Girl Talks Racing

Sorry, Max. I Was Wrong!

Written in honour of Max Verstappen’s first F1 victory.

I’ve known of the existence of Max Verstappen for a very long time. When I first started watching formula 1, internet was only available via dial-up modem and very expensive. So instead of allowing me access to our costly home connection, every two weeks my father would use his office network to print out the latest articles of the only formula 1-website he knew of. The first batch of papers he ever handed me was topped by a piece titled “Verstappen becomes father for the first time”. It was illustrated with a photo of Jos, his then-wife, and baby Max Emilian, born only a few hours earlier.

As the years passed, toddler Max once made the news for breaking his wrist while playing. A few years later, word started coming out of the go-kart world that a now teenaged Max was getting good results and was building a fierce rivalry with fellow Dutchman Nyck de Vries. At the time there were many questions being asked about which of the two had the most talent. For a long time the debate went in favour of De Vries, especially when he was the first to make the switch to cars. Many at the time wondered if Max, when he too switched to cars, would still be able to catch up with the by then much more experienced De Vries.

Verstappen made his move from go-karts to cars a year later, in the winter of 2013-2014. He competed in the Florida Winter Series and then tested some Formula Renault 2.0 cars. Like most, I expected Max to sign up for one of the 2.0 series – it’s a good starting point for rookies – but instead he was announced as a Formula 3-racer for Van Amersfoort Racing. When I heard, I was certain Frits van Amersfoort had lost his mind. Who puts a practically inexperienced boy in heavy machinery like that?!

My opinion about VAR’s Verstappen project didn’t improve much upon seeing it live for the first time. When I stumbled into the Formula 3-paddock at the Hockenheimring in May 2014, it didn’t prove difficult to spot the VAR tent. In fact, it was almost impossible to miss it. It was the only tent with fifteen spectators in front of it, all dressed in orange, with Jos Verstappen-caps and Dutch flags. Grumbling I walked past the canopy. I refused to be in awe of a driver simply because of his last name. As far as I was concerned, Max would have to prove himself first.

During the first free practice, he failed to do that. I was watching from the inside of the Motodrome, from where I had a good view of how strangely Max was handling the Sachskurve. He literally took a new line every lap. So, I quickly pegged him down as a nutter. This was an opinion I stuck with even after Max had finally found his preferred line and, over the course of the weekend, began bringing his lap times down drastically. The races on Saturday and Sunday only made things worse. In the first race Max retired, in the second he broke down on his way to the grid and very clumsily parked his car at the Spitskehre, and in the third one… okay, fine, he won that one. But hey, that was probably just dumb luck. After that first weekend in Hockenheim, I saw absolutely no reason to hype up ‘this Verstappen boy’. On the way home, I even remember stating: “The kid still has an awful lot to learn and I doubt he’ll ever be as good as his father was. If he wants to prove me wrong, he’s going to have to step up his game BIG TIME.”

Well, he did.

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.

ADDOD

I have a chronic problem. It’s called ADDOD. ADDOD is an abbreviation that stands for Attention Deficiency Dis… Ooooooooh Doggy! It effectively means that, at a race track, I’m perfectly capable of staying focused on the race cars and the track action, unless I catch sight of a dog, especially a tiny one. When I do, all my attention will irrevocably be drawn to the little furry friend with the cute tiny paws. It’s gotten so bad that in 2015 I almost missed a pass for the lead in an F3 race because somebody had sat down next to me with a Yorkie…

Unfortunately it seems that such moments of distraction will start happening more often in the future, as the number of (little) dogs present at race events is steadily rising. I’m not sure who started the trend or even when/where it began. I only know that until a few seasons ago it was only a handful of drivers, usually the ones that had a camper parked in the paddock, who had their dogs with them; but nowadays pretty much everyone is bringing pets. Particularly GT events tend to be overrun by Chihuahuas, Pomeranians, Bichons, Papillons, Pugs, Tibetans, and other kinds of arenttheycutes.

In the beginning I felt sorry for the little critters. Race-car engines are incredibly loud and I know from experience they can be damaging. Insufficient ear plug use at the start of my motorsport fan ‘career’ has left me with a damaged left ear and a slight case of noise deafness. So, logically, I figured that if I, as a human, could suffer such a serious decibel injury that easily, then the risk and potential physical hurt for dogs had to be ten times higher, given that their hearing is so much better than ours. The more you hear, the louder it sounds, the bigger the damage, right?

