Category: other

A Christmas Car-ol

I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of Christmas. I struggle with the commercial grip the holiday has been in these past few years; the obligation to cook a lavish dinner for your family, the pressure of having to be 100% absolutely perfectly happy because everyone is supposed to be 100% absolutely perfectly happy, as well as the need to buy bigger and more expensive presents for your loved ones than you did the year before… it all tends to get on my nerves. I’ve been called a grump because of this more than once, but I just can’t help feeling like this.

Still, there’s one Christmas tradition I’ve always loved – the sending of holiday cards to friends and family. I think it ties in well with what Christmas traditionally stands for: showing kindness to the people around you and letting them know that you’re thinking of them. A few days ago I received a Christmas card that embodied this idea more than any of the other cards I’ve received this December or, indeed, the previous December.

The Christmas card itself was a humble affair. It was made of sturdy white paper and it carried a simple design of a pencil-drawn log cabin with a red door and a red chimney. Pencil-drawn snow was falling from the sky and onto the cabin’s roof. Underneath the drawing stood the words “Frohe Weihnachten” (Merry Christmas in German). Inside the card I found a short but sweet message from a dear friend.  It ended with the words: “Did you check the envelop? I extra bought a car stamp!”

I hadn’t really looked at the envelop, but when I did, I saw that my friend had stuck a beautiful stamp showing a Porsche 911 onto its right top corner. The little piece of paper instantly made my heart melt. I know that, according to the big commercial rules of Christmas, it isn’t much to look at. The stamp isn’t big. It’s not flashy. It’s not expensive. But to me, it means the world. Christmas card sending is a bit of a dying tradition these days. If people still send out cards at all, they usually write the same standard message on all of them. And sometimes they forego the message altogether; they just write down their names and leave it with that.

But here I was holding the card of a friend who had taken the trouble to not just write me a card, but also to personalise it. Not because Christmas demands it from her or because it’s something that makes her hip or cool. No, she did it simply because she cared. That’s a bigger gift to me than even a real Porsche 911 would have been. Thanks ever so much, P.!

As for you, reader, please consider the above story my Christmas carol to you. Remind yourself that tonight and tomorrow are more about the tiny gestures than about the big gifts. I hope you’ll be able to drop your holiday stress and will simply have a MERRY CHRISTMAS.

Some Cars Live in Your Heart

Last weekend I went shopping with my friends. At some point, we drifted into a pop-up mall where the ground floor was taken up by an outlet store from Audi, consisting of some fancy show cars and a tiny merchandise shop. It sold most of the stuff that Audi also sells on race tracks. T-shirts, vests, sweaters, caps, key chains, the works. But unlike race track outlets, this shop also sold toys. Amongst them, a Lego model of the #4 Audi R8 that won the Nürburgring 24 Hours in 2014. I recognised it immediately, pounced on the display table, grabbed a Lego box and, to the confusion and disbelief of the shop attendant, started re-analysing half the 2014 24 Hours race.

If you were on twitter last weekend, you probably already know that I bought the Lego car and then spent a good two hours trying to piece it together. (If you weren’t, I’ll insert a picture of the car below so you’ll know what I’m talking about.) I know some of you may find it childish that I bought a kids’ toy and was utterly chuffed with it, but I simply couldn’t resist. You see, for various reasons that #4 Audi R8 is very dear to me.

Part of its specialness has to do with the fact I attended the Nürburgring 24 Hours that it won. It may not sound very special that I was there, since I’m known to attend a lot of races, but believe me, back in 2014, it really was. I have a chronic illness that made my life very difficult for many years, but luckily by the end of 2013 I had pulled through it really well; when the visit to the 2014 24 Hours was planned, I was stable and relatively healthy. Unfortunately, though, in March 2014 I relapsed out of the blue. For months, I struggled to get through the days and the trip to the 24 Hours was almost cancelled. Looking back I’ve no idea how I convinced the people around me that I was capable of going or where I pulled the strength from to attend. I only remember that I was determined not to let the disease beat me. So I got permission from my doctor to double my meds for the weekend, bought crutches to help me walk – and, come Green Hell or high water, I went.

