddock so Mark and Seb are sharing a room at this race – albeit with a divider down the middle. Spy hasn’t ventured in, but imagines it’s pretty frosty even without the benefit of air con.
Oddly enough, down at our sister team Toro Rosso, drivers Dan and JEV each have a ready room of their own. So maybe this is some sort of elaborate plot hatched by team management to force a reconciliation.
Other than that, not much to report from the paddock as yet... In fact we’re so short of celebrity goss at this event so far, Mark and Fernando having a quiet dinner on Monday is making the headlines.
Seb was puzzled when he got asked about this yesterday in his press conference (‘everyone needs dinner and it’s no fun to eat alone’ he said) but then Seb tends to knock about with Kimi, who wouldn’t know a quiet dinner if it jumped up and hit him over the head with a bottle of Smirnoff.
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