My work schedule meant that, for the second time, I ended up getting up early on Friday morning in order to fly back from Germany in time to, um, drive straight back to Germany again. It's about time someone invented a folding motorcycle that you can take on board as hand-luggage. (Yes, I know, but I think a Goped lacks a certain something as a Ring vehicle.)
Rich Seabert and I had arranged to borrow John Greystrong's van ages ago, so it was easiest to go with the plan, but the eclipse trip demonstrated that riding straight there works just as well and is logistically easier. Though that would lack the benefit of John's new hi-tech security system:
I have, though, reached the conclusion that all Ring addicts seem to reach sooner or later: the best option of all is to buy a decent bike trailer. That way you have the car if it's wet, or you just want to show someone round, and ride the bike the rest of the time. I shall probably end up doing that in the Spring, though given later events I'll make sure my breakdown company recovers trailers as well as both cars and bikes.
Martin Plant's trailer (which he's about to replace with a better
one)
A combination of Ixies going over for the weekend, part of the Rumanian eclipse contingent still being there and Mark Davies out there in Flymo's Baby TART to collect his repaired T595 gave us a fairly sizeable Ixion presence:
Together with a large collection of other Brits there with Ring instructor Phil Gardiner, we pretty much took over the Lindenhof on Friday night.
Being a gorgeous August weekend, and with a touring car round on at the Grand Prix circuit, the Nordschleife was crowded and it was no great surprise when it turned into a fairly major crash-fest, including one of the other Brits spinning out at Schwedenkreuz and substantially modifying the rear end and roof of his Impreza:
Jeremy Sagar had a minor failure-to-make-it-round-a-bend incident, but no real damage to either him or his bike.
Saturday morning brought a horrific accident. A Blade rider hit the armco just around Angstkurve, the bike burst into flames and both bike and rider were bounced back onto the track. There was now a burning bike and a motionless rider on the racing line round an extremely fast blind bend.
Three following riders spotted the smoke, slowed right down and then did what was in hindsight an incredibly dangerous thing but what would, at the time, have been entirely natural: they came to a halt next to the rider to see what they could do to help.
Seconds later, a tuned Fiesta failed to spot the smoke, came round the bend at full pelt, saw the accident and locked up all four wheels attempting to stop. One of the riders, a Brit called Kevin who had ironically been a passenger in the crashed Impreza the previous day, spotted the Fiesta in his mirrors and just had time to put his bike in gear and move about 10 feet to the right. It was enough to get him clear. The Guzzi rider next to him wasn't so fortunate: the Fiesta ploughed straight into him doing what witnesses reckoned was still 80mph plus.
The rider was said to be still alive when the helicopter ambulance recovered him, but from the sound of his injuries, it wasn't looking good.
I think it was the unfairness of it which affected many of us, the rider who stopped to help getting hit. The moral of the story was clear: if you find yourself at the scene of an accident, the first thing you need to do is protect your own safety. You can't help anyone else if you become a casualty yourself. This lesson is drummed into emergency services personnel, and to a lesser degree on first-aid courses, but it takes something like this for it to really sink in.
It was a lesson I recalled the following day when I had a fright exiting the Baby Karussell: a skid mark led to what looked liked Adam's bike at the side of the track. I rode well past the scene and parked on the grass before running back down the grass. Halfway there, I remembered that Adam was still back at the car-park dismantling his trailer (see below!), and it turned out that the other yellow GSX-R had stopped to help the actual accident victim: the rider of a grey ThunderAce.
The accident initially looked very nasty, the Ace at a 45-degree angle to the armco, the front completely destroyed and no sign of the rider. The other side of the armco was a steep drop into woods, and we at first thought the rider had been thrown over the armco down the drop. However, someone announced that the rider was ok and back at the car-park, and this thankfully turned out to be the case.
The crashes reinforced my own objective of forgetting about lap-times and instead sticking to a comfortable pace while aiming for smoothness and decent lines. One thing I tried was Jon Taylor's suggestion of doing Miss-Hit-Miss as miss-hit-hit to generate safety margin on the exit, and it did work well.
Adam generated a new objective when he commented on my riding position being to push the bike away from me into bends instead of getting my head and weight on the inside of the turn. So I experimented with hanging off in a very minimalist way.
It initially felt very awkward, requiring a fair bit of thought and planning, and needing significantly lower speeds into bends in order to allow time for me to position myself in the saddle. The change in perspective meant too that my personal lean-o-meter was thrown out of synch, so it was hard to judge how far I was leaning or, indeed, needed to lean.
But I perservered on the basis that almost every fast rider I know does hang off (as well as some very slow ones, admittedly!), and after a while ... well, I won't say it yet feels comfortable, but it at least started to feel less awkward. And the bike actually felt a bit more solid in the entry to corners, losing some of the skittishness I'd been experiencing this trip and last. I shall experiment more next time.
Adam had also observed that I could feed in the power earlier, reporting that he did so from the apex. This experiment wasn't quite so successful, as I had a b-i-g slide when doing this at Aremberg, so I compromised on slightly earlier.
Adamanda had a little incident of their own when their soon-to-be-sold and just-out-of-warranty Scooby packed up and fellow Scooby owner Phil diagnosed big-end failure. With no warranty, they had no European breakdown cover, leaving them with car and trailer stranded in Germany (but at least with bikes to get them home).
Various plans were hatched over beers, one or two of them legal, another one or two feasible (though none achieved both, I think), when a phone call revealed that the original registration date was three weeks later than they had thought meaning that they car was one day inside the warranty period!! Although it was 1460 miles over the 60,000 mileage limit, Subaru agreed to recover it back to the UK.
With the Scooby now being repatriated at Subaru's expense, the one remaining problem was how to get the bike trailer back home, but Adam came up with a cunning plan: take it apart and stash it in the back of BART. Amazingly, John's van could indeed cope with two bikes, leathers, helmets, boots, luggage and still have room for a bike trailer in kit form:
Mark too was having some mechanical problems, but was making a more thorough job of it. First of all, his bike starter packed up with suspected battery problems, requiring it to be bump-started (always fun in bike leathers under a blazing August sun). Then the bike packed up altogether on a test ride outside the circuit, requiring Rich and I to do our AA men impression by collecting it from the roadside in BART, and then finally Baby TART refused to start, also requiring bump-starts! Do not accompany this man to the Ring: he's jinxed!
Given the various disasters of the weekend, my own minor irritation of a failed Chilli power lead leaving me BikeCam-less seemed small beer. Pity, though: I was looking forward to comparing my lines with the footage I shot back in May.
All too soon, it was time to leave for the trip back to the HoverPort in Calais, where we again met up with Martin and Karen:
Would you go on a trip to the Ring with these people?
Amazingly, HoverSpeed got us there and back, to and from the correct ports, on time!
I heard afterwards that a car dumped its sump at Kesselchen and several bikes went down, including Robin Helby from the Nürburgring Riders Club, breaking a couple of bones. As Adam commented, this seemed particularly unfortunate given that Robin was riding at a very gentle pace and being ultra-cautious with his lines, entry speeds and overtaking.
There is no doubt at all that the Ring is a very dangerous place, and you can be hurt or killed through no fault of your own. Nobody should go there without being aware of the risks. But none of the crashes deter me from going, nor do they stop me recommending it to others: it really is that good.
Copyright © Ben Lovejoy 1999
Crashed Scooby pic Copyright © Adam Curtin
1999