Another month, another Ring trip. :-)
The gods were conspiring against me somewhat in terms of the pre-trip organisation. HoverSpeed had hiked their prices substantially, and there was then a minor cock-up with the ferry tickets for the P&O crossing. Then a new pencilcam I bought from Maplins didn't work (ditto a power supply I bought there) and it took quite a while to eliminate all the variables to verify that it was the camera at fault, so no carcam this time. That was topped off by my new SO3s not arriving until the morning of departure, so a quick zoom round to the tyre merchant to have those fitted and bring the old SO2s home in case I can get a second pair later:
Have tyres, will travel
So, matched rubber fitted, now all I have to do is remember to brake for Aremburg ...
I was concerned that switching from HoverSpeed to P&O might mean mixing with the hoi polloi, but fortunately P&O has a Club Lounge for a tenner each way. You don't get free snacks, just tea/coffee or champagne, but they do have desks, which is handy for catching up on email and setting up the trip report ready to complete:
Desk with a view, but a shortage of power sockets
It had been something of a manic week at work, so I decided to take things fairly easy on the trip across Belgium. Interestingly, the difference between 'man on a mission' mode (3¾ hours) and relaxed mode was only 45 minutes, even with intermittent storms:
Even I put the hood up sometimes
Saturday was fantastic. Glorious weather, light traffic for most of the day and not a single closure. I did about 20 laps, mostly with passengers on board, and also grabbed about five or six passenger laps. This included Johanne's 968CS, which he tried to sell me. I declined, pointing out that the car was faulty as it had some strange sheet of metal where the sky should be.
Johanne got a warning light on the 968 just after the double-apex right-hander at the bottom of Pflanzgarten 1, so he pulled off the track onto the grass, unfortunately cracking the front spoiler as he did so. This turned out to be due to low brake fluid after fitting new pads.
I wanted to get a lap in a 968 Cabriolet I'd spotted but couldn't find it in the car-park. Though since I overtook it round the outside at Bergwerk and then pulled away from it up Kesselchen, perhaps this wouldn't have been very instructive anyway ...
I did, however, grab a lap in John Felstead's astonishing 330bhp Westfield on a lap where he was playing catch-up with the Atom after giving it a head-start. The combination of the extremely high speed, its habit of the back stepping out on almost every bend and the complete lack of, er, anything between my elbow and the armco was such that I was glad when he had caught the Atom and he backed off to follow it round ...
We were suprised to see bike lap record holder Helmut Dähne riding there on a public day. We offered him a lap in the Atom, but he described it as 'too dangerous.' When Simon Bradley asked him to explain the concept of too dangerous after lapping the Ring on a bike in 7:49, he pointed to the temporary welding Jon had done to get it to the Ring that weekend and said that it looked like it would fall apart. :-)
Helmut Dähne (centre) and the 'too dangerous' Atom
Jon was still managing brisk passenger business in the Atom from others, including Geoff who did the lap in his underwear. There was a rumour that the sudden unavailability of his trousers was not entirely unconnected with his previous passenger lap with Niek:
'My trousers are at the dry-cleaners'
Niek of course has to destroy one 309 per trip and did so on this occasion by spinning at Wehrseifen and modifying one of the front wheels from the traditional round shape to something more egg-shaped. He claims he did this without hitting anything.
The Ringers spirit was in action when a German M3 broke down due to a broken wire. John Felstead nipped back to his hotel to fetch a soldering-iron, and I provided the power from the inverter in my car:
We have the technology
My tyre-testing was a little less extreme than last time, but also less conclusive. Last time I established that mixing SO2 and SO3 was a Bad Thing. This time I was trying to get a sense of how all-SO3 compared to all-SO2. In the hope that Bridgestone will want to hire me as a tyre-tester so that I can spend my working week lapping the Ring, here's my official write-up on the SO3 vs SO2:
Er ... Hmmm ... With the mixture, it seemed clear that SO3 offered more grip ... But, bizarrely, the all-SO3 set seem to offer less grip than all-SO2 ... Unless maybe there's more grip but less predictability? These SO3s do seem to let go more suddenly ... But then they also seem to be letting go when the SO2s were still gripping, so that again suggests less grip ... Unless I'm pushing more with these because I'm waiting for the tell-tale signs which I don't get with these? ... The truth is, I really can't be sure as I don't know my entry speeds on the SO2s so there's no objective measure ... Er, can I get back to you on this?
I'm sure the offer letter will be winging its way from Bridgestone within a matter of days.
I also tried the routine of letting air out of the tyres after a lap so the hot temperature was the same as the recommended cold temperature. This seemed to improve things significantly, so I'll be adopting this approach in future. Incidentally, what this exercise showed was that my front tyres went up by 5psi while the rears went up by a staggering 9psi. Not quite evenly left to right but almost so.
My last lap of the day was on an almost empty track apart from a crashed bike in Pflanzgarten 1, which didn't look serious. And thence to the Ringers dinner at the Pistenklause.
I'd managed to book the corner by the bar, and the usual beers were consumed and tales of derring-do exchanged:
Helmut Dähne was then spotted with a group of Italians, and since he didn't speak any Italian we invited him to join us for a drink:
'We are not worthy': Me, Helmut, Adrian, Simon Bradley
I asked him whether he'd ever considered beating his own record, and he said that he didn't think any bike since then would be any faster round the Ring than the NC30 'except maybe the 996'. He was impressed by both the Aprilia and the GSXR600, but said that neither had the power to set a faster lap. He dismissed both the R1 and GSXR1000 as too heavy (by which I think he means slow-steering, rather than literal weight).
Maintaining my reputation for blunt questions, I also asked him what he thought of the locals who claimed that they had beaten his time in unofficial sessions. He had a simple response: 'Let them try', pointing out that his record was set with a flying finish but a standing start.
