There were no full weekends in July, but I decided to take advantage of the C-Car to do a one-day visit.
No preparation required on my part, but Keith had been busy organising C-Car work at Ring Racing. This included a full cage, 6-point harnesses (only 4-point available on the passenger side as of this trip, but leg-straps have been ordered) and a second set of rims from Joerg fitted with R-tyres bought by Christer. :-) After hearing several Ringers rave about R-tyres, I was looking forward to trying them.
I'd booked a flight into Nurnburg on Friday evening as per a standard weekend at Birgit's, then a return flight from Koln/Bonn on Sunday evening. Still lacking a car at the UK end, there is a lot to be said for a chauffeur-driven Merc at each end. :-)
I called Keith en-route and he advised that Christer had collected the C-Car from Ring Racing, so we headed straight to the Ring for the 6pm-7.30pm session. No sign of Christer, so more calls, but eventually he arrived just after it opened. The C-Car was sporting a couple of changes since last time I saw it. The first was the rollcage:
The second were the spare rims fitted with R-tyres:
We'd opted to have two sets of rims so that we could have one set fitted with decent road rubber and the other fitted with R-tyres (road-legal race-compound tyres). After hearing several Ringers raving about them, especially Anders who had been trying to persuade me to fit them to the 968, I decided that the time had come to try them, so I'd asked Ring Racing to fit them for my visit.
One thing that hadn't been completed was the passenger-side harness. Given the very dodgy-looking state of the passenger-side seat-belt mounting, I wasn't happy about this, but decided that as Christer was only doing a couple of gentle laps that evening before heading off, I'd risk it for a couple of pax laps.
Christer was true to his word and took it easy, though I said Klostertal would have to be used to try out the R-tyres. Sure enough, they just gripped. No sliding, no squealing, just a fantastic level of grip. I couldn't wait to try them out the next day.
Returning from lap 1 ...
... and out for lap 2
After a couple of laps, Christer dropped the car back to RR for them to fit the pax harness and also check the gearbox oil - they had noticed a leak, tightened it up and then left it parked up for the day. In the course of the day, only two drops escaped, so it didn't seem to be an urgent problem, but they wanted to check it again after a couple of laps.
We met Lennart, who introduced me to Eddie from Hotel an der Nordschleife.
Jeppe came over to say hello while we were waiting for Christer to return, then Jochen arrived. A few Ringers had been doing the drift training course and Jeppe was raving about it. He said that Soren had turned from mild-mannered Ring driver to total hooligan, only occasionally visible through clouds of tyre smoke. :-) Shortly afterwards, the demon spinner arrived:
My plan was for us to get one pax lap with Soren and then one with Jeppe, but Jeppe said he was only doing one lap, so we went for a couple with Soren.
Pulling out of the car-park, we spotted Christer returning in his hired Gold (while his 'Vette was having yet more work done on it). Soren jokingly pretended to push in front of Christer. Christer shrugged, leant out the window and called 'Hire car, mate' ... We let him go first ...
The track was very empty, though there were a surprising number of Brit bikers - later explained by the presence of Byrne-up (sorry no time to say hello, guys - the track was calling!):
Heading straight out for the second lap, Christer was at the barriers. As I figured Christer in a hired Golf had to spell an entertaining lap, I hopped out of Soren's M3 and into the Golf. Christer confessed that he'd had a somewhat interesting time at Aremburg in his first lap in the hired Golf so was behaving himself. It was still a fun lap, though neither of us could quite believe that a modern 2-litre Golf could be so much slower than the C-Car - guess that's what you get for all the added weight of a modern car.
Christer at work in the
hire car
Soren followed us round, so I got the obligatory wing-mirror shot:
He couldn't resist a flypast on Dottinger-Hohe, though:
I'd had a call from my Porsche specialist Jon Mitchell the previous day, telling me that someone had made an offer for the 968 salvage. It wasn't a great offer, but it did still represent a decent profit on the amount I paid my insurers, and it was far less hassle than parting it out over time. A little haggling was done and we settled on a price that I felt happy with, so I decided that a celebration was called for. Dinner at the Pistenklause was thus accompanied by a rather extravagant bottle of wine:
Not quite an 8am start, but we made it to Ring Racing before they opened. I was very pleased to see the C-Car waiting for us with the passenger harness fitted:
So by about 9.15am, it was playtime. I did a gentle sighting-lap, finding the track in excellent condition with all the rubber laid down from yesterday's VLN. Even on the sighting-lap, I could start to feel the difference the R-tyres made. Straight out for a second lap, and picking up the pace, I was just astonished by the grip. Entering bends at speeds that used to have even Toyo Proxes T1-S tyres squealing and the car drifting across the track, the R-Tyres just stuck to the road. No fuss, no sliding, no noise. With each successive lap, I became more amazed at what the tyres could do.
Mindful of the warnings that R-tyres let go rather more suddenly than road tyres, as soon as I was starting to get a small amount of squealing on the safer bends, I decided that was as fast as I wanted to be going.
I usually have a firm policy of never timing laps, but I was curious and wanted an objective measure of just how good the tyres were, so I asked Birgit to time a couple of laps. I only had one 968 time to compare it to - a lap where Euan had been following me and he told me the time afterwards - and I was utterly astonished to find that a car with a claimed 150bhp (after tuning) was turning in the same lap times as the 968 without any effort at all. Once you've experienced R-tyres, there is definitely no going back.
