My good friend Leon was lucky enough to net himself two access all area passes to watch some races at the Fuji Speedway, at the foot of Mount. Fuji in Shizuoka Prefecture. Before you ask, I didn’t manage to get any pictures of Fuji itself, the clouds were out in force in that direction.

I feel I should explain now that I know very little to nothing about racing, and thus I will just post a few pictures here and pretend I know what I’m talking about. What I will add is that the journey there and back taught me one valuable lesson - driving around Tokyo is only a good idea in theory, rarely in practice.

As we could not take our go-kart car on the track itself, this is the best racing shot I got. When you enter the arena you get to drive under the infamous Bridgestone arch. I say it’s infamous - even I recognised it and I thought Formula One was the answer to question 6 in my last Chemistry exam.

Whilst I know very little about how to tell who’s winning in a race, I do know that I like the look of this little monster. It ripped around the track at a shocking speed, and it was yellow. I like yellow cars so I enjoyed watching this car thoroughly. I want to say it’s a Lamboughini but I’m not confident enough to do so.

Even if nobody else was having fun, I think the Michelin man was enjoying himself. Possibly a little bit too much as he wouldn’t leave the poor girls alone. Although neither would the photographers…

Those vultures!

Once the race had started, we headed down to one of the more dangerous corners on the track, hoping to see some wicked awesome crashes. Instead we saw lots of cars turning around a corner at amazing speeds, which was pretty cool, although you can do the same in England for free by standing at a roundabout five minutes before a world cup match starts.

So there we are. I had a fantastic time and enjoyed myself very much, despite not really knowing what was happening. I thought I’d finish today with a picture I am very happy with. I met a celebrity at the race. Quite a significant one. Don’t all gasp at once…

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 3rd, 2007 at 10:52 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.