Apparently not. For reasons I’ll probably never understand, dogs never seem to be bothered by engine noise. I’ve never seen a single one looking scared during an active track session. Most of them simply tag after their owners through the paddock, wagging their tales and soaking up all the activity around them. On the grandstands they either lounge in the sun (provided there is any), sometimes looking up in annoyance when somebody stands in the way and casts a shadow, or they gaze in wonder at the wheeled things flying passed over the tarmac. I once saw an enthralled Pomeranian who was actually following the cars from left to right with its little head as they shot passed. I also once encountered a Pug with a dislike for HTP Mercedes. Every time an HTP-car passed by, it barked angrily.

I’ve actually only once seen a sad dog on a race track. It was a few weeks ago, at VLN1. Halfway through the race I noticed a tiny Terrier sitting on a plastic chair in the back of a team truck. It was crying, crying, CRYING. Immediately my old fear that it might be in pain returned. Nothing was further from the truth, however. The Terrier turned out to be hurting because of a human felony. Its owner had taken it off her lap, gotten up from the chair, climbed out of the truck, walked to the dustbin three meters away, dropped in a banana peel and had failed to do all that AND return to the chair within two nanoseconds. The Terrier was simply missing its cuddles. I guess I would’ve cried too if I’d been in its place. Wouldn’t you?

Error 404

Change is an inextricable part of motorsport. Nothing ever stays the same for long. Series appear and disappear. Teams are founded and die. Sponsor money comes and goes. And with that, drivers rise and fall. Because of these fluctuations, every winter break brings about shifts in the status quo. I’m used to that and can deal with it. I memorise the changes; I move on. However, last winter so many core elements of the motorsport machine shifted that even now, a month into the 2016 season, my head is still spinning. The changes are just too drastic and numerous to be memorised quickly. Every time I come across them, my head gives a 404 error as if to tell me “eh… no, just NO.”

Most of these errors are provoked by teams. First there was ROWE Racing who, after years of loyalty to Mercedes, suddenly announced it was switching to BMW. Whenever I see a ROWE car nowadays, my first response is “it had an accident HALF THE NOSE IS GONE oh wait.” Then there is C. Abt Racing, which made it known some months ago that it was leaving its family brand Audi for Bentley. The move has left me unable to even say the name of the Abt cars correctly. At best, I end up with “Abt Audley”. And finally there’s Car Collection, the team that moved from Mercedes to Audi and now employs an army of Audi drivers that my head utterly fails to associate with them. As a result I’m often unable – sometimes for minutes at a time – to remember what team their drivers race for.

But teams aren’t the only culprits. Drivers aren’t innocent either, not by a long shot. Over the last winter, a great number of them sneaked away from Porsche. It wasn’t obvious at first. The only inkling I got that something might be afoot was when Philipp Eng announced he was leaving Porsche for BMW. The true enormity of the Porsche exodus didn’t become clear until a few weeks ago, when the first entry lists were announced. Suddenly Christopher Zöchling was in a Lamborghini, Elia Erhart was in a Lamborghini, Gerhard Tweraser was in a Lamborghini, Rolf Ineichen was in a – you guessed it – Lamborghini, and Côme Ledogar was in a McLaren, probably because Lamborghini had run out of seats. The only driver who seems to be piloting a Porsche in 2016 is David Jahn, which is quite neat apart from the fact that I expected to see him in a Corvette this season and is therefore not helping the case at all.

It’s probably better when we don’t even get started on the mess that has become singleseater racing. For the first time in almost as long as I can remember, Formula 3 is a Felix Rosenqvist-free zone. There’s a hole there now that no Maximilian Günther or Charles LeClerc (oh wait, blast, he moved to GP3; sorry!) can fill. Furthermore, the names Schumacher, Alesi, Newey, and Delétraz are on everyone’s tongues, but they never refer to the people I think they are referring to. And why oh why is Pascal Wehrlein driving an F1 car now? And WHO made Esteban Ocon wear Renault yellow? AND WHY IS BEN BARNICOAT CALLED BEN BARNICOAT?

Overload.
Overload.
Overload.

404

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.

One Word

Last Wednesday I was sitting by myself in a stuffy copy room. I was bored. Beyond bored, really. There are few things on this planet more mind-numbing than waiting for an excruciatingly slow photocopier to finish your massive 300-page print order. In an attempt to defy the boredom, I went on social media to read my latest updates. I was scrolling through Facebook when I suddenly saw it. It was the tiniest of little press releases, barely noticeable amongst all the much more flashy motorsport news on my timeline. Ninety-nine percent of the press release’s text was in perfect order… but then I caught sight of that one word. It was only ten letters long, but my boredom was instantly forgotten. I was breathing fire.

