Jim and the Terrible No Good Very Bad Day at the Japanese GP 2014

In light of the recent very sad news about Jules Bianchi's passing. I'd like to take a moment to tell a story about the race where he suffered his mortal injury, how I attended said race, and what a strange day it was. Before we go any further, I'd just like to say Forza Jules, we hardly got to know you.

I woke up with my girlfriend in a tiny AirBnb apartment in Tokyo and we gathered our things and set about finding the correct train station to turn in our Japan Rail Passes, in order to take the bullet train to the next train, to Suzuka. Its still early morning and its lightly raining.

We take the 3+ hour train ride to the private rail branch that led to the racetrack. It is now midday and no longer raining. We keep hearing about how the typhoon that is supposed to show up may or may not hit the racetrack. Many men stand around at the final station in various team athletic shirts and hats. I myself have on a Fernando Alonso t-shirt from the 2013 Valencia GP (when he was still at Ferrari) my gf so graciously purchased for me.

During the half hour private train ride to the track, it starts pouring. The heavens absolutely open up and when we arrive we get off the train and follow the others down to a little ticket tent. Now I have to stop and mention a couple important details. I have no cash, since we arrived on a Sunday and Japanese ATMs don't usually work with foreign cards, and neither I nor my girlfriend know any conversational Japanese. So, at this ticket tent we are standing in the pouring rain trying to understand why we need to pay again to take the train back when we already bought tickets to a middle aged man who has to have his much younger associate translate roughly for us.

This misfortune then turns into the immense difficulty of going to the actual track. I discover that the track is actually a mile walk away and its still pouring and we have all our things mind you, from the plane ride over, and we're jet lagged. By the time we reach the gates, I'm completely fed up with everything and also very hungry.

To my surprise nothing inside the circuit can be bought with a credit card and so we cannot purchase food, drinks or souvenirs, as we would like to since its our first F1 race in person. Our seats in the stands are so small we feel like the biggest American Assholes bringing our carry on bags and umbrellas with us to sit down, and so things is when I completely break down.

To someone else this seems like a normal series of events, many bad things happen to me and then I finally snap, however I am not one to have panic attacks and this would be the my first ever, along with my first 24 hours in Japan, and my first Grand Prix in person.

I heard a story on NPR not too long ago about William S Burroughs, and he said something that stuck with me. He purported that if out of the blue you suddenly break down and bawl like a child without provocation or real reason, then something definitely bad is going to happen that day. Now I don't give that much credence, but something weird definitely happened to me that day, because if anything else this frustrating would have happend, I would have been angry, not sobbing like a kid in the rain under a tent at Suzuka.

So that was the bad weird part of the day. What happened next is I calmed down, found a good place to watch the race, and even the rain stopped for a while. The race was red-flagged initially due to Kevin Magnussen spinning off because of a giant puddle, and then restarted. About 3/4 of the way through we left because we were bone tired and wet and hungry, and the race didn't seem to be that much of a barn burner. We got a tourist picture on the podium, and this really shitty video as I was leaving, my only footage of the race:

We took the train back to the station and then another bullet train to Himeji to meet our host family. It wasn't till the next morning that we heard about Jules' tragic injury and how the typhoon rains had indeed come through Suzuka again, and battered Tokyo as well.

I think we all hoped that Jules' would have slowly recovered like Michael Schumacher after his accident, and maybe someday gotten back into racing, maybe even Ferrari, as so many predicted he would wind up. He was much too young, and even though I wasn't there for that horrible moment in early October, I feel like I left a piece of myself at that circuit along with him. #JB17 Forza Jules.



Photo Credit: Independent.co.uk