Cha-Am blog by onlychaam

I was driving from Cha-Am to Phetchaburi last Saturday, when suddenly I saw a red car tailgating me. I didn’t have the time to change lane to let it pass, it had already managed to squeeze between the lanes and it went on at full speed. It was a convertible sort of thing, with two Farangs in it, and it looked like they were actually racing. My first reaction was: Farang ting tong! Then a minute or so later, I saw a yellow Lotus which looked like it was part of the race too, and an SLK also passed by. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was in the middle of the MunMaak Coast to Coast rally.

Then I thought wow, there must be a Ferrari too! They can’t organize such rallies without a Ferrari, right? True enough, a few moments later I saw a tiny red point in my rear mirror. I reached for my phone, which was inside its case and inside my pocket. I know it’s a dangerous thing to do while you are driving, but I just love Ferraris and I wanted to take a picture. Anyway, by the time I had the phone camera ready, I heard the wonderful roaring of the engine speeding past me. I pressed the shutter but the camera on this phone is very slow, it takes more than a second to trigger, and one second is a long time at the time scale of an F430. So I only got a blurry picture of… my dashboard.

I tried to pick up the pace, pushing my car to 170 km/h (at which point other drivers probably thought that I was part of the race too, and how silly it was to race with a simple Toyota), but I soon got stuck in the traffick and all I could see of the Ferrari was a tiny red point in front of me.

I couldn’t tell the model of the red car I first saw, but I did my homework and found the MunMaak website with the details of all registered cars. It was a Westfield Sport 2000. I also learned that Paradorn, the famous tennis champion, was in with his yellow Modena. The website describes the rally as a 400 km drive from Hua Hin to Pattaya. It’s not a race, they say, but there is a “start grid” and a “winner”…!

Anyway the next race… ooops I mean rally, will take place on January 23, 2010. I’ll be there, with a proper camera!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 15th, 2009 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Events and festivals . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.