The press release was written by someone at Aust Motorsport, presumably a PR employee. Aust will compete in the GT Masters championship this year and with the press release it wanted to announce its four new drivers for this season: Xavier Maassen, Lukas Schreier, Marco Bonanomi, and Mikaela Ahlin-Kottulinsky. It’s not necessarily easy to write a PR-text like that. What you want to do in such a text is share some interesting key facts about your drivers to engage the audience. What you don’t want is write four full driver biographies that’ll bore that same audience to death. You need to keep your descriptions short and to-the-point. You must make your mark straight away, in no more than one or two words tops. The best way to do this is by using a noun or an adjective, possibly a combination of the two. It’s a fool-proof method to show the reader in one glance what a driver’s focal characteristic is.

Aust’s PR department knows this technique and has applied it extensively in the press release, for all four drivers. What do they really want us to know about Xavier Maassen? He’s Dutch. (Helloooo, Aust sponsors from the Netherlands! Greetings also from the marketing department!) What do they really want us to know about Lukas Schreier? He’s an ADAC-supported driver. (Woohoo! Massive young talent!) What do they really want us to know about Marco Bonanomi? He’s an Audi factory driver. (Seriously-proper-driver alert!) And what is the adjective they chose to sum up the main asset of Mikaela Ahlin-Kottulinsky, their only girl driver?

Attractive.

Where the male racers receive a description referring to their personal achievements, Mikaela has to make do with a banal reference to her looks. I struggle to understand what Aust’s PR department is trying to achieve with this description. What could be the advantage for them in suggesting that Mikaela brings nothing more to the team than a pretty face? What benefits do they reap from insinuating that Mikaela’s entire worth as an athlete can be measured by her exterior? Moreover, what makes it good for them to ignore her entire sporting resume as a source for a description? There are so many great character tags on there. Up-and-coming racer. FIA Women In Motorsport representative. Volkswagen Scirocco R-Cup race winner. Audi TT Cup graduate. What could possibly have been the reason for ignoring all of that and instead choosing ‘attractive’, the one word that renders everything she’s ever done in motorsport mute?

I’ll give Aust’s PR department the benefit of the doubt here and assume their choice of words is nothing more than unfortunate and not thought through properly. But just in case it’s not: dear Mikaela, fight hard this season and prove them wrong.

A translation of the Aust press release.

Say ‘Maybe Yes’ to the Dress

“That’s an interesting dress.”
“I like it. That flower pattern’s nice.”
“I’m not sure. It is a bit crowded.”
“Really? Why?”
“Well, the leaves are rather big – and a very bright shade of green. In combination with one, two, three… four different colours of roses, it might be a bit much. You’d have to be very careful with the accessories if you wear a dress like this.”
“Accessories? You mean bracelets and stuff?”
“Yes.”
“I never wear many anyways. I used to have this beaded bracelet, but it got caught on the door handle. I swear, the beads were literally everywhere. Never buy bracelets like that.”
“Beads wouldn’t do well with this dress anyway. You need something classy. Silver maybe.”
“I might have something like that. I’d have to check.”
“And what shoes would you wear with this?!”
“I’ve got some white ballerinas. They might do.”
“Mmm. I think heels would be better. White ones. Or green, to match those flowers.”
“I can’t walk in heels! I’d have an ankle injury before I’d even reach the kitchen!”
“Yes, but that’s you. I can walk in heels.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot you had that superpower.”
“Haha, it just takes practice.”
“Then I refuse any form of practice. Flat shoes for the win.”
“Well, I still think this dress would look pretty with heels.”
“Pretty? I thought you said you didn’t like it.”
“No, I didn’t! I said you’d have to be careful with how finish it off.”
“I’ll tell you what. You do NOT finish it off well with a Sauber. Those roses clash dramatically with the blue-yellow of that livery.”
“Oh, definitely. If you work for Sauber, you can NOT wear that dress. It would be a crime to combine the two. If that ever happens, I insist the team is disqualified from the championship for crimes committed against eye sight.”

At this point it might be a useful to mention that this conversation took place while a friend and I were browsing the formula 1-section of a motorsport website (which was full of Sauber pictures), when suddenly Google Ads decided to insert a picture of a dress as a personalised advertisement. When you’re me, that happens. Surprisingly often too, if you must know.

The World Is More Complex Than James Hunt

Recently I went to the Nürburgring with a friend. A male friend. Normally I wouldn’t specify gender, but in this story it matters – trust me. Said friend and I had never visited a track together before, but on this occasion we’d come to a suitable arrangement. Due to circumstances I’m not able to drive the entire way to the Nürburgring on my own. I’m dependent on a co-driver to get there, but for that one day I hadn’t been able to find any. Then I learned my friend was going to the Ring as well. Moreover, he was going there in a car that had a seat empty AND he had selected a route that almost passed by my house. It would’ve been silly not to carpool, really.

