Familiarity is said to breed contempt. While that is not strictly true, familiarity can breed a certain level of indifference to experiences that have become par for the course in one's life.
The first time I attended the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa I arrived home black and blue, having spent the bulk of the weekend pinching myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming. Yes, that was Eau Rouge I could see disappearing up into the distance from the media car park, and yes that was La Source I passed when coming into the press room from Francorchamps.
I had four wonderful days at one of the best tracks on the F1 calendar, even allowing for the inevitable near-trenchfoot that results from the endless rain. Spa was and is a magical place to be.
But after six years of Spa, the extraordinary can become ordinary. The magic of that first glimpse of Eau Rouge will never go away, but watching races in hermetically sealed press rooms makes it easy to forget how different the experience is just outside the window. We go trackside in practice sessions, but the demands of writing race reports and tracking timing screens mean that, as a rule, the grand prix is spent chained to one's laptop in the press room.
Rules are made to be broken, however, and Sunday's race in Spa saw me abandon the press room for a rare-as-hens'-teeth chance to watch the Belgian Grand Prix from the top of the Hotel de l'Eau Rouge.
As far as vantage points go, it can't be beaten. To watch a grand prix from one of the most iconic corners on the F1 calendar is an opportunity not to be missed, but to stand above Eau Rouge in the blistering sunshine and feel the passing cars pulsing through your veins as they roar by is to fall in love with motor-racing all over again.
It was an immersive experience far removed from the typical journalist reality of watching battles unfold using the sector timing screens we have in media centres around the world. Instead of using data to predict future upsets, it was an exercise in watching the drivers themselves, keeping an eye on lines and an ear on engine noises to determine levels of confidence and power as each man tackled one of F1's most challenging corners.
The roar of the crowd and engines drowned out the circuit commentary, and there was no chance to hear any of the radio messages between driver and pit wall. Ignorant of when cars were going to be called into the pits, or just who was complaining of vibrations or a loss of power meant that several of Sunday's upsets involved the element of surprise.
It was the perfect experience during a weekend aimed at being the beginning of F1's new comms-free (or comms-lite, at least...) era. For the first time in years I was able to see a race ebb and flow in real life, to read only those events that actually happened and not to waste time predicting possible outcomes from endless reams of incoming data. It was like going back to the very beginning of my F1 fandom, aware of the fact that exciting things were coming in a race but unable to predict just what those excitements might be.
Familiarity may not breed contempt, but ignorance can certainly be bliss, especially when that ignorance involves Eau Rouge, sunshine, and Formula One.