Apologies for missing days 4, and 5, to be fair the world may have ended but I wouldn't have noticed I as was suffering with "Bucharest Belly", not only that but, with planes stuck in customs, there wasn't much to report other than a new or varied sob story.

So this was the "today or never" date for getting the planes. We had tried several avenues of enquiry including a customs handling agent who at first promised a low price and high expectations but, come reading the official estimate, the price had more than doubled and expectations significantly lowered!

I guess the old line rang true "if you want something doing right then do it your ******* self!". Thankfully we had Dawn Hawkins along with us who, during my sickness, collated all the relevant (and irrelevant) leads and information regarding the custom issues. The long and short of it is that Dawn and Mat popped down to the Otopeni (Bucharest) customs office and after almost 3 hours they got the green light to fetch our planes.

AWESOME! But.... green light to FETCH our planes - We haven't got a van, how are we going to do that?

Whilst trying to organise a van, I got word that customs wouldn't release the models without contact details of the person who would oversee the collection of planes - mate... the person nominated to receive the consignment was totally illusive so we needed someone new and reliable, how were we to find this? Clearly a truly impossible task but thankfully Pål got us sorted in under 15mins.

Amazingly, Pål also got us in touch with the Swedish team who had driven their model down in a Luton style van who kindly offered to run me down to meet up with Dawn and Mat to fetch the models. We also had offers from others, including Mika from Finland, to pick the models up which really shows camaraderie amongst our fellow competitors.

With the model crates in a nice nice air conditioned hall we started the process of unloading and assembling the models. In all the excitement I forgot to mention that we were a man down with Nigel out of action suffering his own variant of "Bucharest Belly", thankfully our fellow competitors are very sympathetic to our predicament and allowed a reasonable amount of time to get the models ready for static judging starting no later than 10:40am.

Probably gone on a bit but it has been a rather welcome change of fortune - just hope we don't all roll in on take-off after all this!

Brian Seymour, GBR F4 Team Manager