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This article first appeared in GP Racing magazine.
Ten minutes to zero hour and the rain is hammering off the garage roof. Out in the pitlane, it's splashing into puddles so large they bring to mind Dr Foster's proverbial misadventure on the road to Gloucester. A sky that had been positively azure half an hour ago is now a glowering grey expanse. The capricious microclimate of Spa-Francorchamps has done it again.
That moment when it's quiet on track, so the TV feed cuts to a tight shot of a team operative glumly regarding a huge splodge of green and blue on the weather radar? We're living that now, me and ex-Renault, Toyota and Lotus technical director Mike Gascoyne: him with one headset cup slipped casually off his ear, lips pursed, eyes flicking between the screen and the sodden vista outside; me dressed like an impostor, head to foot in crisply clean flameproof garb - a Nomexed version of Alec Guinness in The Man in the White Suit.
If the rain fails to relent, we're going nowhere. Drapeau rouge. In a distant corner of my brain a quiet voice is suggesting that, this being Spa-Francorchamps, formerly one of the most dangerous circuits in the world and still one of the most challenging, scurrying back to the warmth and dryness of the media centre wouldn't be such a terrible outcome.
