This was a fairly sobering trip, with two serious accidents in the space of a few hours.
After taking the bike for the first time on the previous trip, I'd pretty much decided that doing it by car was pointless (except for the October trip, when the weather is likely to be iffy). But a good friend was keen on being taken for passenger rides, so I compromised by fitting in an extra trip. :-)
July was a pain for Ring-time. There were no dates when the Ring was open for a whole weekend, and you can't justify the trip for half a day's Ringing, can you? Well, yes, actually. :-) Besides, having a whole day to get there meant that we could see whether there's a fun way of getting to the Ring.
There isn't. Even the Michelin green routes are terribly straight and beset by low speed limits. And even in a car with a passenger to navigate, the route involves so many changes of road that you end up stopping every 15 mins to work out why the N634 appears to have magically transformed itself into the B344.
We did go via Spa, just to have a quick look at the circuit with a view to a possible trackday there sometime:
(perhaps not -- the run-off was obviously inspired by the Nordschleife), and the roads round there were fun but gravel-infested. The revised plan for the Ring+Eclipse trip next week is now to go directly there the fast and boring way and have a bit more time to play on the local roads.
And so to the Ring. There was Pro-Bike racing on the Grand Prix circuit that weekend, the unfortunate result of which was a Nordschleife full of testosterone-fuelled wannabe world champions. The proportion of riders with more adrenaline than intelligence had to be witnessed to be believed. Cutting off people's exit lines, three abreast round the Karussell, squeezing between two cars, cutting someone up then braking hard in front of them ... you name it.
The car driving was similar. We saw a fresh wreck on every lap, without exception. The most impressive was a Porsche 911 that had somehow managed to jump the armco, climb a bank and then roll back down, embedding itself in the armco from the wrong side. The driver looked ok, but then he hadn't yet got the estimate from his dealer.
We were about to go out again when the closure barrier went out. We took the opportunity to grab some lunch at the newly-opened Ring restaurant:
Basic hot food, not good but not bad, and at reasonable prices. Lunch eaten, the circuit was still closed. There were rumours of a nasty car-bike accident.
90 minutes later, the circuit was re-opened. By this time, the queues are massive, and although we're almost at the front, I decided to pull to one side and wait 10 minutes for the mass exodus to clear. This turned out to be a wise decision: three new crashes on that lap, and the circuit was closed when we ended our lap. Another serious crash, this time a car driver.
It's unlikely the Ring will be reopened by the time we need to leave, but things are getting so silly I'm not especially disappointed. Besides, less than a fortnight to go until the next visit ... :-)
Copyright © Ben Lovejoy 1999