Since the Ring was open Friday afternoon, I decided to take the civilised approach. Instead of getting up at the crack of dawn on Friday, driving across Belgium and then hoping to have enough energy left to enjoy the afternoon session, I took Thursday afternoon off, drove over then and had a lie-in on Friday morning.
Euan decided to come along for the ride, which is just as well as - without a witness - I don't think anyone would believe how close I came to spending the entire weekend in a car-wash on the A2. The machine was very, very good at the soap cycle. Unfortunately it had no talent whatsoever for the brush or rinse cycles, so it just repeated the soap cycle over and over again until I eventually risked driving out of it.
(Photo: Euan)
The manager offered me a refund, and didn't seem very interested in the fact that my car was about six inches deep in soap suds. A request for Jet's head office number then produced an offer to send an underling out to jet-wash the car by hand, which had us on our way with a gleaming car.
The usual boring motorway journey was briefly enlivened with this truck. We were debating whether this was a haulage company being honest about their service, or a description of the cargo:
Richard, a Bandit 1200 rider, got his crash in early, getting a massive tankslapper on the back straight during the Thursday evening session. After being spat off at around 120mph, he was lucky to get away with tendon damage to his hand and some grazing on his legs:
He did have the courtesy to video the proceedings, and will be sending the footage to Jörund.
After a delightfully lazy 10am breakfast, Euan and I headed off to an unofficial spectating point I'd found previously to watch some of the manufacturer test session. Along with two heavily-disguised 4x4s which we suspect were BMW X5s, we spotted this disguised Porsche. I've included a full-size pic in case anyone wants to play 'guess what it will be':
The funniest disguise was a Mercedes SL-type model where they'd even covered up the Mercedes badge! Um, hate to break it to you, guys, but we didn't think it was a Ford ...
Unsurprisingly, once I started taking photos it wasn't long before a safety car arrived, so we waved in a 'We got the hint' fashion and went on our way.
As I'd worn out my rear tyres on the previous trip, I'd replaced them with SO3s. Although I expected them to be pretty much indistinguishable from SO2s, they actually turned out to be much grippier - amazing as this seemed. However, a little play on the back road from the Ring to Adenau convinced me that grippier tyres on the back was not a good idea as the MX-5 started under-steering for the first time ever! I thus went down to the tyre place in Adenau and had them swap the front and rears, giving me grippier tyres on the front. Um ... is this enough advance excuses yet?
Ok, on with the confession ... When the Ring opened, I did the usual sighting lap first, just to see where the armco-repair trucks were parked, and also to check out the resurfacing we'd read about on the list. Then straight out for the first proper lap, Euan still in the passenger seat.
All was fine until Aremberg. As I headed down towards the bend, I had a 944 Turbo on my tail. I was nervous about braking too hard with him so close, and tried to encourage him to pass. He moved slightly right, but didn't come past. I decided he wasn't going to pass, so was about to turn in. Then I thought he was trying to pass on my inside. Then realised he wasn't. All of this indecisiveness left me turning in later and harder than usual. More importantly, I was so busy concentrating on the Porsche that I ... uh ... well ... hadn't done much of the ... um ... you know, that traditional thing people do before tight bends ... braking, that's it. Or rather, that wasn't it because I didn't do much of it.
Aremberg: scene of the crime
All of which left me coming into Aremberg at 80mph instead of 50mph and turning in harder and later than usual. Which is a bad thing. The front of the car was willing to give it a go, but the back end said 'You must be joking, pal' and headed for the kitty-litter.
I did the traditional flailing of the arms thing that you do in these circumstances and the back end was now heading for the inside of the bend instead. This didn't strike me as a great improvement since it now put the front of the car pointing at the concrete bridge support. A few more flails later, we were still fishtailing our way down towards the bridge, so I decided that I would now like to be stationary, please. I yanked the wheel round to the right and stomped on the brake hard so that we slid rapidly, if not gracefully, to a halt on the inside of the bend.
