As the clock clicked round to 8.30am it was time for breakfast, whilst outside the storm clouds threatened and the general gloom was only lifted by the flashing of distant lightning. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth (apart from it being 8.30am and time for breakfast) but I thought you might be bored by me telling you how beautiful it is here each and every morning.
Directly after breakfast we hotfooted it upstairs to catch a coach to take us to Kartodromo de Almancil for a team bonding session. The go karting track which was opened by Ayrton Senna is a replica of the former Formula One circuit in Brazil - Jacarepagua.
Everybody was paired up one player/one staff member wherever possible and with safety instructions, practice and then a qualifying session completed to determine pole, the hour long race commenced. This after all the boy racers had to put on what looked like a hotel shower cap prior to donning their protective helmets.
From the off Bob Oteng (partnering Roy Hendriksen) together with Nico Yennaris (partnering Tom Bates) set a blistering pace which the others struggled to compete with. But an hour is a long time in go karting (in truth it's no longer, no shorter than knitting for one hour, but a lot more interesting), and things can change very quickly.
It was quite frenetic and certainly noisy with the emphasis on the partner not in the car to signal to his co-driver when it was felt it was the right time to pit and change driver. It was also quite exciting to the spectator and the people who run the Kartodrome were most professional displaying on the screens lap times for all the entrants.
Come the end of the hour, we were able to announce the winners who received their medals from Marinus on the podium and in classic style wasted three bottles of champagne by popping the corks and spraying the contents over each other and anyone else who was stupid enough to be in the vicinity. Needless to say the players were reminded by me that they couldn't drink any of the champagne.
The winners were Nico Yennaris and Tom Bates who completed 49 laps. Nick told me that his cousin was very much into go karting and he himself used to go karting a lot. In second place was Jota and Mark Smith, amazingly just 4.5 seconds behind them. In third place were Andreas Bjelland and Richard Clark one further lap adrift. The fastest lap was recorded by Marcus Tebar and James Purdue in 44.782 seconds, just over 3 seconds outside the all time lap record time.
After karting if was back to the hotel for lunch whilst it was free time for the whole group for the rest of the afternoon, before, in the evening we all enjoyed a lovely buffet dinner at a open air restaurant overlooking the coastline at Vale do Lobo before it was back to the hotel at 10pm.
And so to bed.
Peter Gilham