This trip seemed a long time coming, perhaps more so due to the long winter build-up on the Ringers list! But eventually Thursday 12th April rolled around and myself, Mac, Chris Rae and his flatmate Paul met up on the 12:15 SeaFrance ferry.
Mac sensibly decided to appease the crash gods by dropping his bike on the ferry. Fortunately the only damage was a broken brake-lever and 'I only use two fingers anyway':
The Ring spirit was well in evidence when two bikers stopped, announced that they were staying at the same B&B as Mac and that the owner, Edgar, would be sure to have a spare brake-lever.
Our convoy of four vehicles briefly grew to about 25 at the first petrol stop as a large proportion of the world supply of Scoobies arrived, along with John's Westfield and a newly-acquired RS200. 'Could we follow you round the Brussels ring-road?'. This plan was less than perfectly executed when the famous 'no signposts until 500m before' fork arrived and I forgot how many vehicles I now had in tow. Since the inside lane was full, I decided to overtake the queue and nip in close to the split. I then realised that this manouevre was likely to scatter our convoy throughout Belgium and so hit the brakes and pulled in early. This took the following vehicles by surprise, so most of them overtook me as we made the turn, but despite this crap piece of convoy-leading on my part we managed to retain the majority of the gang.
At 8am on Friday morning, things were looking a little dubious. The view outside the window looked like this:
The white speckles are snowdrops falling prettily to earth
Which may explain why the view in the breakfast room at our B&B looked like this:
The thronging crowds for the 8am 'Get to the track early'
breakfast
Ever the optimist, I made my way to the track. It seems we Ring nuts are an optimistic bunch in general as the car-park rapidly filled up:
Er, whose idea was this, again?
Mac, wondering why he's at the Ring on a bike in a snowstorm
One of the first people I ran into was Anders, so we trotted off to admire his new toy:
How sexy is that?
Did I mention the sex-appeal of this car?
Now, put yourself in Anders shoes for a moment. You own a car costing a six-figure sum. You have owned it a matter of weeks, and put only a few hundred miles on it. You have never seen me drive, and you know my car has 130bhp. Would you hand me the keys??? Anders did.
Ok, so he wasn't quite silly enough to let me take it for a lap, but the alternative route to Adenau has never been so much fun! You'll have to excuse me coming over all MCN, but there's no other word for it: that car is awesome. As Anders demonstrated when he took me for a passenger lap the following day. Wow. Just wow.
The weather at the Ring that day was as crazy as Anders. You could set out in snow, move into clear skies but a damp track, then hit rain, then clear skies and a dry track, then a snow-storm, then a wet track, then a dry track. All on the same lap. Then you could find the same mixture but in different places on the very next lap.
Maybe I'm crazy too, but I was really enjoying myself. The bizarre weather made it a different circuit every lap.
Of course, a little snow is no excuse for putting the hood up
(Photo: Michael Frison)
Unfortunately, not every Ringer was having quite as good a day. Chris Rae first killed his Lancia, then crashed his flatmate's Saab. In total, he got through two cars in a little over four laps. Possibly he should have bought the five-lap ticket rather than the Jahreskart ...
After the Saab incident: Paul (owner of the Saab), Chris (culprit)
and Neik (passenger)
Both Chris and Paul were being remarkably cheerful about it, but perhaps the beer helped. As you would expect, the rest of the Ringers expressed nothing but sympathy and compassion as we downed our beers in the Lindenhof. We even sent a sympathetic group email to the list while we were there:
Jörund composes his contribution to the group email on my
Psion
The food in the Pistenklause was good, the beer better and the company better yet:
Saturday morning arrived, and the weather was cool but sunny and dry. :-) Ironically, just as I'm about to sell the MX-5, I had a whole succession of passengers telling me how capable they thought it was. Some of the bikers in particular found it hard to believe how much grip it offers, and I have to say I was really enjoying Ring laps MX-5-style. Even so, I was surprised when one passenger timed a lap without me being aware of it and informed me that the bridge-to-gantry time was 9:30 precisely. A randomly-timed lap back in August was 9:52, so something must have been going right.
