He was fab when I first saw him win the F2 Championship a few years back in Istanbul. Which all ties in rather well with the fact that I was going to tell you all about it because I was watching it with my brother Phil.

This week he popped up from London to see me, my brother, not Lewis, arriving at 5.15am on Thursday morning on Megabus. Bit different from Formula 1, I know, but it gets him up overnight and is a good cheap way of travelling. So he was visiting me to have a look at my new gaffe at Tyne Towers.

Now the coach trip was probably even more luxurious than his trip to Istanbul. I was living in Dubai and was very lucky to be able to get a flight with Emirates Airline direct to Istanbul. My serial traveller brother had decided he wanted to do things another way. He chose to fly budget flight from London to Ancona, then take the ferry across to the Greek coast and then take a bus to Thessollonika and an overnight train to Istanbul.

Now, in the old days, Istanbul was the end of the line of the Orient Express and I was waiting for him at The Orient Express Café just at the side of the Railway station refreshed from my stay at my rather plush free hotel.

He arrived dishevelled and we had a quick coffee before I took him back to my place which was more a suite than an hotel room. He had brought a tent and sleeping bag and decided that he wanted to sleep in the sleeping bag on the floor in the hallway! Of a five-star hotel! Odd my brother, but when he subsequently took me round the old world streets of Istanbul reminiscing about being there in the 1977 visiting a place where all the strange travelling people used to meet up and discuss where they wanted to go and where they had been, it all fell into place.

That was a time when a trip to Afghanistan was not for war, but still was a worrying place to be when sleeping in the caves that The Taliban now probably occupy. He told me about someone cocking a pistol as they all lay heads next to each other in a star shape settling down for the night in the caves. He didn't get much sleep that one night in the mountains, and then there were other stories of when he was subsequently turfed off the bus which was meant to be taking him to the north of Tehran to a railway station on the night that the revolution began in Iran. The city of Tehran was burning.

Anyway, there we were in Istanbul visting The Pudding Shop where travellers from around the world would swap stories of their Middle Eastern and further World travels and he was showing me all the old photos and press cuttings from newspapers from around the world on the walls there. At that moment a little guy named Lewis Hamilton was a long way from our minds.

I have been a McLaren fan for quite a few years and my brother has been a Ferrari fan for even longer and this was the first time we had been to a Grand Prix together. Of course Kimi Raikonnen was McLarens star at the time fighting against The Schumacher.

But before the main F1 race the F2 race had taken place and little Lewis in nappies had secured the Championship that day and we were there!

But it got better for me that day as Michael Schumacher span out directly in front of us and Kimi did the business. Now this weekend Kimi could wreck it for me, but I hope not.

So we went out on our last night in Istanbul and sat by the Bosphorus and enjoyed a meal of sea bass. Unfortunately it was to come back and haunt us. At about 4.30am I heard a few strange noises coming from the sleeping bag in the hallway and heard even more as the hours past. And then my constitution gave up and I began using my private bathroom too. We had the worst case of food poisoning ever. So what did I prepare for my brother ahead of this weekends Grand Prix? Seafood! See ya next week.