fans – Girl Talks Racing

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.)

Do You Wanna Be a Snowman?

The heating is broken. Or at least, I’m pretty sure that it is. I turned it wide open three days ago and even though the outside temperature hasn’t risen above ten degrees Celsius since then, the radiator continues to feel stone cold to the touch. I’ve put my ear against it (FREEZING!) and I can hear the water running through, so that’s not the problem. I’ve also checked the central heater in the attic, but that’s burning away quite happily at eighteen degrees. So that’s not the problem either. Still, despite the hidden cause, the heating has every appearance of *somehow* being broken.

Once it dawned on me that something was wrong, I alerted my father. He seemed rather sceptical about my suspicions. In his opinion, it’s probably not cold enough yet for the heating to start doing its work. I pointed out to him that his own central heating is working fine, even though where he lives the weather is exactly the same as where I live. I was quite proud of that argument, but it had little effect on him. All I got was a vague promise he’d take a look at it later this week if the problems continued.

So here I am, sitting behind my computer, wearing the thickest vest I own and wrapped in a thick blanket. Even though some people will undoubtedly say the current eight degrees aren’t cold enough to warrant such attire, I disagree. Eight degrees is freezing cold, especially when you’re forced to spend several hours sitting on a chair behind your desk. The lack of movement quite easily makes eight degrees feel like one. Or maybe even minus one. And that’s not nearly enough to make me a happy bunny.

Still, annoying as this ordeal is, it’s good training for the final race I’ll be attending this season: VLN10. Or, that is to say, that I hope to be attending. I’ve planned to go various times before, but it has always been made impossible by coldness. Not the kind of coldness a broken house heating brings, but the kind of coldness caused by the onset of German Eifel winter. The first time I planned to go, I had to stay home because VLN10 was cancelled due to snow fall. The second time I wanted to go, winter arrived so early that even attending VLN9 was impossible. It was so cold that I had to go home an hour before the finish with a stinging headache, which by midnight had developed into a case of sinusitis that would keep me in bed for a week. When temperatures dropped even lower for VLN10, I was again forced to skip it.

This year I’m trying again, though, in the hope that the third attempt will be lucky. So far the weather forecasts look fairly okay. There will be some rain in the early morning, but the showers should seize somewhere around 8AM. If there’s not too much fog, qualifying might even get underway at 8.30AM without much delay. Temperatures are predicted to be around 9-10 degrees. That may not be very warm, but we had the same temperatures during VLN9 two weeks ago and if you were dressed properly, it was quite doable.

But the biggest risk factor at the moment is snow. When I was at VLN9, a local man warned me that “it is coming. I’ll give it three more weeks at most, but you can feel it in the air. It’s turning chilly. That’s never a good sign.” So right now I’m keeping all my fingers crossed that the suspected snow won’t come just yet. It’d be a shame to have to miss the race again. However, if the snow must come and ruin VLN10, I hope it’ll come before Saturday. As I sit here, freezing despite being wrapped in a thick blanket, I can’t think of anything worse than being at the Nürburgring when the first snowflakes start coming down. You see, despite the fact I’m freezing, I’m not like the characters from Frozen. I do NOT want to build a snowman and I most definitely don’t want to become one either.

A Pirate Code for Race Fans

I’ve been a race fan for most of my life. I’m proud of that and I strongly feel the motorsport fan community has a good thing going. In all the years I’ve followed the sport I’ve never encountered a motorsport hooligan; and up until this day I’ve never had any of my belongings stolen at a race track. *knocks on wood* I also like that the fan community feels like a big family, especially when it’s cold and rainy and you’re all together huddled beneath a grandstand to wait out a weather-induced red flag.

However, human beings are never perfect and neither is the motorsport fan community. I’ve encountered situations over the years that left me thinking: “Is this really necessary?” One of the most poignant happened last weekend, during the final hour of the 24 Hours of Spa. A rain shower had unexpectedly hit the track and was causing chaos. Cars on slicks were sliding off the asphalt left, right, and centre. At some point it became evident that the utterly out-of-control Konrad Lamborghini was going to hit the beached Black Falcon #57. Several seconds before it happened many people on my grandstand were already cheering and when the crash finally took place they screamed their lungs out and even danced. Seeing as the crash was big enough to hurt someone, I found this rather appalling behaviour.

The incident left me rueing the fact that there is no Code of Conduct for Race Fans, a bit like the Pirate Code featured in Pirates of the Caribbean. I know the rules in that code are “more like guidelines” than actual laws, but to me the codex always seemed a neat thing to have. So on the way home last Sunday night I came up with a list of ten rules that I think race fans should follow to make the fan community even better. No doubt there’ll be people who disagree with these rules, but that’s the beauty of democracy, isn’t it? Anyways, here are my ten cents.

At a track you’ll be surrounded by a myriad of people who support different teams and/or drivers than you do. Accept this. Don’t pick fights with them or yell things at them.
Never boo a driver/team who makes a public appearance in the fan area or the pitlane. It’s insulting and they won’t be able to defend themselves against a crowd.
Never boo a driver/team who stands on the podium. This is possibly even more insulting than 2, because not only are they unable to defend themselves against a crowd, they can’t even leave the podium if they wanted to.
Never cheer when you see a crash, regardless of who is in the car or what you think of them. Accidents are part of this sport, but they’re also what makes this sport dangerous. Even if the cars are safer than ever now, even the most innocent-looking crash can still kill a driver. So if you must cheer, do so when the crashed driver gets out of the car unharmed.
If a sign says “team personnel only”, don’t try to sneak in regardless. This’ll only put teams on their guard and ultimately make them more strict.
Similarly, don’t try to sneak into a pitlane or onto a race grid when you have no permission to be there. This’ll only make organisers more strict and less likely to organise pit/gridwalks.
Never insult track marshalls. They may not always be perfect. They may not always be right. They may sometimes tell you to get out of an area where you’re allowed to be. But always remember that without them there would be no racing at all. Reason with them if you must or find a second marshall to prove the first one wrong, but don’t call them names.
Treat grid/promo girls with respect. It’s hard for me to understand why they evoke the responses in male fans that they do, as I see no appeal in the presence of scantily-clad women (or scantily clad men, for that matter) on a race track. But if you’re inclined to look at them, please treat them as you would any other woman. Don’t stand in front of them and loudly comment on who is prettiest/ugliest. Don’t take pictures up their skirts. Don’t touch them unless they’ve given you permission.
Don’t compare a female driver with a grid or promo girl. This is the 21st century. Girls are capable of fulfilling any role in motorsport that they want and there’s no need to revert them to the role they played historically.
Obviously 9 also goes for female team managers, engineers, mechanics, communication employees, catering workers, etc.