You’ll be aware by now that a group of 11 Sidepodcast commenters headed into the soggy depths of the Ardenne Forest last weekend to experience the remarkable 2010 Belgian Grand Prix.  Even though only a small section of our community actually made the trip to Belgium we tried our best to take the site with us, checking the comments and sending twitpics as often as we could. We were of course representing the site while on our holiday, and so to celebrate this I made a larger version of the original Sidepodcast banner.

The plan was to take this with us to the track each day to wave at appropriate moments as a way of spreading the Sidepodcast word. However we had not even set foot inside the confines of the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps on Thursday before our first chance to wave the Sidepodcast flag had arisen.  If you’ve listened to our podcast you’ll already know the story behind it, but we met the BBC’s Jake Humphrey and Martin Brundle on a roundabout near the La Source hairpin. We abandoned the cars and ran up to them for a closer look, no sooner had we arrived Jake took a photo of us, and not wanting to waste the opportunity we asked for some photos of our own.

Both seemed very friendly and were happy to give up their time, while waiting for the technicians to set up, to have a chat with us all. Jake especially seemed interested in the site and its owners. What a fantastic start to the weekend!

Still buzzing, we parked the cars in sensible place this time and headed down for the final half an hour of the pitlane walk. There are no words to describe how it feels to first walk down a busy pitlane, the sound of wheel guns, the crowd and the general hum of F1 really has to be experienced to be believed. We’d not even got past the Virgin garages before our next encounter with broadcasting legends. This time it was our favourites from the 5Live F1 commentary team, Anthony Davidson and David Croft. We’d met Crofty at Goodwood, and upon hearing our shouts and recognising us both he and Ant headed over to say "hi". Both men are genuinely lovely people and they gave us a good few minutes of their time. Before they headed off to do their track run we showed them the banners I had made (one specially for them) and managed to grab them for a photo too. Crofty even noticed the differences between the original and the larger banner!

Shortly after that we were bundled out of the pitlane by some rather scary security guards so we didn’t managed to snap any other famous faces with the banner, but that’s not to say we didn’t continue to take it to the track with us.

We waved it in the grandstand and throughout the weekend, spreading the sidepodword whenever we could.

A truly remarkable weekend for all involved, stay tuned for other posts from the SidepodSpa crew detailing more of our thoughts and experiences,  however I’ll leave you with a slightly photoshopped group photo of us all with the banner after the race.