Hmmm, maybe those 911s aren't so fast, after all ...
(Photos: Michael Frison)
I was also getting my own fair share of passenger laps in other people's toys. Robin Iddon's Elise was an absolute joy, and Laurens' Kadett showed that you don't need a big budget to have fun at the Ring:
We had arranged to take a group photo during the first closure on Saturday afternoon. This appears to be a reliable way to ensure that no serious accidents occur, since there wasn't a single closure the whole day! There were, however, quite a few crashes. One of them, unfortunately, was one of our gang crashing his R6 at Hatzenbach. Fortunately it was a pretty low-speed spill, and his only injury was a sore arm, but the bike didn't fare quite as well:
The reason for the crash became clear when Amanda found this on the bike:
Moral: Remove all number 13s from your bike before setting
off
I also managed a bike crash of my own, despite having left my bike at home. My mechanic, who was servicing and MOTing it while I was away, called me on my mobile to inform me that he had crashed it on the way back from the MOT! That was a slightly surreal moment, standing there in the Ring car-park getting a damage-assessment of a bike last seen parked happily outside my living-room window.
The weather gods also exacted a heavy price for the good weather that day. By midnight, things looked like this:
Things were no better by the morning, and when I spoke to one of the guys at the Ring office he told me that there was deep snow on the track and it would be closed all day. :-(
We thus had to find other ways of amusing ourselves. The difficulties of doing this on a bank holiday weekend in Nürburg are best illustrated by the fact that the most exciting thing to happen all morning was copying some August laps from one camcorder to another via a FireWire cable:
Fortunately things improved in the afternoon when we went to the go-kart circuit. The standard deal was 20DM each for a 10 minute open session, so I asked what group discounts were available. I was told that if we had 10 people, we could have exclusive use of the track for 30 minutes: 10 minutes qualifying and a 20-minute race. We eventually got the 10 people together and much fun was had by all. Both karts and track were excellent for an indoor circuit.
A few of us went off to watch the Grand Prix on TV at a local bar, but the sheer tediousness of it eventually drove me away and I went to catch up on some email and have a wander up the track between Brünnchen and Pflanzgarten:
The good news about Monday was that the track was open. The bad news was that it was the most slippery I have yet known it. There was standing water everywhere, and several streams running across the track, including the exits to bends. It was ideal weather for Scoobies (who, bizarrely enough, almost all went home), but not for much else.
I tip-toed round a lap that must have taken 12 or 13 minutes, and there wasn't any way I was going to be going any faster in those conditions. Back in the car-park, I was waiting for a passenger lap in Michael Oliver's borrowed Exige when Laurens introduced me to a Belgian Ringer and Scooby driver called Theo. Theo & I were chatting when he got a call on his mobile with a now-familiar tale: his mate had just crashed his car! And just two bends further than the site of the Saab crash.
I gave Theo a lift round to Breidscheid to inspect the damage: a broken wheel and moderate front-end damage on the left-hand side. Apparently in Belgium you can buy special insurance for driving borrowed cars which effectively gives you fully-comp cover, and fortunately his friend had done this.
We failed miserably in our attempt to get a Ringers group photo, so whoever said that we should go for a fixed time can now tell me 'I told you so'. Most people left fairly early on Monday after seeing the state of the track, so there were just four of us left there by lunchtime ...
The closest we got to a Ringers group photo:
Laurens, Paul, Chris, me
I did spot the other ideal vehicle for those conditions while waiting to board the ferry home:
I want one of these
So ... not quite the weekend we had hoped for in terms of sunny days spent doing lap after lap, but still a good crack and great to meet so many Ringers. Just have to hope for better weather next time!
Oh, and I finally decided that four wheels is the way to do the Ring. Safer, more sociable (it's fun giving and getting passenger rides) and, for me, just as much fun. All I need is more power. After investigating MX-5 upgrades, I came to the conclusion that the old adage is true: the cheapest way to improve the performance of a car is to sell it and buy a faster one. Hope to have more news on that within a few months.
Copyright © Ben Lovejoy 2001