Another part of the #4’s specialness has to do with its drivers. One of them has been my favourite driver in all of motorsport for almost ten years now. I watch most A-class GT races anyway, but when he’s in them I pay special attention; and when he’s in a B-class race, I watch that too. My friends always find it funny that, of all available racing drivers, I picked him as my favourite. I understand where they’re coming from. For one thing, in terms of personality we’re almost polar opposites. But, despite everything, he ended up my favourite driver anyway due to good timing. In 2007, he happened to compete in the very last race that I got to watch live from the track before I became too ill to leave the house. He came into the race as an underdog and somehow pulled off a performance that everybody thought was impossible to achieve. He caught my eye that day and I’ve never taken it off him since. In my worst sick days, he became one of the special things that helped to distract me from my worries and, I guess, in a way you can say that he was also one of special things that helped me get through those dark days altogether.

So when the number 4 Audi R8 crossed the finish line and took the 24H-victory, I did something I’d never done before on a race track and have never done since: I absolutely cried my eyes out. Part of it was the exhaustion, part of it was the pain, part of it was the nausea caused by the meds, part of it was that I had won my own 24 Hours race, part of it was that my favourite driver had won the real 24 Hours race, and part of it was that I’d never before seen him win a race live at the track. All those parts put together made it a moment I’ll never forget.

When Audi released a model of the black-and-white #4, I bought one immediately. I just had to have it. And when I saw the Lego version of the #4, I had the same feeling. I just had to have it; even if the shop assistant thought I was weird for almost starting to cry all over again. Some cars just live in your heart. End of story.

Empty Weekends

I know that technically we still have a few endurance races coming in 2016, but as far as my head is concerned the race season proper ends this weekend after formula 1, the only one of the big international series that is still going, finishes its last event. After that, winter will be here. The days will be short. The weather will be cold. And the weekends will be rather like the second act of the musical Les Miserables.

I should probably clarify that last statement.

There is a song in the second act of Les Miserables called “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables”. It has always spoken to me strongly. Not just because I love Les Miserables as a story or because of the wonderful music that goes with the song, but first and foremost because of the meaning of the lyrics. They tell the story of a young man who has fought with his friends to overthrow the French government and start a social revolution. He and his friends were all filled with dreams, but as is so often the case in life, dreams don’t come true. The police came down on the revolutionaries and slaughtered almost all of them. The young man is the only person to survive the massacre. As he sings, he becomes more and more confused about how he should continue his life from here on out. All his friends are gone, which is reflected by the silent bar around him. Once his comrades filled up the whole room, but now all the chairs and tables he sees are empty. He’s all alone in the world now.

Although there have been moments in my own life when this song was much more fitting, the start of the winter stop is one of those moments when I’m irrevocably reminded of the sentiment behind it. I know that motorsport is only a hobby for me. I don’t earn my money by working in it and in that sense my future doesn’t depend on it. If it were to disappear tomorrow, drivers, engineers, journalists and series representatives would all be affected far worse than I would be. But at the same time, motorsport is more than a hobby. It dictates how I spend my weekends, how I structure my planning, and when times are bad it’s what helps me to cheer up and not let my head hang in defeat. It has also brought me many friends and acquaintances that I like to spend time with. The thing is, though, that some of those people I can only ever meet at race tracks, for example because they live in other countries. And without races, you guessed it, no track meetings either.

So in that sense, the winter stop is a lonely time. After months of moving around circuits that I consider home and among people whom I consider friends, all of a sudden I’m stuck at home. Alone. No one to keep me company. Cut off. Staring at a TV that refuses to show races, and an empty dinner table with empty chairs around it. This moment repeats itself every year. It’s an almost traditional ritual that last for five minutes.

Those five minutes are roughly the time it takes me to remember that I have a life outside of the racing season. All I need to do is pick it up off the shelf, blow the dust off it, and smile. There’s still a whole world out there to be explored. And without race cars blocking my view, I might actually see new things – and, who knows, maybe make some new friends to fill my set of empty Les Miserables chairs.

Unbelievable

I spend a good proportion of my free weekends running around race tracks, merrily tweeting about my adventures. But don’t get me wrong, I don’t simply sling everything that happens onto social media. I apply a light form of censure: I try not to post messages that lose their appropriate context when you reduce them to 140 characters and become ambiguous – or simply incomprehensible. I also deliberately don’t write about things that are so utterly ridiculous that, if I were to strip them of their details and turn them into an ultrashort tweet, readers probably wouldn’t believe they had actually happened. I was talking this practice over with a friend last week and she said it was a shame that my most bonkers stories never make it onto the web. Initially I disagreed with her, but today I’m wondering if the odd events that don’t work as tweets could perhaps work as a blog post, since a blog allows room for contextualisation. Maybe that concept is worth a test run. So I hereby present…

The Top Three of Odd Things That Really Happened in 2016 But Seemed Too Improbable When Written Down in 140 Characters!

