The GT Open is a Spanish series. GT Sport Organización have run it since 2006 and everything on the grid is FIA GT3, which means a road car underneath and a great deal of aerodynamics on top. Two races a weekend, seventy minutes on the Saturday and sixty on the Sunday. Two drivers to a car, and a pit stop in the middle you have to take, because that is where they swap over. The single seaters sharing the bill are the Euroformula Open.
Seven kilometres of forest with a road laid over it. Nineteen corners, and a hundred metres between the lowest point on the track and the highest, which you feel in your legs long before you see it in a photograph. It used to be nearly fifteen kilometres of ordinary public road until they cut it down in 1979. Eau Rouge is the one everybody knows. You come down the hill, cross the bottom, and it goes up and away from you before you can see where it lands.
The 488 GT3 was still fairly new that weekend. It arrived in 2016 to replace the 458, twin turbo V8, 3.9 litres, about six hundred horsepower once the rulebook has had its say. Ferrari's customer teams took it everywhere for the best part of a decade.
Mikkel is from Nykøbing Falster and was twenty four when we were there. He had already won the GTE class of the European Le Mans Series in 2015 and driven Le Mans itself the year after that. The year after this one he won the GT Open outright. To us he was just Mikkel.
On the Saturday they finished third overall. The trophy is in here, photographed three minutes after Mikkel came back in holding it.
The drone went up on the Friday evening, once everything had gone quiet and the light was going orange over the trees. And late on the Saturday, on the way back through the village, there was an F40 parked at the kerb outside somebody's front door like it was a Golf. Belgium.
