The best place to watch a Formula One Grand Prix is most probably the Paddock Club. Unfortunately you cannot buy a ticket to this place. You can get it for free though.

It's common knowledge that Sun is the technical sponsor of McLaren. It's not as widely known that because of this sponsorship Sun is eligible to invite a few guests to watch the Grand Prix from the Paddock Club. The number of guests is limited and the most important persons are invited on Sunday. Last August I had the chance to be there all weekend:)

You may ask how could a simple presales engineer watch the show from the first row... Well the trick is: I wasn't there to enjoy the show. I was working. :)

Sun gave McLaren a Sun Blade 2000 workstation and two Sun Ray 150s to provide the guests with Internet access. The equipment was traveling with the circus around the world and in each country a lucky Sun engineer was asked to provide onsite support of the equipment. In Hungary I was the only one available with Sun Ray skills.

Although I only had a service pass (which didn't allow me to eat or drink in the area) I was able to get my hands on a full Paddock Club ticket both Friday and Saturday (some guests didn't show up and Alex - the brown-haired woman in a white top, smiling to some guests in the background on the picture above - gave me their pass so I didn't have to starve all day:). It was an interesting experience.

The Paddock club was located on top of the paddock area. Every guest was given an earplug which proved to be a real lifesaver. Without the earplug the noise of the engines causes real physical pain. I know, I didn't wear them on the first day:)

On Saturday and Sunday Balint Fleischer visited us. He's Chief Technology Officer in the Network Storage Group and was born in Hungary. He left the country in the early eighties and immigrated to the US.

These are the earplugs and the McLaren hat.

There was absolutely no problem with the Sun Rays, though one of the guests (but not a guest of Sun:) tried to steal the McLaren mouse pads:). He felt a bit embarrassed when I asked him to take it out of his shirt and put it back on the table, but did so. He was a bit drunk actually... The other incident happened when another guy poured a glass of wine all over the keyboard but we had a spare one just for the case.

Circus...