FIFTY STATES AWAYIt seems somebody heard my wish and the weather has cleared up! We are glad the warmer weather is back in town and we are super excited for today! We are switching our recent string of boating/water events for some racing! For those of you who don’t know Ben’s always been an Formula 1 fan, and I’ve really enjoyed watching the racing on TV with him on the weekends, becoming a fan myself. So today we get to indulge in this pastime!
We are going to the Indy 500, practice race! This weekends race is the 100th run of Indy racing so as you can imagine America is excited about this! They have a very infectious positivity and endless energy for celebrating all the calendar events, unlike us grumbly Brits! Although we saw the Daytona and the Austin track back in Florida and Texas respectively, this is our first event as such! Walking into the speedway you really understand how massive it is, seeing it on TV doesn’t really give it a lot of scale! We headed via an underpass to a seating area just behind the pits and waited for the action to begin! We are lucky that as it’s a weekday it’s reasonably quiet, the benefits to this being we can sit anywhere we like. Even though it wasn’t packed it was an incredible atmosphere and it felt like the speedway was full of gleeful spectators.
The practice session got underway, as each car blasts around the track the noise from the engine thunders through your whole body, its incredibly loud and we were glad to have brought some earplugs to shield our poor ears! On TV they dumb the noise down considerably, another noticeable observation is how fast the cars whizz around each lap with complete power, it’s quite the blur of noise! We also realised that Max Chilton was in one of the cars, nice to see a familiar name!
After enjoying a good few hours of the atmosphere we took a short walk around the stalls and shops inside the speedway, deciding on our way back to the seats to sit near one of the corners, we’d seen a lot of pit stops and got some great pictures of the cars whilst they were still, so now it was now time for some corner action. It was quite windy in this area so after about half an hour we decided to head off and get some of the driving underway. Just as we left the stands there was a rather large crash at the corner where we’d been sitting!
We waited to check that there was no serious injury from the crash and thankfully it seemed that the driver was OK so we headed back to the car on this gorgeous day! We made our way through the spring scenery to a city called Ft Wayne in Indiana to make our stop for the night. We’ve enjoyed Indiana and yet another seemingly distinct culture.