The good news was that I'd kept it on the tarmac and we were now past the apex and thus not on the line. The bad news was that we were facing the wrong way up the track on the inside of a blind bend. Three bikers came round the bend, the first one spotting us and warning his mates. The second or third one waved a 'No, no' and pointed energetically down the track, as if we were driving the wrong way round! "Oh, right, so that's why everyone has been hooting and flashing and driving straight at us for the last 11 miles ..."
The kerb looked massive, and I thought we were likely to beach on it if I tried driving off the track. I briefly considered asking Euan to get out and signal when it was safe to do a 180, but decided that I'd put him through enough for one day, so took a deep breath, put it in gear, did a rapid U-turn and accelerated away as quickly as possible.
Although the incident was pure driver error, and the mis-matched tyres were only an incidental factor, I lost all faith in the handling and started tip-toeing round. For a while, I thought it was going to spoil the weekend as I couldn't have any slidey fun, but I gradually adapted to the new characteristics and started enjoying myself again. Indeed, in two double-apex right handers - Hatzenbach and the bottom of Pflanzgarten 1 - the tail-happy nature of the slides actually enabled me to take them faster than usual since the tail swinging out took the car round the bends without me having to do anything other than press the gas pedal. :-)
I did quite a few solo laps before I felt happy taking passengers out again, but it seems Ringers are a brave lot as I soon had a steady stream of passengers again.
Martin Plant almost decided to try my interesting line through Aremberg when he locked-up the brakes on the approach (his ABS failed earlier). He thought that the gravel-trap wouldn't be much help when going straight on, so decided that at least putting it in sideways would be an improvement. Fortunately he got it back in line and didn't have to replicate my standing-start U-turn.
The day in general was pretty crashy, but fortunately nothing serious.
The Pistenklause dinner on Friday night was the usual semi-chaotic affair, with no real idea who was turning up until we got there. Our booking for 10 wasn't enough, and they had no more room downstairs, so we took over the upstairs room:
Prize for gathering the biggest crowds went to this Atom, brought across by Jon Reeves (left) and Tony Quinn:
Unfortunately it wasn't having a good day. When I went out for a passenger lap in it, the fan-belt came off, so we came to a halt next to the gravel-trap on the exit from Brunnchen - just where you don't want to be stationary! I jumped over the armco and went down to the entry to the bend to hold my helmet up while Jon fiddled with it. We eventually limped back with a safety car behind us. Later on in the day, the Atom crashed at the Baby Karussell.
There were two other competitors for car-park attention. First, this Ultima Spyder:
That too was suffering mechanical woes, so unfortunately I didn't manage to blag a passenger lap in it. This was my second failure to blag an Ultima lap as Andy wasn't happy with the handling of his GTR on a previous trip - ho hum.
The other competition for attention was Jeremy Clarkson, there to film a programme about the Ring. He was grabbing anyone who would stand still to interview them, though he did have a noticeable tendency to spend most time interviewing blondes in tight tops.
Tony chats to Jeremy Clarkson & crew,
while Sabina looks cool (and gorgeous) sat on the Ring Taxi
I asked Jeremy whether he had his Ferrari with him, but he'd brought his E-Type Jag instead. My attempt to blag a passenger lap in that got nowhere as he wasn't taking it out on the track. While this seemed a criminal waste, I could see his point: once the Brits knew he was out there, everyone would want to go home with a tale about how they 'stuffed Jeremy Clarkson up the inside at Wehrseifen'.
Michael Oliver was there with, astonishingly, a car he had actually paid for! He'd been seduced by the Scooby Side, and was initiated into the joys of Scooby ownership with a car-park brake-disc change after one of the originals warped.
On one lap coming down Pflanzgarten I, I witnessed a crash when a Vento went onto the grass on the right, veered across the track to the left and ended up hitting the armco fairly hard. Laurens had just overtaken him and was worried that he might have caused the crash, but I reassured him that his overtake was fine and I couldn't see any reason for the crash. In one of those amazing coincidences, I got an email from someone offering me a photo for my Whoops page. They described their crash, said it happened because they were spending too much time looking in their mirrors and they found out that their friends were taking photos at the very spot! It sounded like the same crash, and when I looked at the photo their friends had taken, sure enough, there I am having just driven past!