3. Size Matters
In the spring I attended the Blancpain GT Sprint Cup at the Nürburgring. That weekend, the Sprint Cup was a support series for the Truck GP. I’d never before seen a truck race and I’d definitely never shared a race track with truck fans. I wasn’t worried about it though. What could possibly happen? It’s not as if truck racing is a big deal or anything, right? WRONG. Truck racing is HUGE. It attracts thousands of super-enthusiastic fans, who outnumbered the GT fans by far all throughout the weekend and at times made me feel a bit isolated, because they had their own fan culture which I didn’t truly understand. However, it turned out that this was a mutual sentiment. When the Blancpain GT cars first hit the track on Saturday morning, immediately after the truck practice had finished, I overheard one of the truck fans saying: “Aaaaaw, look how cute! Aren’t those GT cars SMALL?!”

2. My Little Pony Rocks
During one of the VLN races, my dad and I shared a row of chairs on one of the grandstands with another father and daughter. The two dads quickly got talking about photography and that left me with the other daughter – which was slightly problematic as she was three years old and I’m absolutely horrible with toddlers. So we ended up staring at each other uncomfortably, until I decided to point out the girl’s My Little Pony vest. “That’s cool!” I said. Just then a grumpy man walked passed us, muttering that it was not cool, just “something stupid for kids”. In a reflex I unzipped my backpack and pulled out my My Little Pony travel wallet. I waved it defiantly at the man, who shrugged his shoulders and walked on. Obviously furious, the little girl then climbed on her chair and… flipped the tiniest bird ever to be flipped at a race track, right at the grumpy man’s back. I’m still disappointed he didn’t see it! (And also relieved the fathers didn’t see it either. I probably would’ve gotten blamed.)

1. Head to Head
I have an annoying habit of typing my tweets while walking. It’s not difficult to do, not even in a paddock, as long as you keep a wary eye on what’s beside and in front of you. You don’t want to be hit by a race car, after all. Over the past seasons I’ve pretty much perfected the technique and I never run into trouble. Well, never? Once. Last May, during the 24 Hours of Spa-weekend, I literally ran into trouble when trouble didn’t come from the side or the front (where I was watching!), but from above. I was walking and tweeting along a support series pre grid, which was located in the paddock at the foot of Eau Rouge, being perfectly aware of the exact locations of all the cars and moving engineers to my left, right and front. Unfortunately, I was also perfectly oblivious to the push-out extension of the Garage 59 team truck that was hanging level with my forehead. I walked into it with a surprisingly loud BANG, almost fell backwards due to the backlash, and saw stars for a few seconds. The moment I regained my bearings, I felt embarrassed. I was surrounded by at least 100 people. How stupid an idiot would they think I was?! And that’s when I realised. Despite the bang, the show and the drama, nobody was looking in my direction. Nobody was pointing at me. Nobody was even laughing. They were all so interested in the pre grid, THAT NOBODY HAD NOTICED. The relief I felt was enormous. (FYI: so was the bump on my forehead.)

When Fandoms Collide

Some people say coincidences don’t exist. I’m not sure what I believe when it comes to that. All I know is that, on Saturday October 22nd at around 11.35h, I found myself wandering the starting grid of the tenth and last VLN race. Normally I spend my grid walks wandering around the first starting group, which is located in front of the pitboxes and includes amongst others the SP9-class. Usually I choose to ogle the cars there because a) it’s less of a walk and b) the SP9-class includes GT3 cars and I LOVE GT3 cars.

However, for that particular race the first starting group was relatively small and I thought that for once it’d be fun to check out the slightly slower, but still cool, race cars in the second starting group. So I strolled along the pit building, passed it by, and entered the main straight of the Nürburgring grand prix track at the point where the pit entry catch fence ends and the stone pit wall starts. That divide is the traditional spot where the group two pole sitters get to stand.

Normally I could’ve told you all about the pole sitters, but as it was, I barely even noticed them. I was completely distracted by a car that stood a few rows behind them. It wasn’t like most race cars. Most race cars have one fixed base colour, like black or red, and have that covered with all kinds of sponsor names. This car, however, had a base colour (white, if you’re interested) but no sponsors whatsoever. Instead, it was covered in pretty drawings in the Japanese manga style. For a second I thought it was a Japanese team (believe it or not, VLN attracts teams all the way from Asia), but that turned out not to be the case. It was a car run by a German outfit called Kuepper Racing.

