Singapore and More......

A brief history lesson

Merlion 

A few days to go until I depart these shores for what is my favourite F1 event of the year.  Well, let me be more clear, this event used to rise head-and-shoulders above the other F1 events I've been fortunate to attend over the years, which is in the main due to my dearly departed buddy, Dave Parker.

Fairmont bar

 There will, with the passing of more time, come a day when I'm able to write about Dave and our fun times together, but that time isn't now.  He died, aged 37 in March of 2014 from cancer, he had battled against cancer having an eye removed some 5 years before he passed, his final 5 years he lived life to the full, and I was a lucky beneficiary to be part of that.  He and I had traveled to some 16 F1 events together, almost always for 10 - 14 days at at a time, and 6 of those events were in Singapore which had kinda become our own F1 playground.  As the race is ran through the streets, and in no small part thanks to Dave's elevated status as a sector marshal, we found ourselves in all sorts of places that we simply should not have been.....one of Dave's claims to fame was that he enjoyed a "double flusher" in the McLaren garage....a fact he would have made me remove from this blog - I can hear him now telling me how gay this all sounds.....but the up and down and top and short of it all is that Dave and I had become the best of friends, a friendship formed over several shared passions:

Marina Bay Sands - Goose 

1. Formula One
2. Travel
3.  Beer, wine, Grey Goose, beer and beer 
4.  "Blagging" at every F1 event we'd go to

Sometimes we'd not see each other from one Singapore to the next, always in communication with FB chat, iMessage, F1 races watched on TV where he and I would have a running commentary about the unfolding events, yet even with 12 months of not physically seeing each other, we'd arrive at Fairmont executive lounge at a pre-ordained time and basically pick up from where we left off like we'd only seen each other the day before.  Right about now we'd have a time arranged to meet at the Fairmont lounge, we'd chill over a couple of bottles of Moet and move onto a restaurant, bit of night-life then repeat for 10 days or so, Dave marshaling through the day, me doing my GPA thing at night, but all the while having more fun than you should have when you are "working".

The Monaco 03 group - still friends now (mostly!)

Ah, work!  My work since 2004 has been to run a Formula One travel company.  The aforementioned Dave and I went to the Monaco Grand Prix in 2003 with a group of friends, 9 of us in total, and we were delivered
a fairly shoddy service from one of the vendors we used.  In light of this, I uttered these immortal words; "Feck me, I can do this better meeself with a hand tied behind my back and a blindfold on".  And so it was, that on January 15th of 2004, I formed Grand Prix Adventures.  The initial aim was to simply sell one balcony in Monaco, make a wee bit of money as a side-line, keep my day-job (which I was actually doing ok at!) and get a free trip to Monaco every year.  No brainer right?  So, everything needed was in place and then GPA went live - it took off a lot quicker than I'd imagined leaving me no choice other than to give up the day job and give 100% of my focus and energy to my fledgling business.  Initially focused on Monaco, and believe it or not, built a very successful business on the back of that one event, in our glory days we'd take around 400 people to the Principality in the Cote D'Azur, put simply we'd hit the market at the right time with the right product, alas, the whole economic downturn had a huge impact on our numbers, and so we diversified to other Grand Prix - which was a simple ploy to stay afloat, my dreams of being the Richard Branson of the F1 travel business no longer apply!  So, in the here and now GPA

sells reasonably high-end packages to; Monaco, Silverstone, Monza, Singapore, Austin and Abu Dhabi.  Later this year, in Abu Dhabi, I will click onto my 50th live Grand Prix event and have now personally visited all but two of the F1 races, the two I have not been to being China and Russia - China is centre of my radar, but I am less inclined to get to Russia - in the main because it is full of Russians.  Oh, Mexico too, which only came back on the calendar this year, and one I would be going to if my Paraguayan friend Ade wasn't such an under-the-thumb-wimp-bag.

So, for those who don't know, that's the background/backdrop to this blog, the truth of the matter is I do not actually know whether Singapore is the best as I cannot be objective about it.  I have such a great time because I meet my buddy there and we behave badly for a couple of weeks, and last year I wasn't in any right mind to give an honest evaluation of whether this is or is not the race event I purport it to be, this year will be my 7th Singapore GP, but my first with a reasonable amount of down time, so, considering what to do to pass the time I'm going to blog through the event giving an insight to the whole event.  If you fancy a read, then stay tuned - I type fast, so these will undoubtedly not be short reads but should let you have a wee sneak peek at what makes Singapore so awesome.

KMc.