Hungary: Hungaroring F1 and Budapest

Finally it was one of the moments I have been looking forward to – July 24-25, the F1 weekend at the Hungaroring Budapest. As soon as my Shengen Visa got stamped, I had one eye on the calendar for this particular weekend. Budapest is just 7 hours from Prague by an overnight bus and I knew it was surely manageable. Luckily, my friend Aditya also was ready to go so the plan was finalized. No F1 tickets obviously but where’s the harm in hitting the venue.


Due to weird bus timings, we saw that it was impossible to stay back for race-day so it was decided to watch the qualifiers on Saturday and take the Sunday morning bus back home. After all even in qualifiers, it’s the same 22 cars which go in top speed and emits the same noise as it does during the race. We took the Friday night Eurolines bus which would drop us at Budapest at 5 AM the next morning. Having traveled so much on overnight buses in India, I would have to say that the bus here was no where close to the standards of our Volvo buses in India which run overnight. The seats were as bad as economy class seats in an aircraft as compared to the business class type seats which we have back home. We reached Budapest Neglepet bus-stop at 5 AM and it was no surprise to see that everything was shut including the exchange counters. Without currency, it would not be possible to even buy a metro ticket so we decided to take a nap till the time the operations of the day began. I was woken up by a watchman at 6 (or was it a policeman?) and we realized that the exchange counters were open. We bought the tickets and strictly followed the instructions provided in the website of the hostel that we were booked in till the next day morning. The directions were precise and after a metro and bus ride through the streets of Buda and Pest, we were safely checked in at the Bagpackers hostel. It was full of chilled out folks, some popping their heads out of their sleeping bags in the garden and the others too sleepy to even realize that they have two new room-mates. We were in a room of five beds (anyway we just need it for the night). We got ready as quickly as possible, put our stuff in the locker (Adi, the alert traveler had carried a small lock). Adi has smartly found out the route to go to the Hungaroring and it was tram, metro, followed by another 45 min surface train. A long-haul ahead of us, I realized. But what the hell, a lifetime’s experience at stake.

We took the tram to the city-center, grabbed a burger meal at Burger King and set off by metro from Astoria station for the last stop on that line, from where we took a surface train. The train generally did not stop at the station which was named ‘Hungaroring’ but that weekend they had an exception. Fans were there with us so we just decided to follow them. As the journey started we went more and more inside rural Hungary and the concrete turned into green. Some of the fans got down before the Hungaroring stop and when we reached there; we saw it’s in the middle of nowhere. No wonder they do not have a stop here for the rest of the year. We got down and blindly followed the crowd through green fields mostly used for agriculture and slowly the trip to the venue became a trek. After a long walk we reached the ticket counter and to our delight, tickets for the qualifiers were available for 40 Euros at the Silver stand which is just next to the grand-stand and offers a great view of the final corner and the end of the starting grid. As soon as we started walking towards our stand, Q1 started and the roar of the V8 engines echoed through the air. This was it. We grabbed a beer and started running desperately as this was not to be missed. As soon as we took the seats, a Red Bull car (probably of Sebastian Vettel) zoomed past right under noses, followed by a Mclaren, Renault and Ferrari. The noise was deafening and with the beer in hand it was as much a dream as it was on that great European night in Moscow a year back. However, once you are watching it live its nearly impossible to keep track of the positions and race updates. For that you have to rely on the giant TV screens. So much so, that when Felipe Massa met with that horrific accident, I hardly realized the extent of the damage. All we saw on the screen was a Ferrari car crashing into the walls and later craned back to the pit lane. It was only when the medical vans were in action did we realize something was drastically wrong. So unfortunate that my first F1 experience turned out to be a nightmare for Felipe. Thank God that he is fine now. Qualifying was held up for a long time due to the horrific accident and when it resumed Alonso took a stunning pole. I could know that only because he came out of his car and stood in the middle flanked by Vettel and Weber. Commentators confirmed it soon. The GP2 series race started next so we could also see some racing. Karun Chandok was racing but we could hardly indentify any of the cars or drivers so the fun wasn’t there to just see the cars going round and round. We opted to hit the town and check out Budapest instead. Took the same ‘trek’ back and in an hour we were walking by the side of the Danube. Just like Prague there was whole lot of buildings with great architecture on either side of the river in Buda and Pest respectively. The river had a no. of bridges across it and each was a different type of engineering. The bridges linked the twin cities of Buda and Pest and this epitomized the city of Budapest. After all there would be no Budapest unless Buda and Pest were ‘bridged’. We took the city circle tram and walked around the Danube itself, visited a café for snacks and then later a full dinner by the riverside. By the time we reached back to Bag-packers, we were hardly able to stand and crashed right away. The day journey back took us through Bratislava (Slovakia) and Brno back to Prague and gave us further look-in to the European countryside.