I instantly pulled out my phone. I have a motorsport friend who loves manga comics and I just knew she had to see this. I took some quick shots of the car and Whatsapped them to my friend. I wasn’t sure what she’d make of them. I definitely didn’t expect any kind of overly exhilarated response, I was just hoping to put a smile on her face. But even so, it was an overly exhilarated response that I got. “OH MY GOODNESS THAT CAR IS COVERED WITH CHARACTERS FROM BLEACH, THAT’S MY FAVOURITE MANGA!!! THIS IS AWESOME!!!”

Needless to say I instantly obliged my friend by sending her every single picture of the Kuepper Racing car that I could find on my phone. I even went and buggered my father to see if he had taken any shots of the car in action, to complete my friend’s picture collection. It turned out that he did and again I managed to make my friend very happy. Personally, I thought that would be it. But as my dad and I started our journey home later that afternoon, my phone started to beep. And beep. And beep.

It turned out that the Kuepper Racing car had inspired my friend to look up all the Bleach merchandise that she owned. One by one pictures rolled into my Whatsapp of plushies, big ones and small ones, t-shirts, gloves, and even a pyjama that my friend linked to the black-haired character on the right side of the #455 car: “It’s the same guy!!!” It turned out she’d also found the Kuepper Racing website and had dug through the gallery, but had unfortunately only found a few additional shots of the Bleach car – and, to her disappointment, no explanation about the origins of the manga livery.

It’s been a few days now, but so far that origin story has remained a mystery. But don’t think my friend has forgotten about it yet. She’s still determined to find out and I suspect it’s only a question of time before she’ll e-mail the team. All she needs first, is a bit of courage – German isn’t her strong point. Still, in this case it might prove to be worth the trouble for her. After all, to her, “this is the best race car ever. It’s such a shame the VLN season is over now. If I’d known this car was there, that livery alone would’ve been worth the trip!” So, Kuepper Racing: if you keep that livery for next season, I can guarantee that you’ll have an extremely dedicated fan for 2017!

The Worst Tragedy in the History of Motorsport

He’s a 20-year-old race car driver from Spain. A couple of seasons ago he was a high-flyer in European Formula 3 and last year he made name for himself by claiming P2 in a soaking wet Porsche Carrera Cup Deutschland race in which a submarine would’ve been a far more useful mode of transport than the four-wheeled vehicle he was stuck driving. In 2016, Alex is honing his skills in the VLN Nordschleife championship. He’s racing a Porsche R-Cup in the SP7-class and has already taken five wins, six podiums and a handful of pole-positions.

However, Alex’s results aren’t what I want to write about today. Don’t get me wrong, they’re important. Good results like that are what keep a race car driver in business; but they aren’t what make a race car driver cool. And believe me, Alex Toril is cool. Unlike many of his racing colleagues, Alex has got Style – with a capital S. He’s incredibly aware of what he’s wearing and when it comes to his racing gear, he’ll only accept the absolute best. He demands the right size, the right material and, above all, the right colour. This is why a few months ago he decided to swap his old, grey (BORING!) racing gloves for a pair of brand-new, absolutely fabulous pink ones.

On VLN8-Saturday, Alex allowed me a personal Meet & Greet with his pink gloves. (If you looked at your twitter timeline that day, you may have noticed the almost fifty pictures I uploaded of them.) Upon seeing them in real life, I was almost overawed by their sheer awesomeness. Still, despite that I couldn’t help noticing one tragic problem: Alex’s orange helmet didn’t match their radiant colour, not even in the slightest. When I asked Alex about this, it turned out that his superior sense of Style had already noticed the issue ages ago: “Yeah, I know. I really need a pink helmet to match them, but a new helmet costs 2.500 euros! And pink spray paint is another 500. That’s a lot of money.”

It is, indeed. Most people don’t just have 3.000 euros lying around. I sure don’t and neither do any of my friends – and that’s nothing short of tragic. Go figure. At last there is a driver with the superior brain capacity to recognise the importance of the colour pink for the bettering of his racing career, and then he can’t get the helmet he wishes to have because of A LACK OF MONEY. It’s one thing to not have a race seat due to a lack of money, but missing out on a pink helmet due to financial troubles is just cruel and UTTERLY UNACCEPTABLE. It’s the worst piece of motorsport injustice I’ve ever seen.

