You'd think that a man with access to three DRTs would be able to drive at least one of them, but no, the gods were conspiring against me this weekend ...

The 944 is off the road awaiting a winter engine rebuild. The GCar had an engine problem we hadn't been able to track down, and couldn't drive in the meantime. And a suspension mount on the CCar broke the day before I arrived.

But hey, I can slum it in a Z4 from time to time ...

Unless otherwise credited, all on-track photos are by Birgit. If you're looking for on-track photos of your car or bike, try here:
www.ringphotos.com

Preparation

After I reported back to the syndicate list that the CCar was 'bouncy' (a technical term used by we suspension gurus, the other one being 'bumpy'), Keith took it out for some laps, pronounced it under-damped and found that the adjustable settings were close to minimum damping where the previous incarnation of the car was on close to maximum. He did some fiddling and declared it good.

Unfortunately, this was followed a couple of days later by another email from Keith: this one stating that a suspension mounting had broken. It was apparently just a weld that broke, but Murphy's Law was in full operation - to get at the mounting point in order to replace the weld would require the engine to be removed! This obviously wasn't going to happen within 24 hours.

So that left me seeking temporary alternative wheels. Keith had found that a BMW Z4 made a decent enough Ring car, and gave me a couple of useful tips about the temporary acquisition of same. Arrangements were duly made.

Aside from that, just the usual preparation required:

Friday

We had a wildly optimistic plan to get to the Ring in time for the evening session. Unfortunately a later-than-planned departure coupled to major traffic delays put paid to that plan. One of the delays was due to a rather spectacular crash between a car and another car towing a trailer. All three vehicles ended up down a ditch, but everyone seemed ok.

The Z4 was duly collected en-route:

I was mindful of the fact that, nice as the car is, it lacks one or two of the standard DRT features, like cage and harnesses. I made a mental note to recalibrate my right foot accordingly.

The car did have satnav, but I relied instead on the 'follow that Merc' method of navigation:

We'd always meant to stop off to at the beauty farm near Hohe Acht to assist with the oft-repeated question 'Is there anything for my other half to do while I drive round and round in circles?'. This time it wasn't midnight, so we did.

We picked up a brochure and I'll add some details to the site in the next week or so.

Although our departure wasn't as timely as hoped, we did still arrive at the Pistenklause at a civilised 8pm instead of our usual midnight to 1am time. Birgy had a steak while I had a Diavolo pizza - with additional steak slices. :-)

Dom wandered over for a chat. He was commiserating about my three DRTs, none working. He said he'd originally had the theory that if he had two cars, he'd always have one working one. Given that his main car was a Lotus Carlton, he bought the most boringly reliable car he could think of as his second car: a Polo. Unfortunately, this turned out to be as unreliable as the Carlton!

He eventually ended up with four cars, and still managed to be at the Ring in a Merc estate ...

Tom arrived a little later with daughter Sam. We then left them to it and headed to bed.

Saturday

What the hell is going on here?

Yes, that really is in the morning and that really is my watch. Just shows what a difference it makes to get to bed before midnight instead of after 2am. There were precisely three cars in the car-park when I got there at quarter to eight, including mine:

I was first in the queue of six or seven cars:

Yet more photographic evidence for a sceptical audience:

Although I was first out, number two in the queue was a GT3-MR. I decided he might be going a little faster than a man in an unfamiliar car out on his sighting lap, so I waved him past.

I'd forgotten how lovely the track is between 8am and 9am. There were probably a total of around a dozen cars out there, and as most of us were lapping at roughly the same speed, it was rare to see another one.

The first lap was quite damp. By lap two, there was a drying line emerging - which surprised me, given how few we were. Laps three and four were almost totally dry: lovely!

The Z4 is a very capable car. Mine was only the 2.2-litre, with 170bhp, but it is surprisingly quick. It handles well, though the run-flat tyres fitted were the limiting factor. They gripped well for a certain amount of cornering force then, rather than slide, they skipped. This was a little disconcerting the first time it happened, but I got used to it.

Despite the lack of rollover protection, it was still very nice being there again in an open-top car.

With more power than the Golfs and 944, I had to relearn my braking points. And, in a couple of cases, reinstall them! Once I got used to it, I was loving the car. Consequently, it didn't spend much time here:

After my four pre-breakfast laps, I headed back to the guesthouse for breakfast with Birgit - and to give Karl-Heinz a quick lesson in how to use his new digital camera.

Then back to the Ring to give Birgit her two morning paxlaps before she went off photographing.

