Four days before the trip, and a mere seven months after delivering the car to Germany, my 944 DRT is finally German-registered!

This was not a simple process ...

Preparation

I dropped off the 944 at Ring Racing on 11th November 2003. It finally became a German-registered car on 21st June 2004 ...

There are three key pieces of paper involved. The first is called the KBA, which is effectively just a certificate confirming that the German authorities are satisfied the car is legally owned. The second is the Brief, which is like a sort of V5 logbook on steroids. It confirms the owner's details, but also contains a detailed specification of the car - right down to the correct tyres for it. The third is the TUV, which is a much tougher version of the MOT.

Handing over your V5 gets you a KBA. No problem there. Next you need the Brief. To get a Brief, you must have a TUV certificate. To take a TUV test, you must produce your Brief.

You will eventually find the solution to this. Instead of a standard TUV test, you must book a Vollabnahme. This is the equivalent of the UK Single Vehicle Approval. Your car is treated like a kit car, and a senior inspector will spend about four hours poking and prodding absolutely everything that can be poked and prodded.

At the end of the Vollabnahme, the inspector will fail your car. Among the reasons for this will be that the full Recaro race seats do not fold forward and are therefore unsafe. You will be puzzled by this, as that is one of the key safety features of a race seat. The reason race seats fail the Vollabnahme is ... because the rear seat passengers cannot exit the car quickly in an emergency.

Now, one might be tempted to raise a couple of small objections to this ruling. One might, for example, point out that the car does not, in fact, possess any rear seats and is therefore unlikely to be carrying any passengers in them. One could further observe that the car has a full roll-cage with two bloody great diagonals behind the front seats, and that to either enter or exit the rear of the car one would have to be a Smurf.

But none of this would do any good: this is Germany. The Porsche 944 is officially a 4-seater car and therefore the front seats must fold.

You will thus borrow some road seats for the second Vollabnahme. You will then refit the Recaros and get a standard TUV to note the modified seats and to add them to the Brief. Then everyone is happy. Well, except for your wallet after you've paid for all this malarky.

The Ringers spirit was much in evidence through this process. Another failure point was a tiny crack in the windscreen. This was not in the swept area, and would not have been an MOT failure nor, I think, a TUV failure. But it failed the Vollabnahme, so Kees found me a cheap one in the Netherlands and brought it to RR for me. :-)

All the messing around meant that the car wasn't ready for Easter, and it was a close-run thing getting the paperwork sorted for this trip! But on the Monday before the trip, all the paperwork is in place, the plates are acquired and we're ready to roll.

Of course, the car hasn't been driven since November, and the Ring is not exactly the most gentle of wake-up calls, so I'm not entirely confident of making it through the weekend without a mechanical hitch, but that's what the C-Car is for ...

Friday

A very busy week at work, followed by cocktails on Thursday night to celebrate a colleague's birthday and a 6.15am start to get to a company event in Egham on Friday morning wasn't the most painless of ways to begin a Ring weekend. I could definitely see a gentle start to Saturday morning looming large in my future.

Birgit's work was also being uncooperative, with a 5pm conference call scuppering her plans for an early departure.

At Stansted, I was amused to see that Dixons duty-free (past security) sells tripods that are significantly larger than the Forbidden Tripod. I also tried an iPod voice recorder module, but my iPod turned out not to have the required firmware, so I will have to see if there's an update available on the Apple site.

The weather looked perfect as I arrived at Köln-Bonn:

My chauffeur was waiting with a sign for me:

On the way, Birgit explained the plate symbols. Germans are so organised. The plate itself is the equivalent of road-tax. The pink sticker shows when the vehicle is due for its next emmisions test. The number in the centre is the year (2005), the month pointing upwards (06) is the month it is due. The shading around the 12-o'clock position is so passing police cars can see which way up the sticker is and thus what the upper-most month is!

The green sticker uses the same system to show when the next TUV is due:

We were both so tired we decided to skip dinner and head straight to bed.

