Editor-in-chief
His name is Thommie and I’m staring at his belly for the second time in as many days. Yesterday he was stretched across a table like a go-go dancer, shirt lifted to reveal his prize torso, for a group photo none of us will forget in a hurry. Today he’s swapping T-shirts with Ollie Marriage in a dark car park outside Gotland’s premier waffle house (both pictures can be obtained for a fair price, DM me).
He’s a warm, funny chap with a waxed moustache who used to work for Lamborghini and Koenigsegg, but now lives part-time in a caravan at the Gotlandring and is The Man That Gets Things Done. Like angle grinding padlocks of the garages so we can get our cars out because the keys have gone walkabout (later found in nearby undergrowth), or finding us an in-no-way-leaky fuel pump at short notice so we could transfer our precious biofuel from barrels to cars, or throwing us the keys to his 300,000km Volvo because our taxi hadn’t turned up, we don’t speak Swedish and we were about to miss our flight.
I mention him because he represents everything that makes Speed Week the highlight of our year. Yes, meeting new people and making friends along the way, but it’s more than that. Getting 15 cars and 16 journalists, photographers and videographers to an island off the east coast of Sweden, finding somewhere to sleep, things to eat and producing a library’s worth of the world’s greate