Photo: Keith (yes, I'm using poetic licence with which pic illustrates what part of the trip report)

Ross was the next to jump into the passenger seat. We did two laps, then I needed to check the tyre pressures. With no gauge in the car, I nipped down to the Ed Tankstelle. Ross stayed in the car, but excused himself the moment we got there, saying he felt a little queasy, and promptly disappeared behind the bins ... Must have been good laps, then. :-)

The hot pressures were the recommended cold ones at the front - my usual formula for Ring use - but higher at the rear. I reduced the rears a bit but didn't want to mess too much with settings that seemed to work.

The track was still pretty quiet, the only real problem being a large group of very slow Italian bikers who were apparently under the firm impression that they were very fast Italian bikers and thus didn't need to ever look in their mirrors. They were apparently from some bike magazine or other. They were also taking up a lot of car-park space with their vans:

Things did occasionally get busy on the track:

Joerg arrived in his Elise, which he'd trailered down from Berlin. It was good to see it back where it belongs. I invited myself along for a couple of very enjoyable passenger laps.

I then returned the favour, though Joerg said his passenger stomach was only good for one lap. Did I scare him that much?

Dropping Joerg off at the car-park, I headed straight out for a solo lap. By this time, I was feeling very comfortable with the car, and a solo lap allowed me to turn up the dial a little.

A Brit called Peter introduced himself and said it was his first time at the Ring. Could he get a couple of passenger laps? As I'd managed to come out without any cash, I bummed eight Euros from him to buy a burger and said I'd take him out for a couple of laps afterwards.

Tom appeared to say I'd timed lunch well as the track had just closed.

Look, I really, really have run out of track closure photo illustrations, folks - please stop crashing!

The air ambulance was spotted, so we knew the closure was unlikely to be a short one:

Thorlief was showing off his new number plate:

And then the car-park wander. You don't see many of these around:

A friend used to own one, and I was really surprised when I rode it. It feels big, heavy, stable, slow and impossible to turn. Yet it goes round bends just fine, and when you look down at your speedo expecting to see 70mph-ish, you instead see 120mph. Low-end torque is a wonderful thing, as I'm sure JW would agree!

Assorted car-park eye-candy:

Another mobile bike workshop, this one a little more compact:

There seemed to be some kind of Suzuki Cappacino meet:

It's sad enough when people put Ferrari badges on Fiats, but on a Suzuki?

A CCar lookalike:

There were a number of Skylines with spare wheels, etc. Jochen had a little discussion with them about their habit of taking up car-park spaces with wheels. One of them was later spotted in the armco between Metzgesfeld and Kallenhard.

This was most amusing. An orange 944 Turbo started reversing into an empty car-park space. A moment later, a Merc entered the far space from the other side. Seeing an apparently empty space ahead of him, the Merc driver decided to give himself an easy exit by driving forward into it. Only to meet the reversing 944. Before the Merc could reverse, a BMW pulled into the rear space, leaving the Merc trapped in the middle. :-)

This was eventually resolved by the BMW driver reversing out again and looking elsewhere for a parking space.

I don't know whether I was noticing Z4s a lot more because I was in one, or whether they have suddenly become very popular Ring toys, but there seemed a lot of them there:

I have no idea what those black things behind the windscreen are, though.

Did I mentioned that I was enjoying mine?

Photo: Keith

A number of Ringers had gathered at the office 'plaza', and an enjoyable chat was had. Mostly, Bren was causing much amusement at the idea that he would be collecting his working Westie later:

Jochen was eating lunch:

Bren caused more amusement when trying to enter the purchase code for his prepay mobile phone topup. First, the number was in relatively small print, causing problems for his famous short-sightedness. Second, the instructions for entering it were in German, and despite living there, Bren probably speaks even less German than me ...

I checked the oil in the Z4 (still at max) and admired the standard strut-braces:

Finally the track reopened, and - amazingly - the formula of the last three weekends continued! Crap weather forecast, actual weather fine, very crowded car-park, very empty track. :-) The Italian bikers were still causing small queues behind them, but apart from that it really was lovely.

Photo: Keith

I then invited myself along for a paxlap with Soren, and JW announced he'd make it a convoy lap. We did one lap with JW following, and another with us following him. The Torquemobile certainly lives up to its name. :-)

Photo: Olaf Schulz

In the process of overtaking, yes, some Italian bikers, JW took a rather interesting line out of the top of Fuchsrohre. When I commented on this afterwards, he declared this was an 'I'll sort it out by the next bend' line.

I then did two paxlaps with Keith in the Speedster.