Leaving Alex to suffer through this dreadful fate on his own would be inhuman. That is why we need to help him – all of us, together. I already looked into starting a crowdfunding campaign, but since I live life without a credit card that proved a bit complicated. So I’ve come up with an alternative way to help him: we need to find him a personal helmet sponsor. I suggest that next Monday everybody goes to ask his/her employer if they have the financial ability to give Alex the 3000 euros he needs to buy himself his dream helmet. (Please note that in return Alex’ll have to put the sponsoring company’s name on his helmet, but even if you work for a potentially ego-painful company like OB or Always: please don’t let that deter you from asking your bosses for help! Sacrifices must be made for great purposes and no one knows that better than Alex.)

So please, my dear readers, take action.

Do it for motorsport. Do it for justice. But, above all, do it for Alex.

(And maybe also do it a little bit for me.)

Footnote: please note that most of the content of this blog has been blown up, overdone, overdrawn, and utterly exaggerated. The entire text is to be taken with a healthy pinch of salt. 😉

Postponing the Inevitable

It’s that time of year again. That time when the season has well passed its midway point. That time when it’s become obvious who the lucky few are that can still go for the title. That time when the first champions are beginning to be crowned. (Although with some luck only in series I don’t follow too closely.) That time when it’s becoming increasingly clear that, as they say in Game of Thrones, winter is coming.

However, it’s also the time when the true end of the season is still just far enough away to go on denying its existence for a little while longer. After all, even if most of the racing calendar is behind us now, most championships have at least a round left to run. Some even have three or four races left to go, like DTM. That means there are still many, many weekends on the way in 2016 in which I can enjoy watching races from my comfy couch. And of course there are also still some weekends on the way in which I’ll go and attend race events live! Although… I’m getting  frighteningly close the bottom of my calendar. There’s Blancpain Endurance this weekend and then VLN8 next week, and then… nothing.

That’s where the list ends.

Or, does it?

My motorsport friends and I have very different characters, but there’s one thing we all have in common. The moment we’re getting signals that our string of race visits is about to end, we all fly into a frenzy. A but-what-if?! frenzy. Suddenly ideas are flying around the room left, right, and center. “Yes, I know VLN8 was the last race we had planned to attend, but the weather is still good and we still have a little bit of money left, so what if we also went to…[fill in event+venue here]?”

It’s not always easy to find races to attend so late in the season. From September onwards, championships either end or leave Europe, to race on tracks where the weather hasn’t gone into early-winter mode yet. But scarce options or no, we somehow always manage to come up with a pretty decent short list. In the last three weeks, I’ve heard many ideas, ranging from attending VLN9 and VLN10 to the GT Masters final in Hockenheim, the DTM final in Hockenheim and even the Blancpain GT Sprint final in Barcelona.

That last one is definitely the most bonkers idea – and probably also the most impossible one to turn into a reality. Provided I can scrape together the money for an air-plane ticket to Barcelona and back, my only option to return home on time for work on Monday morning would be to fly home on Sunday afternoon… during the main race. The other suggestions, however, might well turn out to be doable. Maybe not all of them (that’d cause financial trouble), but with some planning an extra VLN race and perhaps a Hockenheim final seem to be realistic options right now.

My friends and I would really love to extend our race-visit calendars a bit. It would mean getting to see this-and-that driver racing once more in his current car before he/she moves up to another series. It would also mean getting to support our favourite teams one more time. And of course it would mean getting to breathe in one more whiff of gasoline aroma before we’ll have to go without for a whole winter. I guess that’s what all this late-season buzz is really about, when it comes down to it. We’re simply trying to postpone the season’s end; to postpone the coming of the big W and the empty weekends it brings; and, most importantly, to postpone the inevitable. Forever, if we can.

And if we can’t, then at least until the middle of October.

The Night Before

The night before I go to a race event is always a bit of a double-edged sword. I can never quite make up my mind if I like it or not.

On the one hand, I dislike the night before a race weekend. By the time it comes around I’ve usually already spent the entire day looking forward to attending the event and after all those hours and hours and hours and hours of not being able to do anything but think of the great things to come… the day still isn’t done and I still have the entire night to get through before I’m allowed to finally be on my merry way. Sometimes I try to trick myself into thinking that the night won’t be so bad, because I’ll spend a large part of it asleep – and when humans sleep, they’re oblivious to the passing of time. Neat trick, right? Nope. Wrong. The more I think that time will go quicker when I sleep, the less I’m actually able to sleep. I often end up spending two thirds of the the night tossing and turning, waiting in agony for the arrival a morning that never seems to come because my alarm clock simply isn’t ticking fast enough.