We also asked him the perennial question about bikes vs cars: which is faster? He said that he had once taken part in a trial against a 911, riding a BMW1100S (someone who was less drunk than me or has a better knowledge of BMW bikes may be able to correct the model number if I have it wrong). He said that the 911 was faster on the straight and faster through the slow bends, but he was faster through the fast bends. Overall, the car was faster, though he agreed that it would be interesting to try it on a more suitable bike.
Simon Bradley kept us entertained with stories of his military flying days, my favourite of which was two fighter jets who sought permission to overfly the airfield. An aircraft waiting to take off was asked to hold, and permission was duly granted provided that the flypast was 'not below 500 feet'. Shortly afterwards, the two fighters had to climb to clear the perimeter fence and did a fly-past at 19 feet AGL. When they were bawled out for this and reminded of the 500 feet instruction, they responded: 'Roger, we were at 500 feet regional'. The airfield was 481 feet above sea level.
The Ring wasn't open until 11am on Sunday, so I took the opportunity to catch up on my sleep, not having managed too much of that in the previous week.
The weather was again absolutely gorgeous. Since a bike had gone down in Pflanzgarten 1 last thing the previous evening, and the Oldtimers had been out the first few hours of the morning, oil on the track seemed quite likely, so I did a very circumspect sighting lap. Which was just as well as there was was a crash at the bottom of Pflanzgarten 1, just beyond an Oilspur ('oil spill') warning sign.
One of a pair of BMW E46 Hartge H50's (460bhp!) had hit the tyre wall immediately after the drop and bounced across the entire width of the track while turning 180° and flipping upside down to come to rest against the armco on the inside of the bend. The driver was already out, but there was so much debris across the full width of the track (bits of plastic, glass and gravel) that everyone had to come to a halt. I cleared the glass out of the way to avoid the risk of a puncture and we then tip-toed past to complete the lap. The track was of course closed when we got back.
The BMW V8 coupé that didn't crash
And the one that did
Amazingly, the only injury was a broken arm on the part of the co-driver: the driver was completely unhurt from what must have been easily an 80mph impact. According to a friend of the driver who emailed me afterwards, the crash happened as the result of an over-optimistic attempt to overtake a bike: he crashed when forced to back off as the rider turned in for the bend. Oh, and he also said that the car had had a customer waiting to buy it the following week ...
The car-park had been filling up rapidly, so there was the usual scrum when it re-opened. I'd noticed that almost everyone hangs back for 10 minutes, so have recently been adopting the strategy of going out as soon as the track opens. M3 John hopped into the passenger seat, but him grabbing his lid and attending to a call of nature meant we were in the thick of it when we went out.
I don't like the car vs bike mentality that occasionally manifests on the list, but I have to say that there were a significant number of bikers who didn't like being overtaken by cars. There were plenty who were obviously new to the circuit and were just unaware of what was behind them, and that's perfectly understandable when what's in front of you requires so much attention in the early laps - but there were others who knew cars were wanting to overtake and simply wouldn't move over.
Unfortunately we got one of these on this lap, slowing to about 30mph for almost every bend and then accelerating rapidly away along the straights. After sitting patiently (well, giving an illusion of patience, anyway) behind him for about half a lap, I have to admit to a blast of the horn to make the point after he'd looked at us in his mirrors for about the 15th time, and he did finally move over to let us past. Amazingly, he then remained behind us all the way up Kesselchen and we lost him somewhere between Angstkurve and the Klostertal hairpin.
I did the usual wandering around the car-park bit during the closure, and had my attention drawn to this Beetle with a full roll-cage and apparently some kind of actual Porsche engine instead of the Porsche-designed VW one:
Now that's what I call a good stealth car!
Also present was this 355. Unlike most Ferraris at the Ring, this one was being driven in a manner which was both enthusiastic and courteous. Unfortunately, he over-did the enthusiasm bit as I saw him a little later facing the wrong way against the armco on the inside of the second half of Adenauer-Forst.
The 355 before its Adenauer-Forst encounter
And preparing to head back after its excusion on the grass
(Photo: Michael Frison of www.nurburgring.de)
A pair of blue Elises also ended up as half a pair after one of them reversed into the armco at the end of Wippermann. I asked the driver of the other one if he was ok, and was told this was his third crash at the Ring ...
Having taken M3 John out for a passenger lap the previous day, he returned the favour today. Fun.
Jon Reeves took leave of his senses when he invited me to drive the Atom for a lap, and I took leave of mine when I accepted. Unfortunately, it seems Jon has longer arms than me as it was too long a reach for the long-throw gearstick. Since I figured being unable to use 1st, 3rd or 5th gear might prove a small handicap when driving it, that was sadly the end of that idea.
No playing with the Atom ...
After always saying I'm going to leave the Ring at 4pm and in fact leaving at 5pm, I didn't even go in for the pretence this time. I was just about to do one last on-pace lap before my now-traditional goodbye sightseeing lap when Joerund told me he had problems with his bike and couldn't show a friend round as promised, so could his friend come out for a lap with me? I said of course, and off we went. Traffic was still heavy, and two incidents didn't help, but Stefan was evidently enjoying himself as he was constantly laughing, WooHoo-ing and slapping his thigh. He still had the grin on his face when I said my goodbyes and set off for my farewell lap.
The journey back was uneventful apart from having to stay behind a Belgian police car for a while. Fortunately he was doing about 95mph so it didn't delay me too much. I got to Calais with about 20 minutes in hand just as the sun was going down:
Sunset at Calais Port
All-in-all, a fantastic weekend. Great to put a few more faces to names, though I will of course have completely forgotten them all by next time. Which is only two weeks away. :-) :-)
Copyright © Ben Lovejoy 2001