(Apologies to JW for stealing his patented camera position. :-))

We finished the lap behind Joerg:

It was interesting comparing this and the Elise. Both really do feel like the same car, though there was a little difference in the driving style. One might say the difference between 'This is my car, I love it and want to keep it for a long time' and 'Hey, this is a rental, it has a small insurance excess and I'm about to skip the country'. ;)

I then returned the favour, Keith coming for two paxlaps with me in the Z4. Keith explained how the Z4 traction-control worked, with three positions. When fully on, it will both cut power to the wheels and also apply the brakes to individual wheels. If you press the DSC button once, it switches out the brake circuit (illuminating a DSC warning on the dash). If you hold it in for five seconds, it switches out completely and illuminates a large warning triangle on the dash. As the track was still a mix of bone-dry with wet patches, I settled for the middle position.

It would have been very handy to have a simple three-position switch, so that you could select whatever you wanted on a bend-by-bend basis. I asked Keith to feed this back to the teams responsible for the systems he works on. :-)

The tyres were the weak point of the Z4, being run-flat tyres with extremely stiff tyrewalls. This was good in that it kept the tread in contact with the track under quite hard cornering, but bad in as much as they skip rather than slide when things eventually get too much for them. But the 3-litre version with sticky tyres really would be an amazing Ring tool, methinks.

Birgit meantime texted to advise that she had, in half a day, filled two 4Gb microdrives. That's well over 1200 photos. If it was out there, it got photographed:

Though she wasn't getting as carried away as some photographers:

I went for a paxlap with Myles in his hire car. Myles was initially not having a great weekend, having come over especially to drive the CCar for the first time after joining the syndicate and then finding no cars available. But the gods made it up to him.

After finding only Smarts available from rental companies, Myles booked one for 41 Euros. When he got there, being an optimistic chap, he asked if they had anything he could upgrade to. 'We have an SLK'. How much to upgrade to that? 'Nothing, you can take it.' So Myles got this for €41:

The car felt a little on the big & heavy side, but handled well enough, and had quite decent performance. Myles drove a very smooth lap.

I then returned the favour. Myles had certainly got the line down well, but I was able to show him the knack to one sequence that eluded me for ages: Schwalbenschwanz.

Photo: Keith

More car-park entertainment when some kind of VW cabriolet club turned up:

The lead car drove around the car-park, then just got out and left the car in the middle of the lane! This, of course, soon completely grid-locked the car-park:

Joerg and I went to find one of the car-park marshalls. He didn't seem in any great hurry to leave his post, and by the time he came over, the VW driver seemed to have been given the message less officially ...

The car-park was pretty packed, but the track was still remaining remarkably clear.

And sun too!

The owner of Audi S4 had a little incident when the brake fluid boiled in his newly-fitted Porsche brake system. He was spotted on the phone to the company who did the work, discussing their choice of brake fluid ...

Manthey turned up in a posh minibus:

We tied to take the official Ring Pic Chick photo for www.ringphotos.com, but the Ixus wasn't really up to the job, so I'll do that with the D70 sometime. The marshall had some ideas for the photo, though:

Birgy came out for a final paxlap, making my 20th lap of the day. :-) The Z4 was handling it without any complaints at all.

Photo: JW

As we had a few syndicate matters to discuss, and we had seven of the eight syndicate members there (all except Matt), we decided to have a syndicate-only dinner. The business side of things was quickly and efficiently despatched.

After JW managed to chop Birgit in half in last month's dinner pic, Birgy managed to miss JW altogether in the syndicate pic. Never chop a woman in half, JW! From left to right: Myles, Jochen, Ed, Keith, me, Joerg, JW's hands ...

Myles is our newest syndicate member, and it was the first time he'd met most of the team, which may explain his expression here.

The other end of the table was meantime entertaining itself with slide-shows.

After dinner, it was time for the slide-show to begin. Quite a few other Ringers wandered over for this, including Euan and Thorlief.

Keith had managed to position himself behind the laptop, so couldn't see anything. Birgy produced a mirror from her bag and with some help from my beer glass, Keith then had his own private screen:

The beer glass was then replaced with a pepper pot, for obvious and important reasons.

Jochen had understandably chosen this photo for his desktop. I have a vague memory he took it at Spa:

The last two trips, JW was the clear winner of the Pic of the Trip award, first catching a car on fire as the driver ran around it, and second repeating his knack for being in the right place at the right time by capturing an on-track argument between a 911 driver and an errant Merc driver.