Saturday afternoon was rainy, with a Merc doing the usual Hocheichen crash. It looked expensive:
As usual with the rain, the track was very empty. Although I was more tentative than usual with my tyres, I still enjoyed having the track almost to myself, expecially once it was fully wet rather than mixed. I was as puzzled as ever by the fact that the large collection of Scoobs were all tucked up in the car-park during the rain:
A criminal waste of all-wheel-drive
A few of us went to the Pistenklause again on Saturday night, with the normal vidfest:
I'd kept intending to have a wander by the track at night, but hadn't ever made it before, so after I left the Pistenklause I walked down to Tiergarten. The track at night has a very different feel. The sense of all the things the track has witnessed over the years is almost palpable.
A sailing book I read many years ago talked about the total indifference of the sea to the fate of those who sail upon it, and the feeling here was the same. Make it round a bend or not, live or die, the track doesn't care either way. Like seeing a bad accident, experiencing the track at night is one of those things that I think helps avoid over-exhuberance the next day.
Looking back up to Nürburg from trackside at Tiergarten late
at night
The weather on Sunday was superb - hot, sunny, dry.
I was on the track for most of the day. The routine was something like drive two laps, have a rest and a chat while the car cooled, do another two laps, another chat, blag a passenger lap in something, out for two more laps, and so on. One of the passenger laps was in Adwo's M3 Cabriolet - the one Laurens tried to sell to me without the owner's knowledge. :-) Not a pretty car, but handled well and with lots of grunt.
Adwo with his M3 Cabriolet
Niek, Euan & I went toy-gazing in the car-park:
A 911 RS, fully-stripped
A 968 Clubsport, which we all blagged rides in
A Tuscan belonging to a guy called Graham who hangs out at
Pistonheads.com
An ex-rally Cosworth, with good advice painted on the side:
There was also some less exotic but still fun machinery:
Unfortunately, Mac had a crash at the Klostertal hairpin caused by a front brake failure. Fortunately he was unhurt, and the damage to his bike was minor. It turned out that the case was a pad detaching because it was worn below the minimum: check those pads ...
Niek asked me to go out with him in his 309 to help him with his lines. The 309 was most entertaining. To say that it had massive understeer doesn't do it justice. To get this car to turn into a bend, you had to fill in a form, send it off to Peugeot, get it approved and then wait for the stamped form to be sent back. Then the car would turn. And it leaned futher into the bends than most bikes, albeit in the opposite direction.
Approaching Breidscheid, we were flagged down. A German biker had crashed badly. There was an ambulance on-scene, so we didn't stop, but while he was obviously alive it looked very nasty. Some of the Brit bikers witnessed it and said that for some reason he went in much too hot, doing about 100mph as he tipped in. He low-sided but was travelling so quickly he was thrown into the concrete wall and bounced off it, landing quite some distance round the bend. Unfortunately we heard later that the rider died in hospital.
Once it re-opened, it was almost non-stop laps until it was time to set off. I'd originally planned to leave at 4pm for a relaxing drive back to Calais, but couldn't quite drag myself away. After more laps, I did my now-traditional slow-speed goodbye lap. This started out as my way of avoiding 'one last lap' syndrome, ensuring that my last lap was always at a touring pace, but I now really enjoy having the chance to take a good look at the scenery on the way round.
It was about 5.30pm by the time we left, and this meant that the drive back across Belgium was a bit 'Man on a Mission' style. But the generally good lane-discipline in Belgium meant that a polite left indicator was usually all it took to ask someone to move over so we could overtake. Once we reached France, I backed things down to a more leisurely pace, but we still made it there early enough to catch the previous crossing.
Best moment of the return journey was when we overtook the queue of vehicles waiting to board the SeaCat and were waved straight through. A stroppy woman in a van said to the hostess: "Don't they have to queue up like the rest of us, then?" and got the reply: "No, they're First Class." :-)
And so home to England:
The white cliffs of Dover
Copyright © Ben Lovejoy 2001