Grapevine: Paddock Life - Spa Edition

But while the final European encounter in the past has often had a pretty joyous end of (half) term feel to it, the 'spygate' stories that continued to overshadow the weekend left everyone pretty weary and keen to get the event over with so people could go home.

There were some provisional plans to hold a 'Truckie Olympics', which included eating a full English breakfast as fast as possible, downing a pint of beer, a tyre-trolley race and reversing a truck into a coned area, but sadly the idea never reached fruition.

Maybe it can be resurrected at the next European race in Spain next year, when finally perhaps the paddock's spirits will have moved on from the mess surrounding technical dossiers and car secrets.

But it was not just the teams' motorhomes that were making their last appearance at a Grand Prix this season.

Formula One's famous three musketeers of Simon Arron plus Autosport contributors Mark Hughes and Tony Dodgins take their own motorhomes to most of the European races - and invariably get involved in a fair bit of misadventure.

And most of the time that revolves around 'incident magnet' Dodgins, who this time had a bit of a trouble rescuing his mobile phone when it once again went missing at the track on Thursday.

Having returned to the motor home and been unable to find it that evening, Dodgins came to the unfortunate conclusion that the phone must have been accidentally picked up in a pile of rubbish he had thrown into a skip when he had parked up.

Sure enough the muffled sound of a mobile ringtone from amongst the bags of rubbish confirmed Dodgins' worst fears. So, brandishing one of his children's fishing nets that had been left behind after a summer holiday, he was lowered into the skip to try and find his phone.

Amazingly he found it without too many dramas. But his vertically-challenged frame meant that while getting into the skip was easy, getting out was a bit of a different matter....

As has already been mentioned, the one talking point that dominated all chatter in the Spa-Francorchamps paddock was the spying affair.

In fact, on Thursday it seemed that while everyone in the paddock may have been present in body in Belgium, their spirits were a few hundred miles away in Paris. Groups of conversations in the paddock would instantly fall silent when someone's mobile phone went off, or an SMS arrived, and everyone wondered if that was the news from the World Council.

Once the verdict was out, it was heads down for the entire F1 media contingent as they strived to get their heads around what the $100 million fine and constructors' championship ban meant. Some scribblers went without food and water for the entire night as they tapped away at their computers, but popular Finnish journalist Heikki Kulta went one better than that.

Having worked late, he headed back to his hotel for a few hours sleep and then returned to the track in the morning. He then sat down bleary eyed at his computer to write a feature for his newspaper on the spy affair aftermath.

It was only when he put the date at the top of his article, that his brain realised something very important.

"I put down 'September 14' and then thought, hang on a minute, that's my birthday," smiled Kulta. "My family had failed to get me any cards or presents and I had forgotten."

All wasn't lost though. After returning to his Spa hotel later that evening, he told the owner about what had happened and the old man ventured into a back room to dig out an old record player and a copy of Cliff Richard's 'Congratulations", which they listened to over a few glasses of red wine.

Red Bull Racing are currently 10 points adrift of Williams in the fight for fifth place in the constructors' championship, and know that on current form it is going to take a fair bit of luck for them to overhaul their Grove-based rivals in the final three races of the season.

So that is exactly what they will be counting on next week when David Coulthard travels to the Sensoji Temple in Tokyo to take part in a blessing ceremony for his team.

The prayers will be for safety and victory - although the latter may well be a bit too far fetched judging by how far ahead Ferrari and McLaren are on track.

But then again Sensoji temple has enjoyed it fair share of miracles. It has survived major earthquakes, World War II bombings, fire and lighting strikes. So maybe all is not lost...