Saturday

There were a number of new Ringers expected this weekend, so we thought we'd make sure they could recognise Birgit:

We headed off to RR to get the plates attached to the 944. This would only take five minutes, of course, especially as it would be done 'now'. 20 minutes later, we chased. It would be done 'straight away'. 20 minutes later, we chased again. It would be done 'immediately'. 20 minutes later, after we didn't allow Uwe to wander anywhere unattended, and after a total of an hour, it was finally done and we were on our way.

While we were waiting, we spotted an anonymous car with some anonymous marks from an anonymous incident:

We also saw another car which had been there for quite some time:

Back in November, the 944 did three laps and then blew the head gasket. About five months later, RR repaired it. This time it did three laps and blew the head gasket ...

This led Nick, a friend of Matt's, to nickname the car the '933' - with a note that the '9' is merely an ambition on the part of the car.

The few laps we've done were at least sufficient to remember what a Porsche is like on the Ring. While the Golf is beautifully set up, and the handling is really neutral, getting back into a RWD car reminded me what I was missing.

But that is what the C-Car is for, so we headed back to RR to collect it ...

We timed this well, as Matt was about to head off in it. We prised it from his grasp (he had his Scoob with him) and he said the tyres would need to be changed very soon. As I wasn't keen on seeing RR again that day, I asked them to change the tyres then and there. This time, immediately really was immediately!

The syndicate deal is that the driver pays for optional tyre changes (such as road tyres to R tyres, or early changes to enable continuous lapping). But when the old tyres were removed, it was clear that this was not an optional change!

Matt suggested we standardise on the Eagle F1s, rather than have both those and Toyos in stock, and I agreed. The performance is very similar, and having a standard tyre makes life much easier for changes. However, I did find that the F1s are a lot more sensitive to pressure, with even a 0.1bar difference resulting in a noticeable reduction in grip.

By the time we got back to the Ring, it was closed:

They were again operating the system of closing the entrance so that the car-park didn't get gridlocked:

The roundabout thus became an overspill car-park. Of course, the system is great when you're already in, not so great when you're trapped outside and keen to be among the first out to get a lap in before the next closure ... But we were able to persuade the car-park marshall to let us in.

The closure turned out to be because Ross had crashed at Breidscheid. According to Bren, who was riding with him, he went in a bit hot and low-sided. He hit the concrete wall and was airlifted to Koblenz. It was clear that his injuries were nasty, but fortunately Bren was able to let us know immediately that he'd been conscious and had full movement. By later in the day, he was already asking after his bike ...

Matt reported on Monday morning that the injury count was four broken vertabrae, both knees broken, one broken ankle and five broken ribs. He is expected to be in hospital for around a month. If you know him and want to send good wishes, Keith has set up a guestbook at:

http://www.freegb.net/gbook.cgi?85075

He will regularly print that off and take it to the hospital.

The closure did at least allow time to wander around the car-park looking at some of the Oldtimer cars there. There are a number of Oldtimer events during the year, and this is the second biggest one after the Oldtimer Grand Prix in August.

The track was remarkably quiet, but that didn't stop people crashing. This included a Brit biker who lowsided his Ducati right in front of us at Schwalbenschwanz. Fortunately both he and the bike just went into the kitty litter and stopped there, so no drama for us and not too much for him (you always wonder if the bike and/or rider is going to bounce off the armco and back across the track). We stopped on the grass a little further down, but before we could even reach him he was up, had lifted up his bike and was back onto it! A safety car then appeared, so we left them to it. I have a sneaking suspicion the biker was trying to get going again before his mates caught up with him and saw he had crashed ...

