Category: Zandvoort

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.

Fluffy Fluffy Fluffy Fluffy

It’s not easy being a journalist. For one thing, you’re expected to do interviews. Every time you do that you’ll find yourself battling the spoken-written word differential gap. The what?! The gap that separates the spoken and written word, and makes them fundamentally different. Many people don’t realise this, but speech rarely comes out of our mouths the way it is printed in magazines.

When speaking, we use fillers like “ehm” and “well” to verbally fill the time we need to think about what we’re going to say next. We also use stop words. These are words that we repeat often, usually without realising it. I think motorsport’s most common stop words are “obviously” and the dreaded “for sure”. Most importantly, when producing live speech we don’t always finish our sentences. We tend to cut out words or just cut off the entire sentence half-way through. Because of this, it’s common to hear something like “know what we should do, let’s eh… really wanna go get frites”. Weird as the formulation may be, your brain’ll understand the message.  It’ll fill in the information holes with such ease that under normal circumstances you don’t even notice anything’s off.

Unless of course you’re a journalist who has interviewed someone, recorded the entire thing, and then sat down to type up the conversation for publication. All of a sudden every cut-off sentence, every stop word, every filler stands out. Sometimes the transcription of a perfectly coherent spoken conversation can prove to be perfectly illegible on paper. The journalist is then forced to take the verbal mess and edit it into something  readable. This is a tricky process that takes years to perfect and that, even then, can cause you trouble. How often haven’t we heard a celebrity complain about a magazine publishing something they didn’t say “like that”?

I’ve always felt that converting spoken to written words is especially difficult in sports. After all, as a sports journalist you’re not only facing the differences between speech and writing, you’re also confronted with strong emotions. I’ll give you an example. I learned long ago that at a circuit drivers are the best sources of information. So when an Audi mysteriously retired from last year’s Blancpain GT feature race in Zandvoort, I decided to ask the driver what had happened. I got a pretty clear answer.

“It’s fluffy unbelievable. He eh… we just got fluffy hit at the fluffy start! From fluffy behind! Some people fluffy terrible. Don’t have fluffy brains. Really… I’m so fluffy pissed. I was in a fluffy good place. He was behind me, should have stayed there. But no. He fluffy didn’t break and fluffy smashed into me. Broke the fluffy car. They ruined the entire fluffy weekend! It’s all just fluffied up. Really really fluffy, this.”**

While hearing these words, I felt relieved I wasn’t there as a motorsports journalist. I wouldn’t have known what to do with such a high-spirited quote. I don’t think literal publication would have been an option due to lack of family-friendliness. But if not that, is it possible to normalise this type of speech? And if yes, would the written text still have any relation to the original words? How big would the risk be of publishing something that no longer has roots in reality? Is that desirable? Or admissible? Maybe the safest route would’ve been a paraphrase: “Driver X made it known he wasn’t happy.” It’s probably best if we leave this conundrum for the professionals to solve.

**He didn’t actually say ‘fluffy’.  I just used ‘fluffy’ to replace another (ruder) stop word.