We had breakfast and by 07:00 we were back at Chikusa station ready to start our train trip to Suzuka.
The sub-way train at this early hour was jammed with passengers, mostly locals heading for work but we could see there were also a lot of people heading for the GP as well. We followed the crowds through Nagoya Station using people wearing red Ferrari tops for guidance.
The train we needed to catch for the GP was overcrowded and we were lucky to find sufficient space to stand let alone obtain a seat.
The trip took just on an hour and we alighted at Kintetsu Shiroka Station which is the nearest station to the Suzuka GP circuit. We then walked through a maze of witches’ hats involving a distance of about one kilometre to get on a bus to the GP circuit.
The bus trip took half an hour and then we had a further two kilometres to reach our seats in grandstand B2 (J).
The position we have on the circuit must be the about the best available as we see the exit from the pits and then corners one and two plus the next five corners up the hill for nearly a kilometre.
Suzuka F1 Grand Prix circuit from grandstand
Friday’s activity was mostly practice for the Ferrari challenge cars, the Porsche Cup cars and the F1 cars. The Mercedes, McLaren and Ferrari teams filled the top of the practice time listings with Red Bull not looking competitive at this point. The weather was warm and sunscreen was a sensible consideration.
Cherry blossom at Suzuka corner 4, Japanese F1 Grand Prix circuit
The final event for the day was the Ferrari sports car qualification so we left the circuit at 17:00 and walked to the bus terminus ‘arena’ to find that there were thousands of people and utterly insufficient buses. After two hours of queueing, we eventually got back to Shiroka Station and then had another hour of travel in an overly congested train compartment back to Nagoya. We finally had the subway train trip back to Chikusa and arrived home at 21:30. Bryce commented that we’d had seven hours at the Suzuka circuit and seven and a half hours travelling!
Corinne had been at Chikusa having a quiet, restful day and had been catching up with washing, downloading photos and supermarket shopping.
We had a take-away evening meal back at our Airbnb and called it a night just before midnight knowing that tomorrow was likely to be a repeat of today.