motorsport in general – Girl Talks Racing

A New Hope

Yes. I just blatantly stole and re-used the title of a Star Wars movie as the title of this blog. There’s a reason for it though, so please bear with me.

We’ve made it to the month of December and everywhere you look you’ll find year reviews. Motorsport is no stranger to that practice, but this article won’t be a review. I’ve decided to leave the reviewing to the professional journalists. I’m not exactly a motorsport newbee and I’m sure I could say a thing or two about the goings-on of the past twelve months, but I know when other people are capable of doing a better job than me. (In case you’re interested in some of those better jobs: please visit autosport.com for a cool F1 driver review – subscription only – or Racing.gt for a pretty awesome GT driver review.) But most of all, I’ve decided against writing a review of 2016 because I’ve noticed that most of the reviews are a bit sad. It seems too many bad things happened this past year; too many people died, too often the world collectively had its hopes trashed, and nobody really wants to be reminded of it all.

The more I became aware of that, the more I began to think: “Why would I spend the last day of the year writing a text that looks back on a year that has made everybody sad? It’ll be far more fun to look ahead at a new year that hasn’t harmed anyone yet. A new year in which everyone still has a new hope of better days.” (See! I told you my Star Wars title thievery had a point!)

So instead of a top 10 of things/teams/drivers/races/etc. that left a mark on 2016, this 31st of December I’ll leave you with a list of 10 wishes I hope will come true in 2017. I present them in no particular order:

I wish for someone to finally tell WRT that it’s really, really, REALLY necessary to start painting their cars in different colours. I’d like 2017 to be an I-can’t-tell-those-WRTs-apart-headache free year.
I wish for less snow during the 24 Hours of the Nürburgring. The weather gods can dump a white load on the Ring at Christmas time, but not in the middle of May. Not even if it makes for really spectacular Youtube-videos.
I wish for European Formula 3 to have a season in which there’s less talk about who is paying who to get extra support for their child and more focus on the actual racing.
I wish for more rain during the 24 Hours of Spa. Only it can’t be constant rain. It must be showers, like the tiny surprise shower we had at this year’s edition, which shook up the whole order in the dying minutes of the race. (Oh, and of course those showers can only fall when I’m safely sheltered. I don’t want a soaking. Obviously.)
I wish for Mick Schumacher to be given time and space to make a normal formula 3 debut, just like all the other rookies. He’s not his father; he’s his own person. We should accept him as such and allow him to develop his own skills at his own pace.
I wish for Stéphane Ratel’s plans for GT3 and GT4 racing to unroll the way he wants them to. He dares to dream big and it would be so good for the GT sport if he can make his dreams come true.
I wish for less handbag fights at Mercedes F1. Enough said, I think.
I wish for DTM to climb out of its current slump. The fact that all three brands reduced their entries from eight to six cars can only be a bad sign. Whatever the problem is, I hope someone somewhere can get a grip on it.
I wish for more people to at last realise how much fun the Audi TT Cup is and start watching it. (Similarly, I wish for more tv channels to finally start broadcasting it.)
And last but not least, as always, I wish for everyone involved in motorsport to have a safe year and make it through the 2017 season without any injuries.

May it be a good year. And may the downforce be with us!

(Last Star Wars reference, I swear.)

The Quiet Kind

For a while I always stayed at the same hotel whenever I went to the Nürburgring. This hotel came with its own pub, which was frequented by hotel guests and locals alike. An evening in the hotel pub was always a small adventure. Behind the bar would be one of the owners, Jürgen, a bold man who spoke German and very little else but believed that if you shouted loud enough you’d always get your message across, even in a foreign language. His wife Janna ran the kitchen and was only ever seen in the pub when serving out her home-cooked meals.

About four years ago, I walked into the pub on a quiet Friday night. All the tables were empty and there were only three bar stools taken; one by Jürgen, one by the local he was talking to, and one by an older man I’d never seen before. He was sitting in silence, staring at his pint of beer, presumably listening to Jürgen’s wild story of reversing a truck onto a busy crossroads in the middle of Cologne during rush hour. When Jürgen saw me, he shouted at me to get myself a bar stool. “IT’S SO EMPTY TONIGHT THAT SITTING AT A TABLE’S STUPID. GO TALK TO ARNOLD HERE.” He pointed at the older man. “HE’S HAVING ONE OF HIS QUIET DAYS.”

I dutifully sat down next to Arnold, who didn’t say much at first. It wasn’t until Janna had brought me an apple juice that we struck up a conversation about how similar in colour our separate drinks were. After that, I ventured to ask Arnold where he was from. He said he’d been born and raised in a village down the road. Then he asked me why I was staying in the hotel. When I told him I was there to visit the Nürburgring, he smiled. “I’ve been going to the Ring since I was a boy. I love that place. These days I often work there as a volunteer.” Soon after he finished his beer and left the pub. I didn’t think much of the conversation.

On Saturday night I returned to the pub and found it very crowded. I had just sat down at the last empty table with one of Janna’s home-cooked meals, when out of nowhere somebody sat down next to me. It was Arnold. “I’m glad I found you. I wanted to show you this.” He placed an old photo album on the table. “I was a marshall at the Nürburgring in the sixties and seventies. Have you ever seen the Ring in those days?” He opened the album and revealed a wonderful collections of black-and-white, slightly faded photographs.

