VIVA Ferrari

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I still remember being 5 or 6 years old and my dad going to his friends houses to watch Grand Prixs. He would then come and sit on my bed and tell me everything that happened. I loved it. I remember at that time McLaren dominated with Senna and the boys always taking the cake.
After travelling around Italy and Greece with Manuela my father met up with me in Milan with his old friend Wilf. We had gathered to watch the Italian Grand Prix at Monza. I can't tell you how excited I was to watch it. I had always wanted to watch a grand prix and now it was becoming a reality. And there was no grand prix that I would rather watch than the Italian home of the Tifosi.
We had rented a motor home which we parked outside the track. The day before was qualifying and I rember standing on the side of the wall and just hearing these machines speed round was so exhilarating. I jumped the wall with some help from my dad and saw a grand prix car for the first time. What a sight seeing these cars barreling around a left hander at 200mph. The police then made me come down but I still ran round and climbed over another fence to watch.
Schumacher on pole beautiful.
I meticulously packed my back pack for the race the night before and placed it on the RVs table. We awoke to an absolute nightmare. It started when Wilf said "hey, where the hell is my Ferrari hat?" Then I could not find my back pack, then my father could not find his briefcase containing the tickets to the race. I could not believe it, we had been robbed in the night. Some SOBs came into our RV in the middle of the night and robbed us! I remember running out of that RV and screaming at the top of my lungs. I was so upset. I ran straight to the gates where I spoke to several people telling them what had happend. They said to go to the police and speak to them. We raced over there and filled out a theft form of some sort. We met some Dutch guys there that had been robbed as well, passports and everything gone. For whatever reason the last thing I did before I went to bed was take my passport out of my bag and hid it in my clothes. But they did steal all my photos from the time I spent with Manuela in Greece, my brother and mother in France and Switzerland, as well as my video tapes from Greece as well. I was and am so frustrated to have lost it.
Anyway, we went to the gates and showed them the police papers and they let us in. Phew, worst comes to worst we could stand and watch. But we did pay 350 euros per tickets so we wanted to get to our seats. I was so determined. I was focused on getting to R236 -R238. No one was going to stop me and no one did. We went through about 5 or 6 checkpoints just showing them the police papers.
Great race, Shumacher won and Barrichelo 3rd. I climbed over the high metal fence trying to evade the cops and jumped onto the track. I ripped my pants up and cut my right wrist really badly (i still have scars to this day) I got on my hands and knees and kissed the track and preceded to run to the podium for the awards. The atmosphere was awesome with people singing and clapping and a massive Ferrari flag flowing over the crowd.
Viva Ferrari!

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