Sigh.

On the other hand, I also like the night before a race weekend. It’s a moment of relative quiet. The work week is done, but the action hasn’t started yet – although the anticipation excitement is definitely there. It’s the quiet before the storm, only without a tornado approaching on the horizon and more butterflies in the stomach. What will happen during the races? Who will be quick? Who will be slow? How will my favourites do? And what will the weather be like? In all honesty, for rather selfish reasons, it’s usually the last two questions that weigh heaviest on my mind. I don’t count a lot of drivers among my favourites, but I definitely have a soft spot for the rare few I do like. I always want them to do well, obviously, but when I go to see them race live I really want them to do well. As a result, a small part of the night before is usually spent checking out the competition and estimating the chances of ‘my lot’.

And then there’s the weather question. It’s probably a no-brainer why that one has caught my systematic interest. You know, if I truly have no other option I will sit in the rain to see a car race, no problem. However, when it’s not absolutely necessary that I almost drown myself for the love of the sport, I really rather wouldn’t do it. This means another chunk of the night before is dedicated to staring at the weather website, especially when the initial forecast was bad, because until the last second I’ll hold onto the hope that the bad news will somehow turn good. This is why it’s only at the very last moment that my rain gear gets packed.

Packed?

Oh blast.

PACK.

It’s nine o’clock and I still have to pack my suitcase. AND I still need to shower, too. Goodbye butterflies, hello stress. Never mind this whole balanced goody two-shoes discussion above. I hate the night before.

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.

Poster Wall

The Poster Wall wasn’t always a poster wall. It started out as the Wooden Wall; 2.8 meters wide, plain-shaped, brownish-yellowish in colour, and consisting of 46.5 identical slats (I counted). However, it turned out there’s a limit on how much brownish-yellowish identicalness  a person can handle. As a result the wall soon became known as the Ugly Wall. And not much after that it was dubbed the Ugly BORING Wall, at which point I decided something had to be done. Covering it up with things that weren’t brownish-yellowish and/or identical seemed the best – or at any rate the cheapest – solution to the problem. Cue the posters.

 The original version of the Poster Wall had a rather ambiguous personality. I didn’t own too many posters back then and had to use literally all I had to cover the full span of the wall. In the bottom left corner I put a poster of a long-haired Heinz-Harald Frentzen, posing next to a pile of Good Year-tyres. I’d gotten it half a decade before from a friend of my father’s who wanted to be rid of it. (I can’t imagine why.) The top and middle of the wall I covered in posters torn from F1 magazines. In the centre I placed a picture of my back then recently deceased Pomeranian dog. And on the right side I placed the biggest Lion King-poster the world has ever seen. My aunt had won it at the neighbourhood fair. It was as tall as the Poster Wall itself, bright orange, and no matter how many pins I stuck in it, it’d invariably fall down every 2 weeks.

 At first I only changed the Poster Wall lay-out sporadically, as it was hard finding new posters. (Needless to say that, when I finally did find some new ones, the Monster of Loch Lion King was the very first to go.) Nowadays, with all the races I visit, the search has become much easier. If I wanted to, I could change a poster every month. But since it’s a rather time-consuming job, I usually limit myself to one extreme make-over every December. This year I’ve decided to replace 12 of the 17 posters that were on the wall. The only ones that get to stay for another twelve months are the FIA GT event poster from Zandvoort 2013, the old Formula Abarth-poster of a now-GP2 driver and Audi’s  Nürburgring24 First Victory-poster. Oh, and the picture of my dog is still there too. It’s been on the wall for so long now, it’s become tradition.

Sometimes I do wonder if I haven’t gotten a bit too old to own a Poster Wall.

 I probably have. Way too old.

 But it’s such a fun way of tracking how life changes. At the start, the wall was full of F1 cars because I foolishly believed F1 was the only racing series worth watching. Now that I know better, there’s not a single F1 car left. It’s mostly GTs and junior formula cars now. Also, if I’m entirely honest, I’m a bit scared to take the posters down. In the last days of the Ugly BORING Wall I was literally prepared to take an axe to it, no matter the consequences. Imagine what I might end up doing if, starting tomorrow, I’d be confronted day in day out with a Restored Ugly BORING Wall ft. Ten Thousand Tiny Even Uglier Holes. I guess I’d rather be childish than find out.