The journey went without a glitch and once we got to the Ring, we had a good time. We studied the new cars, compared them to last year, gathered some racing intel: the works. But even so a small detail was amiss. Neither of us failed to notice that throughout the day one question kept popping up. It wasn’t a new question to me. I’d heard it many times before in the past decade, but never this frequently. Most of the time the question was asked in the following context. A person would walk up to us, look at my friend, look at me, look back at him, and ask: “Is that your girlfriend?” It’s a simple question. Many won’t see harm in it. In fact, the people who asked it only did so out of interest, not to give offense. Unfortunately, however, in a way they kind of did.

You see, the question has its roots in an old motorsport stereotype, one that I sometimes refer to as Hunt, are fearless, strong-willed, free-spirited, do whatever they please whenever they please, smoke, drink, and surround themselves with women. Who these women are isn’t really important. As long they have long hair and cleavage, nothing else matters much. They’re mainly ornaments anyway.

It’s because of this idea that every time someone assumes I’m dating a man simply because I’m standing next to him, I feel a bit uncomfortable. Comically-meant follow-ups like “why didn’t you bring her on a day with better weather?!” usually make that worse. It’s just not a nice feeling to know that you’re being simplified to fit an image born in the 1970s. This is 2016. We live in a world that’s much more complex than a stereotype. We have female drivers. We have female engineers. We have female team bosses. So why not assume that a girl on a race track, regardless of who she’s standing next to, is there to see the cars? Why conclude she’s attached to her boyfriend’s hip? And speaking of the supposed boyfriend, why assume that every man standing next to a girl is straight? I’ve no doubt there are gay men the world over who love motorsports.

We’re a long way away from abolishing the James Hunt-Principle. Motorsport is an archaic fortress that won’t be changed in a day, or even a week. But if we stop asking women on race tracks if they’re a man’s girlfriend; and if we stop asking girls if they’re there because their father made them, I think we’ll take a step in the right direction. I admit it’ll only be a tiny step. It’ll be like putting a grain of sand on a table. At first it’ll seem like nothing. But remember, if you keep stacking up grains then eventually the table will vanish.

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.

The Naughty Audi

He leans against the tow truck. The legs of his orange jumpsuit and his shoes are caked in mud. His hands are covered in grime. Given that he’s had an incredibly long day, it’s not surprising he looks like he’s been through the weather. He had to report in to the circuit at the crack of dawn, mainly to be given the same set of safety instructions he’s already been given a hundred times before. Still, you can never be too careful with safety. So even though he knew he probably wouldn’t hear anything new, he crammed himself into the tiny conference room, along with all his colleagues, to attend the run-through of the emergency procedures.

He’s glad he hasn’t had any need to put those procedures into practice today. Despite the considerable length of this endurance race, it’s been a quiet day for post 29. (In as far as a day filled with roaring WEC engines can be called ‘quiet’, that is.) However, if anyone had gotten into trouble, he and his colleagues would’ve been ready to help. That’s what marshalls are for. Without people like him, motorsport wouldn’t even exist – and he knows it. A smile forms around his lips. The only thing better than doing something you like, is doing something that matters.

Suddenly his daydream’s interrupted by an LMP1 car approaching La Source. It’s the race-winning Audi 7 that’s just taken the chequered flag. The car confuses him. It has no visible damage, but even so his gut feeling tells him something’s wrong. Then it comes to him. The Audi’s going too fast. Victory laps are forbidden at Spa, so the LMP1 should’ve slowed down by now to prepare itself for making a sharp U-turn coming out of La Source to steer itself back into the paddock. But it hasn’t. Not even a little. It has just hit the apex and is now steering into the corner using the racing line. This is going wrong. The driver needs to be stopped.

It seems his fellow marshalls have come to the same conclusion. As one man, they start to move towards the track. Some rush through the small opening in the tyre wall. Others jump over the catch fence. As fast as their legs can carry them they run across the run-off tarmac, looking somewhat like a herd of overenthusiastic orange minions attempting to close the distance between them and a pile of moving bananas. Most of them are holding objects above their heads. He himself has gotten hold of a white flag and he waves it frantically through the air, hoping to catch the driver’s attention. By now the Audi has rounded the corner. If he runs fast enough, maybe he can block its path. He speeds up, but it’s not use. When he’s still some meters away from the track, the Audi shoots passed him.

When he realises he’s too late, he teeters to a stop. In disbelief he stares at the Audi as it’s gearing towards Eau Rouge. Helpless, he waves his flag above his head one last time. Behind him his colleagues are beginning to block the track to make sure that no other cars can slip through illegally, but he can’t tear his eyes away from the Audi yet. He watches as it shoots up the hill, shrinks into a tiny dot, and disappears behind the horizon. Sadly he lowers his flag. He can’t believe this just happened. The moment he comes home he’s going to write up a new emergency procedure, one designed especially to deal with naughty race-car drivers.