Category: Zolder

Opel – Wir Leben Langsam

My parents taught me it’s rude to be late. It’s simply bad manners to leave someone waiting for you. As a consequence I always try to arrive on time, not just when I know that a friend is waiting for me, but also when I have to attend an event, such as a motor race. I’m proud to say that most of the time I do arrive on schedule. Unfortunately, however, I can’t always get to the designated place at the designated time.

Sometimes this is my own fault. For one thing, I tend to get lost. I once spectacularly drove past the main entrance to the Zolder Circuit without seeing it, only to realise that something was off after I’d already steered onto the freeway leading to Antwerp. I’m also guilty of not always getting up on time. I’m well aware that, if I want to be at the Nürburgring when the VLN qualifying start at 8.30h, I must get up at 4.30h and be in the car by 5.30h at the latest. And yet, and yet… doesn’t that snooze button seem appealing, even more so at 4.30h? Aaargh.

But sometimes I’m late through no fault of my own. Sometimes I’m simply late because the universe is playing a game and odd things just seem to mysteriously happen en route. For example, I once missed a part of the GT Masters practice because Circuitpark Zandvoort had forgotten to open the ticket booths. I also once arrived late to the start of an event in Assen because there was a cow standing in the middle of the road, causing a considerable traffic jam. And just last year my arrival to the Nordschleife was delayed because in a tiny Eifel village we caught the tail end of a crocodile. Not a real one, luckily. That would’ve been too much, after the whole cow-thing. No, this was a crocodile of cars. Promotion cars. Opel promotion cars, to be exact.

We didn’t notice anything odd was going on at first. We just turned a corner and found ourselves stuck behind a white Opel Astra. No big deal. It happens. Only then we turned another corner and we saw there was a red Opel Astra in front of the white Opel Astra. Okay. That’s odd, but coincidences happen! But then we turned a somewhat wider corner and caught sight of a blue Opel Astra in front of the red Opel Astra. Eh… huh?!

It wasn’t until we left the village that we got a proper view of the full crocodile. It was twenty Opel Astras long. It was also going very slowly so as not to lose anyone on the narrow Eifel roads and, whenever a gap inevitably fell in the line, the entire front part of the crocodile would halt, wait until the backmarkers had caught up, and then sloooooowly crawl back to its steady pace of 60km/h – on an 80km/h road, thank you very much. We had no choice but to follow the crocodile as patiently as we could, with as little swearing at the existence of Opels as we could possible manage.

By the time we finally made it to the track – a whopping twenty minutes later than planned – myself and everybody else in the car had seen more than enough of Opel Astra for the rest of our hopefully very long lives. So even though it was probably not Opel’s intention when it decided on its promotion campaign; I now know exactly which car I’m NOT going to buy in the future.

What If It’s Not Lost in Translation?

When I’m in the company of strangers, I’m not a big talker; but when I’m in the company of my friends, I am. With them, I can easily keep babbling all day long. Luckily my friends never get tired of returning the chattiness, so we’re never short of conversation topics – especially not on circuits. We discuss our separate journeys to the track (“We got overtaken by a Bentley!!”), odd paddock scenes (“One of the teams brought a swimming pool!”), the weather (“I blame this rain on BMW!”), shoes (“How can she walk in those heels?!”), small dogs (“LOOK HOW CUTE.”) and, most importantly, the on-track events. Who is leading? Who’s fallen down the order? Why? And, if there’s no clear answer to that last question, can anyone come up with a farfetched theory? (“I bet it was bugs.”)

Most of the things we talk about is plain pointless banter, which is perfectly fine among friends. Only the problem is that, on a race track, you’re not just among friends. You’re also among a lot of other people, a large group of which consists of drivers, mechanics, engineers, and other race-related personnel. Seeing as these are usually the people my friends and I are bantering about, I’d rather not be overheard by them. A running gag among friends is fine, but a joke out of context can be taken in entirely the wrong way. So to make sure I cause no great trouble, I either fall silent when a Potential Eavesdropper comes too close or I switch to a language I’m sure the Potential Eavesdropper doesn’t understand. 99% of the time this approach works flawlessly.

In the remaining 1% of the time, however, I get caught out by the circumstances. My most famous blunder happened back in 2012, in Zolder. It was the Saturday of the GT1 WC-weekend and team AF Corse had parked its Ferrari entry behind the pit building. When a friend and I came across it, seven mechanics were standing around it. There were pointing and gesturing at it, while talking to each other in rapid Italian. Since they were all so obviously Italians, I started talking to my friend in a language the two of us shared, but Italians rarely if ever understand. I began telling her all about how I thought the Ferrari GT car was ugly and how the stickers on this particular one made it even worse.

About halfway through my story, the seven mechanics were joined by their two drivers: Francesco Castellacci (yet another Italian) and Enzo Ide. I barely knew Ide at the time, but I logically assumed that if his first name was Enzo and his last name could be pronounced with an Italian accent then NO DOUBT he was Italian too. So I didn’t bother to stop talking. After all, there was no way he could understand me, so why bother? I just kept on babbling. And babbling. And babbling. I didn’t even stop when Ide stood himself next to me. And turned his face partly towards me.  And threw me a few strange looks. I simply kept on talking until I’d said all I wanted to say. Then my friend and I moved on to some other part of the track, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

It wasn’t until two days later that I found out Ide wasn’t Italian at all, but Belgian. Which means he’s fluent in the language I was using to bash the looks of his car. He probably understood every word I said. Sorry, Enzo.