I was enjoying myself tremendously. The car was coping brilliantly, with oil temps never exceeding 104° and no sign of brake-fade, so I switched from my usual pattern of two laps then a rest to one of four laps then a rest.
Coming up to lunchtime, the exhaust started rattling again. We'd had a recurring problem with exhaust-hangers breaking, so I assumed it was this again. Although it wasn't doing any harm, I decided that as it was time for a break anyway, I might as well run the car up to RR to see if the heavy-duty hangers we'd ordered had arrived. We'd picked a good time, as there was only one other customer there so they were able to put the car on a lift straight away:
The hanger turned out to be intact, but they said that as it got hot it was stretching. They added a wire loop to ensure that it couldn't fall off the hanger, and also again checked the gearbox oil while it was there - no problem.
The hanger that stretches,
causing the exhaust to rattle
Having the car on a lift gave me a chance to have a close look at the tyres. I'd earlier felt just how soft the tyres got when hot, and there was evidence of a certain amount of melted rubber:
Then it was playtime again. The laps rather blur together, so I can't remember how many we'd done by the time the rain appeared:
It was raining pretty heavily, and I'd been warned that R-tyres have no grip at all in the wet. Birgit had spotted an open car-park at T13, so we nipped in there for a spot of spectating. I wish the video idea had struck me about a minute earlier, because the first car we saw coming round the left-hander after the bridge was a 944 who lost the back end biiiiiiiiiiiiiig time. He applied full opposite-lock, headed along the track at a 45-degree angle for a second or two, then gathered it all neatly back together and continued down into Hatzenbach. I noted, though, that he braked for the first bend. :-)
We stayed there for about 10 minutes, also spotting Sabine having fun in the rain:
We could see that the track was just starting to dry out, so headed back to the car-park. Just time to take a pic of this rather subtle paint-job:
Then back out for a sighting lap of the drying track. The first half of the track had dried out pretty well, though Fuchsrohre was still very wet. Wippermann onwards was still pretty damp. I took the first lap very easy, but things had already dried significantly by the next lap, so gradually upped the speed again.
On the last lap before lunch, a bike was down between Kallenhard and Miss-Hit-Miss. There was no sign of anyone hurt, and half the population of Germany was parked up at the side of the road, so I decided that the last thing needed was yet another car cluttering up the track.
Approaching Bergwerk, I found myself gaining on a rather familiar-looking vehicle. The driver has banned me from mentioning that I overtook him up Kesselchen and soon lost sight of him in my mirrors, so I won't identify the rather powerful blue Ford estate in question. I wouldn't take the piss anyway, as he can be a bit of a bastard ...
We'd bumped into quite a few familiar faces in the car-park. Bren was there with his 4-wheeled toy. We were just heading off for a late lunch, but I tried to book a paxlap for later:
Chris Hellegers borrowed a helmet for a passenger lap with someone, and when he returned it told me that he'd got a couple of good pics of us in the C-Car.
It turned out that the bike crash must have been a bit worse than it looked, because Chris told us that the track had been closed for that crash, and an ambulance had gone out. Heading over to chat with Bren and Jochen, the track reopened, so we jumped back into the C-Car for a last 4-lap session before it would be time to leave.
The first lap was great, but we had no sooner set off on the second than the heavens opened, and how! By Schikane, the track was wet. By Hatzenbach, it was soaked. By Flugplatz, there was standing water on the track and I aquaplaned for several metres. After that, I just slowed down to about 50mph. I entered Schwedenkreuz at about 40mph, and the track was like a river. Fuchsrohre was a river, with just the occasional island of tarmac visible.
The R-tyres had no grip at all in these conditions. None. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Nothing. I was losing traction while doing 30mph through some bends. We decided that this was definitely going to be a farewell tour. Despite the absurdly slow speed I was doing, I think only four cars overtook us on the entire lap. By Schwalbenschwanz, I not only had no grip, but could no longer see where I was going - even on double-speed, the wipers couldn't keep up with the rain:
Parking at the end of the lap, I spotted Sabine pulling up in the Ring Taxi. Now, a lap with Sabine in those conditions had to be fun! While Birgit sheltered in the Merc, I grabbed her umbrella and dashed over to the office. I asked Sabine if she had any spare places, and she said that not even she was going out in those conditions!!!
We'd also spotted Keith, so I was able to settle my C-Car account and hand over the car to him. Then it was time for a very wet trip to the airport and plenty of time to write up this brief report of a most enjoyable trip.
One day, one Golf GTi, 15 laps and a whole lot of fun. :-) Plus some more thinking to be done ...
I had already decided to switch to a two-car strategy: a fun but strictly road car in the UK, and a DRT (Dedicated Ring Toy) in Germany. My initial thoughts were an old-ish 911 in the UK, and a 944S2 or Turbo as the DRT. The first time I drove the C-Car, I was amazed how much fun a Golf could be. Having now driven it with R-tyres, and managed 968 speeds through the bends, I'm now wondering whether I need a Porsche at the Ring. Especially when the Golf G60 offers more power and bigger brakes than the GTi. Running costs are a fraction of those of a Porsche, which would mean I'd be able to afford more trips like this one in addition to my normal full weekends. Decisions, decisions ...
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