Ben Lovejoy

Since some trip reports of late have featured the bar almost as much as the track, I thought it was perhaps about time we had some write-ups of the Beer & Video Evenings. :-) This one, at my place in October 2002, was the 4th.

The original 968 Cabriolet dealer poster occupying much of a wall set a good tone

Ringers being Ringers, and me being the gadget addict I am, this of course had to be something of a technofest as well as a Ringfest. We thus had the following technology in situ:

Just for a bit of extra technology, JW brought a couple of videos on a USB pen-drive which, for some entirely sound technical reason, glowed green when it was accessed:

Some parts of the evening were a little lower-tech. When I was at the OldTimer weekend, I caught up with a 1930s Talbot being driven in the approved fashion. I was so impressed with the way the driver was chucking it round, tail out, at a respectable pace that I decided to follow him for the rest of the lap to capture it on video. I added that to the master tape, but needed a way of letting future evenings know what it was. So I used VideoCaption 1.0: writing the caption on a piece of paper. I then took a pic of that with the digicam and used the TV out lead to record the pic onto the video for a few seconds:

The screen for the projectors was a 10'x9' bookshelf unit covered by wallpaper liner. Forget widescreen TVs with a 66cm diagonal screen size, this one was 264cm diagonal. :-)

The original plan was for laptop 2 to be displaying the yahoo chatroom from the old group. But true to its old form, yahoo was broken, so we couldn't connect to the chatroom. We thus used the second projector to display the webcam page:

I never did managed to do a headcount, but somewhere in the 15-20 range, I think:

Food was courtesy of Dominos Pizza - they called me back to ask whether I really had just ordered about 450 pizzas.

The first batch of pizzas - which disappointingly
arrived by car instead of a whole fleet of mopeds

Additional food was provided by Birgit & I in the now traditional form of a tin of chocolates and an absurd number of pots of Chocolate Mousse:

Lillian then added the perfect final touch with a chocolate cake iced with a map of the Ring:

Of course, all this eating and video-watching is thirsty business. As well as four crates of weissbier, two crates of some more German beer, assorted other beer and two dozen genuine weissbier glasses, Euan gave new meaning to the term 'big beer' by supplementing his crates with this:

And no Ringers evening would be complete without some Jagermeister, so Birgit picked up a bottled at the airport:

I think it was approximately that time that the Great F1 Aerodynamics Debate took place. What started as the usual 'What's wrong with F1 these days' discussion, with all agreeing that there is almost no real racing left, turned into a debate about what should be done about it. The participants in this debate dwindled first to Francis, Jocke and Caz, while the rest of us listened with amusement. Francis then dropped out of it as Jocke and Caz got first more vocal and then very quiet. Caz went to fetch an engineering textbook sometime around this point. And then the pair of them went outside to continue the debate.

Jocke and Caz, if you want to purchase an 8-minute video of this, please note that I am JW's official agent in connection with this matter ...

Watching the lap where Martin had his close encounter with a bike was pretty frightening:

The Rhapsody in Blech footage also had the moment that was more frightening than funny, but we think the driver is seen outside the car helping to fight the fire:

I don't know how much of a sense the webcam gave to those who couldn't be there, especially given the difficulty of coping with a bright screen and people in a darkened room, but we did our best:

People gradually started drifting away as the early hours arrived, and I headed off to bed at around 3am. I gather the usual suspects kept going until about 5am. The next morning we were all feeling rather bleary.

Ben Lovejoy's www.nurburgring.org.uk

Beer & Video Evening 4