We managed about three laps before the next closure:

The C-Car thus spent rather a lot of time in the car-park:

Approaching Galgenkopf, we saw Fabian flagging a crash. I gave him a thumbs-up for doing the safety marshall bit, when he gave a very sheepish expression and pointed at himself! Back in the car-park, I reminded him of the price of being a crashed Ringer:

Showing off his scuffed bike and leathers

During one of the closures, I heard about a very lucky MX-5 driver. He had lost the back at Schwedenkreuz, gone onto the grass on the inside and slid slideways down it, the front of the car just scraping along the armco. The only damage was to the number-plate and a little scratch in the front spoiler. The culprit showed me the damage later (hard to show the damage and disguise the plate at the same time(!), so here's my attempt):

The track was getting busier, and there were a lot of blind/idiotic drivers and riders out there. I think we managed two laps before the next closure.

It was during this closure that The Case of the Mystery Book was discussed. The book appeared in the C-Car. Everyone assumed it was Birgit's, but it wasn't. Nobody else was admitting ownership:

The mystery was solved when Niek read this report and advised that it belonged to his girlfriend, Asia.

There are some C-Car drivers who have the memory of ... er, what was it I was talking about? Oh yes, trying to keep track of their laps. They thus typically end up having to work them out from the mileage logs. I thus decided that a lap-counter would be a good idea. This is actually a golf-scoring clicker, but if you ignore the 'current hole' digit, the double-digit total strokes counter does the job well enough:

I followed round a Smart Roadster for a couple of laps. It was exactly like the one Niek had hired, but this one was being driven in a restrained manner by a mature driver. Oh no, hang on, he just borrowed some grass for a few bends - it's Niek after all.

Saturday afternoon brought my closest ever escape. This was on a par with Euan's famous 'between the 911 and the safety car' dive ...

Coming round Galgenkopf, with the car drifting sideways as I fed in the power, a biker came running up the grass on the inside. So at this point I know there is a crash around the bend. I also know that the tyres are on the absolute limit of adhesion as we slide sideways, and that any attempt to brake will see us spinning off into the armco.

I do the only thing I can do: hold it on course, ease off as much as I can and get ready to brake or steer around the crash once the car straightens up and I can see what we're facing.

The actual crash was, I think, minor. It may even have only involved the biker who was up and about and running up the grass. But half the world had stopped in the middle of the track, right on the very last part of the bend.

There are about three cars and two bikes actually on the track. The outer half of the track - ie. the line we're on - is now complely blocked. One of the cars in our path is Niek, who had clearly been forced to stop by the car ahead of him. There is also a stationary biker about a third of the way out from the inside of the bend.

As anyone who has ever been in that kind of situation will know, the temptation to simply slam on the brakes is almost irresistable. But while my right foot - and Birgit - are both screaming for me to do that, my head is pointing out that each successive car to stop had less distance to do it in, and a successful stop would leave us as the rear-most vehicle around a fast blind bend.

I have about half a second to make a decision. I decide to leave the brakes alone and opt for the gap between the cars and the bike. Fortunately it's about two car widths wide. There is yet another stationary car dead ahead, but I have time to brake before steering around that one.

As a rock-climbing handbook would phrase it, that little experience was not without its moments of interest. However, with all the closures, I decided not to take a break and head back out on another lap. I take it easy, and the red light is on when we get back from that one.

Keith had booked dinner at the Pistenklause. I've actually stopped booking Ringers dinners as it had become too much like hard work trying to make sure those who booked got seats and those who hadn't waited until the bookers had turned up. But we headed over early and things worked out fine.

There was a surprisingly small digicam-fest at this dinner:

Jules made up for it with an Archos hard drive recorder on which he had some video laps filmed back in 2002 ... He too had had a biker fall off in front of him.

It was Niek's turn to have the piss taken for his Jahreskarte photo:

Um, this looked quite cool after a bottle of wine:

Honestly. Drink some wine and then look at it. Ok, drink more wine. Alright, maybe you just had to be there.

I really liked the baked ice-cream special they had at Easter, so Birgit persuaded them to do it again for us if we got a reasonable-sized order.

