Race tracks are usually a good place to spot weird things. Sometimes these weird things are of the technical kind, like Nissan’s DeltaWing. I’ve no doubt that car raised many eyebrows when it was first wheeled out of the truck. Sometimes these things are of the disturbing kind, like the mystery man who violently broke a side mirror off a VLN car and ran away with it, disappearing into the dense crowd on the starting grid never to be seen again. And sometimes these things are of the I-wish-I-didn’t-just-witness-this kind, like Christopher Mies going all out playing air guitar on top of a team truck at 8 o’clock in the morning while in a state of considerable undress. But most intriguing of all are the weird things of the inexplicable kind.
To give you an example, I’ll take you back to last year’s Blancpain GT Sprint weekend in Zandvoort. On Saturday I found myself standing on the pit roof, looking out over the main straight and the dunes surrounding Tarzan corner. A support race had just finished and it was one of those rare quiet moments, during which the engines of one series have gone silent but the engines of the next series aren’t ready to be started yet. More out of laziness than anything else, I turned my eyes to the pitlane below me. It was pretty much empty, apart from a single pitlane marshall who was closing the side gate through which the last of the support series crews had just left.
Suddenly my eye fell on a pitboard that was leaning against the pitwall. It belonged to Phoenix Racing and spelled out a clear message in neon yellow: PENALTY. I scratched my head. An hour or so earlier the Blancpain Sprint series had done its qualifying session, but I’d heard nothing of Phoenix being punished. Unless I’d missed the news? I pulled out my phone to check the latest updates, but to no avail. The internet was oblivious to the penalty. Even a text to my most well-informed motorsport friends resulted in nothing – although we did come up a fancy theory. Sharing pit materials is pretty common in motor racing. What if one of the support race teams had borrowed Phoenix’s pitboard to communicate a penalty-message to one of their own cars?
The theory made sense, but like all weird things of the inexplicable kind it kept bothering me. In fact, it kept bothering me so much that a few hours later – after being pushed into it – I walked up to some Phoenix mechanics and outright asked them. Their first response was a long, loud laugh. “It’s a good story you know,” came the reply at last, “Last race Niki [Mayr-Melnhof] got a drive-through penalty, but we couldn’t find the penalty-sign. No one knew where it had gone! So we had to radio him the message, which was a bit embarrassing. But during qualifying we finally found it again! So to let Niki know the good news, we stuck the PENALTY-sign on the pitboard right at the end of his final run. We were only being informative, but he jumped out of his skin and somehow thought it wasn’t funny at all. Weird, huh?”
Indeed.