The Oldtimer weekend normally means an extremely busy track with lots of closures. But this weekend was hot! As in 39° in the sun, track temps of around 50° - and air temps of 27° even at night! Most people seemed to have decided it was too hot to drive, so the track was virtually deserted. But the heat really was tough.
I do love these C-Car trips because there's nothing much to write in the preparation section. :-)
This was a 10-day trip for me, staying at our German home between the two weekends, so all there was to do was pack a bag and do a spot of blackmarket currency exchange with Keith to enable him to buy brakes and suspension components from the UK while I topped up my C-Car account and German bank account.
Birgit had been having a slightly more interesting time. We'd been at our UK home the previous weekend, and on the way home from the airport the engine failed. Being German, Mercedes Assist does these things properly: every Mercedes main-dealer is required to be open 24 hours a day for one week roughly once every three months. This means that you should never be more than an hour from an open dealer even in the middle of the night. So at midnight, Birgit was recovered to a dealer who inspected the car and announced that the fuel filter had disintegrated and parts of it had been carried into the engine.
Blondes clearly have an international reputation, as the dealer all but accused Birgit of having filled the diesel car with petrol! She actually had to produce a receipt clearly stating 'Diesel' before they gave up on that one. As the car required an engine rebuild, they gave her a courtesy car in the meantime, so Birgit finished her journey in this:
How come I never get
a CLK as a courtesy car?
As an engine rebuild was clearly going to take quite some time, I was looking forward to us having a CLK for the weekend. But damn that German efficiency - they had the engine rebuilt and her own car back to her on Friday afternoon.
Friday
The flight to Koln/Bonn is with Germanwings, a cheap-and-cheerful airline which has the uncivilised practise of not allocating seats in advance. And the flight was delayed. But a spot of eavesdropping on the gate staff conversations tipped me off that we would be boarding from a slightly different place, so I was able to beat the crowds and get a front-row seat ready for a prompt escape at the other end.
Birgit was waiting for me on arrival, and we'd both decided it was too hot and too late at night to bother with dinner. Our usual B&B was full, but as last year, the couple who own it had arranged for us to stay in their own apartment in Adenau. :-)
The two opposite ends
of the car spectrum in the car-park in Adenau
Saturday
A late night after not much sleep the previous night, coupled to having to drive from Adenau to Nurburg for breakfast, meant that we didn't exactly make it to the track by 8am. Oh, and what the hell is muesli yoghurt all about?!
Sorry, where was I? Oh yes, getting to the track. It was more like 10am than 8am, and the car-park was rather full:
Everywhere you looked there were rows of matched cars. When I spotted a line of Cobras, I assumed they had to be part of Rob's group:
But no, they were a Belgian Cobra club and these were just a handful of the approximately 100 Cobras there!
Around the town, it was pretty clear it was the Oldtimer weekend:
Gotta love that restricted
car-park sign ...
After Christer used the C-Car for the CHC race, it ended up plastered in race stickers. Technically these are supposed to be removed from the car after the race, but a 2-hour delay caused by a driver disputing his points - during which cars had to remain untouched - meant that he ran out of time. The marshalls didn't object to our stickered car, and we figured race stickers were good for an extra 10bhp, so we left them in place:
Copyright © Keith Maddock
2003
The sunscreen sticker was actually very handy, and I think there were times when someone seeing a fully-stickered German Golf in their mirrors moved aside a little more quickly than usual. :-)
Despite the crowded car-park, the baking heat was keeping people out of their cars and off the track:
I was still in normal Oldtimer mode, doing as many laps as possible before the next closure. With hardly any traffic, it was a delight, but the heat really was bad even with the windows open and sun-roof open.
With so little traffic, there were very few incidents. The only really nasty-looking one we saw was a biker who had gone into the concrete wall at Breidscheid. This is almost a standard part of trip reports. I really don't favour messing with the track - we drive it because we love it for what it is - but one thing I would definitely like to see is some kind of cushioning of that wall. There may not be room for a full tyre-wall, but even if it were vertical tyres secured with a rubber cover or something, that has to improve the chances of bikers who crash there.
