Thank Frankel It's Friday – Discovering the old Spa

No bits jumped out of the engine, no wheels went for a sightseeing trip of the Ardennes, the historically not in the least bit trusty old Ford Falcon just chuntered around for six hours after which we all went and got drunk.

But like most race weekends, the one at Spa is full of downtime. As anyone who’s ever done it knows only too well, the entire business of motorsport is one of spending hours – days even – waiting for something to happen. Rushing to wait or waiting to rush are the two cornerstones of car racing.

So this year I did something I’ve wanted to do ever since I first came to Spa over 20 years ago: I took a proper look at the old circuit.

You will know that wondrous though the modern Spa is, its course follows barely one third of the route of the mighty original circuit whose 8.77 mile length was longer even than Le Mans is today. I have of course driven around it many times but there’s only so much you can soak up in a moving car keeping pace with heavy traffic. So I pulled on some training shoes and headed out, determined to trot around the old circuit, thereby completing the slowest lap of Spa in history.

Naturally you can’t access the new track during a race weekend so the run from Blanchimont up to La Source, down and up through Eau Rouge and along the Kemmel Straight is off limits, but you can get just the other side of the wall at Les Combes and straight into another world.

Where the modern track turns sharp right, the old circuit angles through a long quick left and starts plunging downhill. This is the old Les Combes and it leads straight into possibly the most evil corner any car ever raced around. Burnenville goes on forever, it’s all downhill, it tightens slightly and in a Porsche 917 or Ferrari 312PB you’d go through at around 180mph. This is where Stirling Moss had the second biggest crash of his career and where the brilliant Chris Bristow lost his life. Know where to look in the forest beyond and you’ll find memorials to others, too.

The old corner at Malmedy is the only one that not longer exists, having been replaced by a roundabout underneath the E42 dual carriageway, but you can still see where it went and how it flung cars onto the Masta Straight.

By the time you reached the left right swerve half way along the Masta’s length, you’d likely be travelling as fast as your car could go, which would be 200mph plus for the quickest things that raced here. Knowing Spa, it would probably be raining. Some have insisted that this kink was flat in the dry, but I really can’t see how: it’s two proper corners with the consequences of getting either wrong at such speed likely to be fatal. With no downforce and olde worlde tyre technology, keeping you foot pinned from entry to apex would have required courage I can’t comprehend.

Then, helpfully, the track runs downhill again, making sure that any speed you’ve scrubbed off in the kink is quickly recovered. And there, in front of you, is Stavelot. Steeply banked and arcing away up and to the right, this actually looks like it might be the one corner on the old circuit someone like me might characterise as ‘fun’. It would be terrifying too of course, but terrifyingly fun.

Sadly for me my attempt to take Stavelot flat on foot aggravated an old calf injury so I had to pull over to the side of the road and wait to be recovered, meaning I never got to run up through the top speed swerves that lead back to Blanchimont as Spa as it is today.

What I did manage to do on my travels is take a few photographs on my telephone of the aforementioned corners. They are, of course, rubbish, but perhaps worth spending a minute looking at and considering that, in 1973, in a normally aspirated Ferrari with an engine of less than 3-litres, and despite having to slow to perhaps 40mph for the La Source hairpin, Jacky Ickx averaged 163mph around here. Averaged. Of all the places I’ve been in pursuit of my passion for motorsport, there remains no fact more mind boggling to me than that. And now I’ve seen in all on foot and in slow motion, that feat is the one thing I thought it could never be: even more incomprehensible than ever.