This time, Birgit won the award for this photo of Keith taking a first-time Ring visitor out for a passenger lap:

The reason for the award becomes clear when you take a close look at the expression on his passenger's face:

And somehow it was midnight. Birgy and I packed up the laptop at the end of the evening to find we had acquired two pieces of lost property: Jochen's laptop power and Keith's credit card. Luckily for Keith, German shoe shops are not open on Sunday.

Sunday

Ok, so I didn't manage another 7:35 start. But still got to the track at a halfway reasonable time. It had been raining earlier, but it quickly dried out.

Though the blue sky was marred by some rather grey-looking clouds:

Birgit again came out for her morning paxlaps before going off photographing. The first lap had a dry line everywhere except the exit of Bergwerk. There was also some oil in the middle of Wippermann. The second lap had a dry line the whole way round. Nice.

This proved a popular place for oil-spills. A little later in the day, coming round Hedwigs-Hohe, a bike had dropped some oil down the right-hand side of the track. It wasn't clear whether it was a crash or a mechanical failure, but both he and the bike were upright, so I didn't stop.

Keith was just climbing into the Speedster, so I proferred his credit card and asked whether he accepted Mastercard. Off we went for a couple of laps.

It was gloriously sunny in the car-park but already wet by Hatzenbach. The marshalls were flagging a bike crash. The safety car was there and the biker upright, so no need to stop.

The track was mixed wet and dry, one of those times when you really have no idea what conditions will be like in any given bend on any given lap. I'd already asked Keith where the first-aid kit was located as it looked like we might be needing it.

There was a bike down at Metzgesfeld, this time on his own. We pulled over, Keith ran back to flag and I went to check on the biker. He turned out to be British, and was ok. A Dutch car also stopped, and when the biker initially thought he might be able to ride the bike, we helped him get it upright. It was immediately clear that it wasn't rideable.

I called the office. My pitifully small German vocabulary just about stretches to such things. "Unfall, Metzgesfeld,. Mottorad, Nicht verletzt."

The rider asked me how much the recovery truck would be. I said 175. "Pounds?" No, Euros. "Ok."

He seemed to be taking it all in good spirit, so I asked whether he wanted a souvenier photo. "Yes, I don't have a cameraphone." So here you go:

I asked him to get behind the armco so that Keith and I could leave - with him safely out of the way and the bike up against the armco, there wasn't any real need to continue flagging, so we left him to await the truck.

Out for a second lap, Keith found that there was rather less grip in Hatzenbach than he was expecting. Twice. ;)

Back in the car-park, a whole gaggle of GT40s turned up. Genuine ones. There were seven or eight in all, which must be a fair percentage of the surviving ones:

Ferraris seemed a bit ordinary in comparison!

But no matter how blasé people get about nice cars at the Ring, a Carrera GT can still attract crowds:

This gave me a great idea for a practical joke one trip. We pick some perfectly ordinary car belonging to a Ringer, and arrange for loads of Ringers to rush over to it with cameras the moment it appears in the car-park. I bet we can get lots of other people taking photos, thinking it must be something special. :-)

Meantime, back in the real world, Andy Eccles was there with his new toy. He had just finished applying a Ring sticker to it:

We were 'enjoying' Ring-special weather. Gloriously sunny in the car-park, raining by Hatzenbach then a random mix of desert and ocean as you go round. Lapping when it's like that has always stuck me as pretty pointless, as you can only cruise around doing the odd bit of point-and-squirt when you can be sure the little section ahead is dry. No surprise that everyone was in the car-park:

The exceptions generally weren't having too good a day of it:

I spotted Tom heading out, so jumped into his Mini. Given how big they are in reality, I'm always amazed how Mini-like they feel on the inside. Fun.

I then took Tom out for a lap in the Z4, but conditions were getting worse. Which meant only one thing: a paxlap with Soren in the Driftmobile:

Of course, when you actively want it to be really wet, the track promptly starts drying. Soren had to work quite hard to get the tail out. He said it was tough in rapidly-changing conditions as the secret was to gradually build up the amount of drift applied in any given bend, which was what he hadn't done in one recent famous incident. :-)

A Brit called Kevin said it would make his day to be featured in my trip report, so here he is:

Another Brit said my PDA microsite had saved the day when he ran out of brake-pads. I'd recently added directions to Marc and to RR, and he had used those to get some new pads.

It started raining again:

What we need now is a Scoob. Ah, there's one ... So out for a paxlap with Ruud:

Keith was going out at the same time so Ruud followed him round. Unfortunately, conditions were really variable. A fully wet track is great fun in a Scoob, but an unpredictable one requires as much caution in a 4WD car as any other. Still fun, though.

