October is far too dodgy weather-wise to risk a bike-only trip, so until I get a bike trailer it made sense to do this as a car trip.
In nose-to-tail traffic out of the City onto the A2, Martin Plant - who'd been able to take the day off and get there in time for the Friday afternoon session - very kindly decided to call me from the Ring to tell me that the track was empty and the weather was sunny. Cheers, pal!
HoverSpeed had yet again cancelled the crossing I was booked onto, so put me on a SeaCat leaving at the same time but taking twice as long. Still, I'd discovered that they offered a first-class option: for a extra fiver on the way out, and £7.50 on the way back, I got priority embarking and disembarking, a separate cabin area (nice on the SeaCat, irrelevant on the hovercraft) and free refreshments. Bargain. And the ideal environment in which to programme the route into one's new GPS ...
The, er, salubrious 1st Class cabin on the hovercraft
(on the SeaCat, you get leather seats and an attractive cabin)
Risking life, limb and permanent inability to find my way out of the place, I decided to try the Brussels route. I programmed in an extra way-point called BR-OUT to at least point me to the right quandrant of the dreaded ring-road. But I needn't have worried: the route was a success. Slightly longer but quicker and avoiding the awful road-surface of the first stretch of the A25. Although the GPS wasn't strictly necessary, it did provide welcome reassurance on those long stretches where the Belgians decline to sign-post anywhere more than a few miles ahead.
The usual suspects were in full swing at the Lindenhof, but as I'd had only three hours' sleep the previous night, and the nearest B&B we could get into was about 15km away, I settled for a quick hello before wending my way to bed.
Saturday morning was icy and foggy. Wonderful. But we decided we might as well make our way to the track. Literally two miles before reaching it, I emerged from the fog into sunlight. :-) On arrival, I asked John, one of the Brit bikers, whether the circuit was icy. "Dunno, I'm waiting for one of you car boys to find out." Sensible chap. I set off to tip-toe my way round a totally empty track. There were a few patches of ice at Fuchsröhre and Bergwerk, but it was nothing like as slippy as I'd expected.
Straight out for a second lap, I upped the pace as the sun visibly warmed the tarmac.
You know those occasional laps where everything just comes together beautifully, and you somehow take every bend exactly the way you intended to? Where your line is spot on, your speed at the entry to each bend just right and the machine does exactly what you want it to? I had one of those. It was utterly delightful: fast, smooth, no scary moments. Of course, it was helped tremendously by the fact that I had the track to myself -- I again didn't see a single other vehicle the whole way round.
My third lap also felt very good. Having previously concluded that a car was a very poor second-best to a bike, I was falling in love with the MX-5 all over again. Granted, the bike is still better, and the car could use a fair bit more power, there's still a lot to be said for such a chuckable car. Perhaps I'll call my insurance company and see how long it takes them to stop laughing when I use the 'turbo-charged modification' phrase ...
Karen Plant came for quite a few passenger rides and was quite taken with the MX-5, though Martin was being very tempted by the news that you can get a Dutch Scooby for £13k ...
Adam had initiated me into the mystic secrets of using a GPS for lap-timing. The advantage of using a GPS for this is that you can get split-times every minute, showing you exactly how you did on each section and even watching a real-time replay of your lap on a map on your PC. Plus you don't get to find out your times until you're safely home, reducing the temptation to try to shave ten seconds off your previous time. However, since I was in the car I risked using the trip computer to time a few laps there and then and my best lap was a shade under 11 minutes -- nowhere near my best bike time, of course, but still not bad for a stock MX-5.
Some other Brit bikers turned up for their first time at the Ring, and we warned them to take it very easy on their first few laps. This advice fell on deaf ears: three of them went grass-tracking at Adenauer-Forst, two of them remaining upright, the third going down. The others then put themselves at serious risk by coming to a halt on the track itself while waiting to see if their mates were ok. Ho hum.
A Scooby-driving Ring virgin was also winning friends and influencing people, telling anyone who'd listen and quite a few who wouldn't that he'd spent sixty grand on it and that he'd "downloaded all the pace-notes from the Internet so [he'd] soon be sliding it sideways round the bends." Suffice it to say that on day two I was still easily overtaking him in my £19k 127bhp MX-5 ...
An early start next day had me raring to go, and not even the state of my car was going to deter me:
Sure enough, the track was absolutely fine by the time the sun had warmed it up.
I again had some stonking laps, and was clearly lapping in about the average car time and I was overtaking little and being overtaken by little. The main exception was an enormous gaggle of Porsches under instruction: ever tried to overtake about 15 cars all driving nose-to-tail?
Martin and I swapped passenger rides a few times, and I logged one of his laps on the GPS (when I eventually get the chance to download these, I'll put them up here). We had to abort the first attempt at this when a German Polo deliberately blocked him all the way from Fuchsröhre.
It wasn't a particularly crashy trip, with only two police attendances, but Schwedenkreuz was capturing more victims than usual. I saw a total of six crashed vehicles there over the course of the weekend, including a 206 that looked like it had already been put through a scrapyard crusher. Someone also succeeded in tearing a long hole in the armco! =:-O On the same lap, a 911 had gone into the bank just after Ex-Mühle and was looking extremely second-hand.
Fortunately, there appeared to be only a few bike crashes, and none looked serious.
One of Phil's group, Tony, span his 911 at the Baby Karussell when someone braked hard in front of him and he founding himself sliding backwards up the track. Having done the same thing at Brunnchen, I know how this feels! Fortunately, he got away almost as lightly as I did: just a slight dent in his rear bumper and a bent exhaust.
Karim had the frustration of a stuck throttle cable on his Elise, and three of the Brits got speeding tickets on the way home, but everyone else seemed to have had an exceptionally good weekend.
"This is NOT a practical car. I must resist ... This is NOT
a practical car. I must resist ..."
After a very enjoyable last lap before leaving, I managed to resist 'just one more lap' syndome to end on a high note. The 258 was very busy indeed, and I ended up doing most of it stuck in a steady stream of 40mph traffic. However, a little bit of 'Oh, was that a left-turn-only lane, officer?' at some lights gave me the road to myself briefly.
278 miles to the Hoverport at an average speed of 68.15mph (including a lunch-stop) gave me time for a walk on the beach and a warming cup of coffee while writing this on my palmtop.
The GPS proved itself a good toy both en-route and at the Ring. I mean, how else can you tell whether or not your hovercraft is on course?
All-in-all, an excellent end to the Ring season. Easter weekend should see me, car, trailer, bike and next year's season ticket ready for an equally good start to the next!
Copyright © Ben Lovejoy 1999