There was also what looked like a bike-car crash at Schikane, but while an ambulance car went shooting on with sirens wailing, the biker was sat up and conscious as we passed. The only other incidents we saw all looked minor:
An Elise which rear-ended
the armco slightly at Eschbach -
the recovery truck driver was seemingly on a hot lap when he collected it
In a previous year, I'd witnessed a car-park altercation where a biker pulled a driver out of his car and punched him. There was apparently a repeat run of this today, which almost turned into comedy. Someone emailed me off-list to fill in the details, and gave me permission to post here with names and nationalities removed ...
It started around Brunnchen, when my friend <Name> was
trying to pass a
red Alfa. The Alfa indicated to the right, and he let a Porker through.
<Name> and his two riding buddies started to overtake when the Alfa
(still indicating right) swerved over to the left and hit <Name>'s bike!
<Name> was pushed off to the grass, but he somehow managed to keep it
up
(a skill which is useful in many situations!) The other two bikers
followed the Alfa to the carpark and tried to get him to stop and talk.
The Alfa tried to escape, but the bikers were able to get
around and
surround him. The R1 guy (dressed all in black all the time) got off
his bike and tried to stop the Alfa from driving away but the Alfa drove
into his knees! Thus his reaction was to bang hard on the hood of the
car and pull out the driver :)
Then a minute later, the bus ran over his R1!
The poor bus driver still had to do his lap afterwards, and you won't be surprised to hear that he was taking it slowly even by bus standards.
The police showed up later on and did some questioning. <Name>
had no
injuries and the bike somehow sustained no damage. The only damage in
the incident was the dented Alfa hood and bloody nose of the driver.
Thus the police wanted to place blame on the <Nationality> bikers for
injuring
the Alfa driver and didn't seem to care about the reckless driving on
the Ring. <Name> mentioned that the Brunnchen spectators would be proper
witnesses, but the police would have nothing of it and hauled them all
to the station.
Apparently they couldn't conclude anything but would file in a report
and contact the <Nationality> police regarding the possible charges of
causing
personal and property injury against <Name> and his friends.
In the light of events, the sticker on the side of the police van was delightfully ironic: it calls for 'civic courage' and implores people to get involved rather than leave everything to the police. :-)
By the time lunchtime rolled around, it was definitely time for a decent break but it was too hot to contemplate a meal, so we settled on ice-creams:
Keith appeared while we were eating them, and took the opportunity to take the C-Car out for a lap:
Following Keith out afterwards
After 'lunch', I set out for what turned into six straight laps. The first four were great, but the car started sliding a fair bit on the fifth and a lot on the sixth. It seems even R-tyres can over-heat in such temperatures.
Karl & I did a couple of laps following each other, and I can confirm that he doesn't hang about. I kept him in sight, but no more than that. I can also report that the alleged power difference between the two machines is entirely ficticious. Both on Tiergarten and up Kesselchen, the two stretches where power makes a real difference, I wasn't able to gain on him when following or pull away when leading.
Sir Bastard's personalised
plate, with the C-Car in the background
The heat meant that we dived for shade at every opportunity, the food hut being a good place to shelter from the sun while watching the world go by.
I was told he was 'cute'
in the helmet, so a pic was required
I did manage a bit of wandering around the car-park taking pics of the exotica, but it was a bit half-hearted given that I was melting:
I have no idea what this
is (the apparent owner was deep in conversation) ...
... but I love the disabled
sticker :-)
When you need assistance
now!
Birgit found a new angle on the classic wing-mirror shot:
I'd been meaning for an age to update my Photolap page, both because the text was written on the basis of about 30 laps experience and because it seemed silly to have bike pics when I no longer ride there. Keith had been taking loads of pics, so I asked whether he would do the same for me. A Scooby driver called Kees offered to follow me round while Keith took pics from the passenger seat. The new photolap page will follow (actually, it'll follow after next weekend as a bike crash at Schikane meant we lost a bit of track), but here's a few samples. Obviously these are selected entirely at random and not by picking ones that show me on-line and passing hastily over ones which show me with several acres of Germany between me and the edge of the track:
I think this will be a significant improvement over the present page: it's much easier to see the line when you can see it from behind rather than frame-grabs from the vehicle itself. Many thanks to both Kees and Keith.
