Just how crazy and dedicated is the Dutch Orange Max Verstappen Army? To discover that madness, was our main reason to visit the Australian Grand Prix this year, besides doing what we love the most, watching a Grand Prix live.
We have been invited by Red Bull and get to sleep in a pretty cool caravan sponsored by Eriba, a brand of the Erwin-Hymer group. We will stay at the Max Verstappen village, Sportstadion created this camping ground especially for Max Verstappen fans.That’s something we have to experience for once in our lives!
The camping is pretty busy as all the fans arrive, most from Holland of course. We had a flight from Amsterdam and get to the camping grounds with a rental car. We can enter the village with our car to unload our stuff to the caravan. The caravan has been set up for us, so we can directly go to sleep.
Waking up at the Max Verstappen village was quite easy, most residents of the village are up early and some like to play some very loud dance music. I’m talking about 7 a.m. here ;-). We head to the showers, and get ourselves ready for the free practice. It’s about a 20 minute walk from the camping to the track, and it’s not that bad as we get to talk to a lot of Red Bull fans. The Red Bull Ring must be one of the best organized and well maintained tracks on the Formula one calendar. The track, that was formerly known as the A1 Ring, was purchased by Red Bull founder Dietrich Mateschitz in 2005.
“Red Bull paid a lot of attention to details”
He let the track layout stay the same, but spend several millions to re-scape the complete landscape surrounding the track. He thought of every little grass field and tree, nothing was left to chance. You can see that he spend a lot of attention to details, from the gorgeous sights and tree lines to the ‘Charging bull’ in the middle of the track, just behind the Max Verstappen grandstand.
After watching the cars all day we head to the camping. We watch some soccer as the World Cup is being held, no.. no Dutch glory there.
The next day it’s the same routine and we head to the track for some action of Max Verstappen, at the end of the qualifying word gets out that he will give ‘act the presence’ at the Max Verstappen village and do an interview with the Dutch commentator Olav Mol on the podium. The tent is crowded with people as the time the interview will start gets closer, and than, as Max Verstappen enters the podium, the crowd goes wild! Olav has some questions for Max and Max, relaxed as always, answers the questions and gives his predictions for the race tomorrow. Max leaves to get some rest and we party till late with the Max fans in the big party tent at the village.
It’s raceday and we head to the track again. Now the whole stand is packed with Dutch fans and it completely turned orange. All Dutch fans do the wave and cheer as loud as they can for Max every time he passes the stand. The crowd really goes wild when Max passes Kimi Raikkonen, just in front of us. Due to this great action, a well timed pit stop from Red Bull and some bad luck for both the Mercedes cars, Max manages to win the Grand Prix. Wanna know how this weekend looked like for us? Check our the Austrian Grand Pix gallery >
“If it ain’t Dutch, it ain’t much”
Everyone goes mad and we ‘set sail’ to the podium, this is the first time for us that we see Max on the highest stand on the podium. We manage to get there just in time for the Dutch National Anthem. We are proud of Max and dream on about what lies ahead in the future.