Some pictured people, Arnold’s friends and fellow marshalls, of whom Arnold dutifully told me their life stories. Others showed a small tent next to the Nordschleife. “This was our marshall post. It gave us good shelter from the rain, but it wasn’t very stable. One day the wind was so strong it got blown into the forest and up a tree!” He burst out laughing. “We had to climb up and get it!” The album also contained photos of concrete buildings. With Arnold’s help I managed to recognise the pit building and some other Nürburgring landmarks. It seemed he had a funny story to tell about all of them. He did so with much gusto, too.

The final photograph in the album was a shot of an empty medical stretcher. When I asked Arnold what the story behind the picture was, his face turned grey. The light in his eyes faded and then disappeared altogether. “I thought I’d thrown that away,” he muttered. “That was taken in 1976. We were marshalling on the Nordschleife when we suddenly heard a lot of noise. I’ve never forgotten what I saw that day. We tried to help, but it was so difficult. Poor Niki. No one deserves to have such an accident. I’ve never marshalled again after that. Some of my friends tried to go on, but I just couldn’t do it anymore.. Nowadays I try to make myself useful for the Ring as a volunteer, even though it’s not the same.” Arnold closed the photo album and bid me goodnight again.

I saw him a few more times after that, but he was never again as talkative as that Saturday night. Some locals later told me he lived alone with two cats and didn’t go out much. They also said he’d been suffering from depression for over fourty years, which would put the starting point of his struggle somewhere in the 1970s. I’m not sure how much Lauda’s accident had to do with Arnold’s fall into sadness, but if it was the cause of it then marshalls run even greater risks than I thought they did.

How to Show Affection in Motorsport

I don’t like bullies. This is partially because of principles, but also largely because I was bullied myself as a child, by a boy at my primary school. He taught me how to hate recess. Every day he would come after me, kick me, hit me, spit on me or at one point even push me off a climbing frame. I tried to tell people of authority. Of course I did. But the teachers said they couldn’t do anything until they actually saw the boy bullying me, which they never did because he wasn’t so stupid as to do anything when school staff was around. My mother also laughed at my complaints. She said the boy was probably just teasing me because he ‘liked’ me. In the end the bullying went on for a year, until the boy moved schools, and in all that time nobody ever came to my aid.

I’ve never had cause to connect my experiences with bullying to motorsport. Of course motorsport has always encased political tricks, intimidation and mind games, but somehow I’ve never really classed those as ‘bullying’. It’s not that I approve of any of those behaviours. It’s more that that self-centered way of dealing with the world seems to be so interconnected with professional sports that it has transcended common bullying and become a culture, an athlete’s way of life. All behaviour spawned by this culture serves to help achieve a goal; the goal of winning. For example, a driver who is verbally intimidating an opponent is doing so in the hope that his words will result in a beneficial mistake on-track. In that sense, the behaviour isn’t even personal. It’s just a means to a selfish end.

When I think of ‘bullying’, however, I imagine a type of behaviour that’s not aimed at achieving a specific goal, but that stems from internal frustration and is taken out on another person for the express purpose of putting him/her down and causing pain; all to make the bully feel better about him/herself. As far as I’m able to tell, such bullying is relatively rare in motorsport, even if I did hear rumours last year about Formula 3’s Maxi Günther being bullied out of Mücke by his teammates. The story was never fleshed out though and no official action was ever taken. Who knows, maybe that ruined some of the series’ karma.

Off-track driver behaviour has been questionable in formula 3 this season. In the past weeks there were two major incidents that have given me cause to genuinely worry. The first one happened in Hungary, when Nikita Mazepin thought it was justified to rough up Callum Ilott for blocking him in free practice. Mazepin was called to the stewards and handed a whopping one-race suspension. Various people, myself included, felt the punishment was too light. A three-race ban for the whole weekend would’ve sent a far stronger signal about where the uncrossable line between good and simply unacceptable lies. Now, however, it feels like Mazepin got a very-nearly-free pass out of trouble. And I can’t help but wonder: is that a possible reason we saw a second incident at the Norisring?

In the third Norisring race, Mücke-drivers Beckmann and Jensen crashed into each other, both retiring as a result of the clash. During live coverage, Jensen (21) was shown hanging over Beckmann’s cockpit to have a good shout at his 16-year-old teammate. Later on, the duo was shown standing side by side behind the barriers, with Jensen shouting some more at Beckmann and deliberately invading his personal space to make him uncomfortable. If that wasn’t enough, the last few seconds of the highlights reel showed a shot of Jensen in which it very much seems like he’s grabbing Beckmann by the hair.

Click here to view.

I’m not sure what to make of the footage. As far as I know, Beckmann didn’t file any assault charges and the stewards didn’t get involved either, even though they had an obvious reason to do so, especially given the precedent of the Mazepin incident. It would’ve been a fantastic opportunity for them to make up for the mediocre way in which they handled that indiscretion. But all there was after Norisring, was silence. Utter silence. And no clarity.

Ever since I’ve often found myself thinking of my school bully. I’ll never forget how lonely I felt when I realised no one of authority was going to help me. I can imagine that Ilott and Beckmann (if the scene pictured above is indeed what it looks like) have also become familiar with the feeling. After the stewards’ questionable responses to their respective incidents, who can they turn to now for protection? In fact, who can anyone in formula 3 turn to for protection if something like this were to happen again? And why wouldn’t it happen again, if the punishment is practically non-existent? I’ve always believed that, despite the culture of mind games and intimidation, sportsmanlike behaviour existed in motorsport and that it was championed by those in charge. But maybe I was wrong and naive. Or maybe sportsmanlike behaviour has started to die off. Or perhaps this is simply how Formula 3-drivers show they ‘like’ each other. Don’t people say boys will always be boys?

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.

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