Dear Friends,
As many of you know earlier this week I boarded a flight to take me back to England and get back to the effort of getting to Formula 1. Little did I know in this process I would set a new world record: fastest consecutive cross-atlantic flights.
My flight left from Dallas / Fort Worth International airport on Wednesday afternoon at 530 p.m. By my calculations 8 hours later I had crossed the Atlantic Ocean and arrived over British soil and by 9 1/2 hours I had landed at Heathrow airport in London. Once on ground in the brand new, 'ultra modern' terminal five. We painstakingly slowly disembarker our plane and loaded onto a bus which took our flight to immigration/boarder crossing to get our passports stamped. Well, that was the plan atleast.
When I arrived at the immigration this lady who was on a mission to prove something took a look at my passport and immediately launched into 21 questions. Who are you? Why are you here?? What are you planning on doing??? After explaining my name was Michael, I am here on our countries mutually agreed upon tourist visa which allows us to visit the other country for up to six months, and I intend on watching some premiere league football, looking at castles, and enjoying some british weather, the lady decided she wasn't satisfied. She took me out of line and into an office where she repeated the same questions and asking why I was returning again to the country after so recently being here. These questions carried on for half an hour or so before she told me she thought I was lying and that I was in the country to work. (clealy my broad shoulders sold her on the construction worker type).
After a complete tear down and inspection of my bags this increasingly charming lady (not), repeated for the third time the same set of questions trying to get me to tell her I had came to the country for working. By this time four hours had passed and it was nearly noon. My friend Bradley Philpott who had came to the airport to pick me up was, I am sure, getting particularly pissed, especially after turning up at the airport at 8 a.m. to pick me up. With a further no explination the lady left only to return a couple of hours later to announce she had came to the conclusion that I had came to the country to work and I had been booked for a return flight to the United States on the next possible flight.
With no course to refute this decision I was stuck and my only option was to get on the flight back to the states. Thirteen hours of flying later I arrived back at Dallas / Forth Worth airport clenching the new world record for fastest consecutive cross atlantic flights. Now, while I am most pleased to receive an award for being the fastest at anything, you can be assured I am not one bit happy with this situation, and to say that is in fact a massive understatement.
After I got home I slept for about 13 hours. After waking up I spent most of the day thinking about the massive flow of east europeans who are currently overwhelming the british social benefits system and how damn awful fish and chips are. Now that I have spent sufficient time hating that immigration cow, I am going to start focusing my energies back where they belong on getting back to the top of motorsport.
Michael
20 September, 2008
12 September, 2008
How are things going?
Dear friends and family,
Just wanted to make a quick update to say hello and let everyone know what I have been up to. While I have been away from England I feel like a few of the projects I have been working on - with teams and sponsors have been unattended a bit. However since I left England I have remained fully emersed in motorsport, on account of Al Mitchell, the manager of MSR Houston (www.msrhouston.com) who was kind enough to extend an invitation to me to help out around his circuit while I was in the states.
Since I have been down here I have been helping them get their karting operation up and running. They recently built an incredible eight-tenths of a mile kart circuit and they are looking forward to getting a full rental and competition race program up and running. I have been helping get those things up and running and in the process have gotten to do a bit of driving myself!
MSR Houston is absolutely fantastic and a blast to be around. I can only begin to tell you about the facilities they have set up for the members of the track. My favorite thing on site, which I have not done yet, but agree fully to in principle and plan to try out soon is a shotgun shooting range. My friends in England will not believe it, since guns are prohibited (without a special license). However here in Texas we have lots of guns and naturally a clay targets range at the racing track is a fundamental piece of the puzzle. There is also a work out facility which I have been spending some time in while I haven't been working.
Additionally there is a lake on site for fishing. I must say, I don't think having a lake is that special, because PalmerSport has a lake as well. As you might remember PalmerSport has a special tradition of throwing lucky birthday people into the lake. In the lake they have here in Houston there is a real, live, honest-to-god Aligator. I was able to take a few pictures of it and I will have to upload them to prove it to all of you soon. I thing getting a birthday treat of being thrown in the pond would be less than optimal.
As many of you might have heard the weather is getting a bit dodgy around here. The last I heard there was a level 3, (read: 120 mile per hour wind) hurricane called Ike bearing down on my present local. I haven't ever been in a hurricane before and in fact never in any major disaster for that matter. A lot of people around the coast of Houston have evacuated along with many others throughout the city. Since we are not in an evacuation area we are going to hold up as the hurricane passes. I'm not sure if I will get a chance, but I will try to take a picture to show you what it looks like. We were considering opening up some of the garages (two doors at booth end of building) putting a race car on scales and doing some aerodynamic wind tunnel testing. Sounds a whole heck of a lot cheaper than buying our own wind tunnel!
Hope all of you are doing well. I am enjoying things down here (bar hurricane) and am looking to getting back to Europe soon!
Warmest regards
Michael
Just wanted to make a quick update to say hello and let everyone know what I have been up to. While I have been away from England I feel like a few of the projects I have been working on - with teams and sponsors have been unattended a bit. However since I left England I have remained fully emersed in motorsport, on account of Al Mitchell, the manager of MSR Houston (www.msrhouston.com) who was kind enough to extend an invitation to me to help out around his circuit while I was in the states.
Since I have been down here I have been helping them get their karting operation up and running. They recently built an incredible eight-tenths of a mile kart circuit and they are looking forward to getting a full rental and competition race program up and running. I have been helping get those things up and running and in the process have gotten to do a bit of driving myself!
MSR Houston is absolutely fantastic and a blast to be around. I can only begin to tell you about the facilities they have set up for the members of the track. My favorite thing on site, which I have not done yet, but agree fully to in principle and plan to try out soon is a shotgun shooting range. My friends in England will not believe it, since guns are prohibited (without a special license). However here in Texas we have lots of guns and naturally a clay targets range at the racing track is a fundamental piece of the puzzle. There is also a work out facility which I have been spending some time in while I haven't been working.
Additionally there is a lake on site for fishing. I must say, I don't think having a lake is that special, because PalmerSport has a lake as well. As you might remember PalmerSport has a special tradition of throwing lucky birthday people into the lake. In the lake they have here in Houston there is a real, live, honest-to-god Aligator. I was able to take a few pictures of it and I will have to upload them to prove it to all of you soon. I thing getting a birthday treat of being thrown in the pond would be less than optimal.
As many of you might have heard the weather is getting a bit dodgy around here. The last I heard there was a level 3, (read: 120 mile per hour wind) hurricane called Ike bearing down on my present local. I haven't ever been in a hurricane before and in fact never in any major disaster for that matter. A lot of people around the coast of Houston have evacuated along with many others throughout the city. Since we are not in an evacuation area we are going to hold up as the hurricane passes. I'm not sure if I will get a chance, but I will try to take a picture to show you what it looks like. We were considering opening up some of the garages (two doors at booth end of building) putting a race car on scales and doing some aerodynamic wind tunnel testing. Sounds a whole heck of a lot cheaper than buying our own wind tunnel!
Hope all of you are doing well. I am enjoying things down here (bar hurricane) and am looking to getting back to Europe soon!
Warmest regards
Michael
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