This paxlap was, incidentally, the explanation for a mysterious sight spotted in the car-park: my Z4 with the roof up!

I'd only closed it to keep it dry whilst out paxlapping: it of course was restored to its rightful state immediately afterwards.

The sun was back out in the car-park:

Giving the bikers in particular a dilemma: do they go out or not? We saw several that got as far as Hatzenbach, localised storm-cloud centre of the day, before they were visibly wishing they could turn around.

They doubtless weren't encouraged by this ongoing repair. These two photos were taken at least an hour apart:

Euan had joined me in deciding that discretion was the better part of valour in these conditions. (This is a weird English expression. I have no idea what it really means, but it sounds better than 'Euan and I decided to be cowards'.)

However, James was heading out in his blue 968, and it was a while since I'd been in one, so I joined him for a paxlap. Very wet, but a nice smooth drive and still good to have a bit of a 968 experience:

There was a big oil-spill from an apparent crash at Breidscheid, so the marshalls took the decision to close the track to bikes for a while:

Thorlief promised me a paxlap when he returned from taking a fellow M3 CSL owner round, so Soren and I were chatting as I waited by the barriers. This was an amusing sight: a diesel Touring packed full of people in full-face helmets. Very sensible, of course, but still looked quite funny.

There were also one or two comedy cars there:

It appeared to be someone's birthday or something, as all this Viper passenger's mates were there with cameras and camcorders:

Euan was heading out for a paxlap with JW in the Torquemobile:

They were back in time for my paxlap with Thorlief, so in deference to the conditions, he followed them:

The CSL is just incredible. The grip on the dry track is truly unbelieveable, the acceleration if GT3-like and the entire experience is fabulous.

We swapped places with JW halfway round, and it seems Euan also enjoyed the experience of following:

Time for a pax-swap and off he went again. I think Thorlief was quite enjoying himself too:

There was just time for one last drift lap with Soren. The track was wetter than last time, and the best bit is that there was absolutely nothing out there. This gave Soren all the room and time he needed to play, so it was tail out on most bends, albeit at suitably low speeds.

He said he thought he really needed practice on a roundabout. I casually remarked that the industrial estate one was very close, and that was all the encouragement he needed. We did about eight laps of that. It's amazing just how much grip the car has in the wet, and he had to circulate pretty briskly to get the tail out. Fun. :-D

It was a DTM weekend, with the races finishing at 4.30pm. We've been there on DTM weekends before, and we know the drill: leave Nurburg by 4pm prompt. So the plan was for Birgit to head back from Brunnchen to the Ring car-park at 3.30pm, do a last lap, collect our bags from the guesthouse and then be on our way.

Only this time, it all went horribly wrong. Birgit called at about 3.15pm to say that she was trapped at Brunnchen. What happens on DTM weekends is all the roads away from the circuit are made one-way. This usually happens around 4.30pm. This time, they had the one-way system on the B257 operational by 3.15pm. I suspect with all the rain, some races were cancelled or shortened.

Birgy managed to get to Hohe Acht by turning left up the 257, and then made her way to Adenau. I said worst-case, she could use the track from there, after cautioning her to take it very slowly in the conditions. This wasn't necessary, and she made it via the back roads, but it was clear we'd left it too late: there was already a stream of cars from the DTM coming towards her.

We left the guesthouse at 15:51. The B257 looked like this:

The drive to the airport usually takes 40-50 minutes. This time, after 45 minutes, I had just reached Brunnchen:

The autobahn was as bad, and the rain wasn't helping, as there were a couple of minor accidents to add to the delays. It was literally about 20km before I got out of first gear.

The Z4 is a great car, but the satnav system isn't. Although I do this journey regularly, it's usually from the passenger seat of Birgit's Merc, so I don't really pay much attention. The satnav wanted to head the wrong way down the autobahn, and actual airport signs don't start until you get quite close. I had to rely on a couple of calls to Birgy to keep me on the right roads. (Following Köln/Bonn signs is fine until they start point to Köln one way and Bonn another ...)

After a three-hour drive, and dropping off the car, I got to the airport 15 mins before check-in closed. No time for writing the trip report at the airport this time!

Next year, we will leave by 3pm prompt!!!

Still, a really great weekend. To be honest, I'd enjoyed the Saturday so much that I considered any Sunday driving I got to do as mere bonus. Sunday was more about paxlapping, but that was really nice, so definitely a top weekend. :-)

Next one, mid-September. More Birgy pics will be added to the trip report in the next day or two.