Ending the photolap:
Speaking of in-car pics, I was hearing the story of a certain Ringer who shall remain anonymous. Stuck behind a gaggle of slow Ferraris taking very erratic lines, he decided that they might as well make the most of a bad job and take a few pics. He asked his passenger to grab the camera in his glove compartment. The passenger advised him that the glove compartment was locked. So the anonymous Ringer, who is now heading up Kesselchen, puts the car into neutral, switches off the engine, removes the key from the ignition, unlocks the glove compartment, removes the camera, reinserts the key, switches on the ignition and restarts the car!
The best bit of all this is that despite heading steeply uphill without power, the Ferraris had failed to pull away.
On the subject of coasting in neutral, I found that I was able to stick the Golf in neutral after exiting Galgenkopf and then comfortably coast all the way to the cones. This seemed like a good way of letting it cool down.
Paul Nagels also got a nice shot of us from inside Klostertal Kurve:
Copyright © Paul Nagels of www.motorcycle-nl.net
The Zakspeed Viper was there again:
We headed back to Adenau for a shower and then Trish gave us a lift back to Nurburg. We spotted a huge snake of cars en-route to an car club parade lap of the Ring, so we headed down to the Ring to watch for a while:
Genuine or replica? Can
anyone tell from the pic?
Love the luggage
Errr ...
While I was standing near the exit taking pics, several of the drivers asked me if it was ok to do a second lap. Like I would know. Naturally I assured them that it was.
Not that it was exactly going to be a hot lap in that traffic:
Sunday
Not much to report on Sunday as all I did was drive and sit in the shade drinking water before setting out again to drive. :-)
The track wasn't due to open until 10am, so we had a nice leisurely start to the day and still arrived just as it was opening. It was just as hot as the previous day, but today the track was a little busier (though still incredibly light by Oldtimer weekend standards):
There was some kind of incident on every lap, I think, but I didn't see anything that looked serious.
Achim was there both days, but I don't think he knew who was waving to him from AN Other German Golf :-)
The C-Car has had a few minor ongoing issues, one of which is that most of the headlights don't work and another of which has been non-functioning indicators. The latter was a pain, though we found that hand-signals work well. However, we'd asked Ring Racing to sort that, which they'd pretty nearly managed. Namely, we had both rear indicators and a left-front. We assumed the non-functioning right-front would be a blown bulb, and Trish kindly offered a replacement. Jochen and I set about a repair. This was the usual teamwork affair when I'm involved in anything mechanical: Jochen set about replacing it while I watched and borrowed screwdrivers from local Italian bikers.
The fault turned out not to be the bulb, so back it goes on the 'to be fixed' list. While we were there, Birgit spotted a sheet of apparently abandoned half-used fake carbon-fibre sticker lying on the ground. We thought a fake carbon-fibre VW badge would set the right tone, so were about to appropriate it when the Italian bikers came to claim it.
Towards the end of one lap, we came up behind Rob Stanley's Cobra. I assumed the low-ish speed was due to the traffic we were all being held up by, so we grabbed a few pics while following him:
It turned out to be a friend at the wheel on his first lap, so I hope he wasn't too worried by this nutter coming round the outside of him at Galgenkopf in an attempt to take a pic alongside him ...
And, er, that's my crop of Sunday pics! By 3.30pm, I'd had enough of the heat, so we refueled the C-Car, checked the oil (none used at all), washed the windscreen (well, my pit-crew did), filled in the paperwork (we have a logbook in the C-Car for keeping track of who did how many laps) and handed over to Jochen. Then I dozed in the Merc while Birgit chauffered us home to Selb. And time to start importing those hundreds of pics ...
Apart from the heat, a most excellent weekend. And only five days before the next one. :-D
Copyright © Ben Lovejoy 2003 | Email me | Visit my homepages