Before:

After:

And Christian demonstrating the method of converting one to the other:

Some uncouth types at the dinner put the football on. I think there was a gap of about 10 seconds between Sweden losing and us realising that we needed to immediately call Anders and Christer. Christer wisely had his phone switched off, but Anders was available for a bit of ribbing.

When we left the Pistenklause, it was raining:

Sunday

It was still raining the next morning. I didn't do anything as energetic as look out the window to determine this, we could hear the rain on the glass so we decided that staying in bed for another hour was the best plan.

I texted Matt to book a paxlap in his Rain Machine, aka Scoob, but he'd obviously been frightening himself earlier - I've never known him drive so slowly! Very sensibly, though, as it was that 'random grip per bend per lap' situation, the track varying from soaked to bone dry on a bend-by-bend and lap-by-lap basis.

Sunday was worse than Saturday. Lap, closure, two laps, closure, lap, closure, lap, closure. No exaggeration: I got five laps in the whole day.

The Smarts had a definite edge in the car-park:

I spotted this absolutely gorgeous Jaguar MkII:

There was a Ring sticker and various race stickers in the window. It had harnesses. Hmmm! :-) The driver had left the lights on, so I started asking around if anyone knew where he was. I found him just as the track re-opened, so I asked for a passenger lap.

A lap of the Ring in a car like that is fantastic even if the driver just cruises. This driver was not cruising. :-) He was a great driver, and the car was unbelieveably good. A real experience to treasure.

A Barchetta driver called Mario had sent me a contribution to the Whoops page (no longer online) ages ago after he failed to turn left at Wehrseifen. I spotted his car back there a few months later and introduced myself. As he's been there every trip since, and appears to have avoided repeating the experience, I accepted his offer of a passenger lap:

The car has a somewhat tweaked engine (around 155bhp) but almost standard suspension. It goes very well indeed!

The track was bone dry by lunchtime:

A white GT3RS had rear-ended the armco at Kallenhard, and there was another accident further on

There was yet another closure at around 3.15pm. As we had to hit the road at 3.30-ish to allow time to stop off at RR, we decided we might as well call it a day.

We arranged with Kaul & Will to collect the 944 from Ring Racing. They will investigate the problem, check the car over generally report back to me.

My GPS is very good at distinguishing between Shortest and Fastest routes. In Fastest route mode, it sticks to motorways, dual-carriageways and fast A-roads; in Shortest route mode it takes squiggly roads. Birgit has the same unit, but for some reason the German mapping doesn't seem to understand this distinction. From the Ring, it directs us up past Brunnchen and out that way. From RR, it wanted us to turn left, so we decided to let it have its way. According to the GPS, this is the Fastest route:

Still, it was a very nice windy route back into Adenau ...

I'm doing three successive Ring weekends in August. I'm staying in Germany between the first two, then flying back over for the third. Birgit draws the line at two Ring weekends a month, so I needed to arrange a hire car for the third. There are six car hire desks at Köln-Bonn airport, so I got quotes from all six:

Let me say that the €5 per day Sixte rate for a Smart must apply to bookings for a wet Tuesday in November, because even two months ahead they were quoting €90 for the weekend. However, National had some interesting cars in their list, so I will email them to find out if there is any way to guarantee a particular car. They normally say no, but I have managed it occasionally in the past.

Germanwings has non-allocated seating, so it's a scrum from the plane. I like to get front row so I can be straight off the plane at the other end. The problem with bus transfers to the plane is you never know which side the doors will open, so you can get trapped on the wrong side of the bus.

I managed to summon up enough German to ask the bus driver 'Ausgang links oder recht?'. He thought about it for a moment, replied 'Recht' and I was first onto the plane. Another Brit had spotted me having a word with the driver and move to the door on the other side of the bus, correctly concluded that I had inside information and followed me out.

And that was the June trip. Not terribly successful from a 944 viewpoint, and very crashy, but fun nonetheless.