Category: Blancpain GT

Early in the Morning

Saturday, 10th December 2016 – 5.54AM

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen!

Ouch. That sounded very breakfast show-like, didn’t it? I’m not sure if that is the impression I want to make right now, because breakfast shows are usually associated with cheerful, entirely awake hosts sitting at newly-painted tables paying close attention to the words of their guests. I’m nowhere near any of that at the moment.

I got up at 4.30AM to watch the Sepang 12 Hours. That may now be almost two hours ago, but still I’m not fully awake. Every once in a while my eyes start to droop and if I’m not careful I’m going to fall asleep and miss a considerable part of the race. (Indeed that is one of the main reasons I decided to write this blog; to help ward off sleepiness.) I’m not going to look in the mirror right now, I’m honestly smarter than that, but I have a fairly good idea what I currently look like – and that’s nothing like a prepped tv show host. I’m sure I have a pale face, bags under my eyes, rings under my eyes, eyes run-through with red vains, and hair all messed up, sticking out in more random directions than you would think humanly possible.

I’m not sitting at a table either, let alone a newly-painted one. In fact, I haven’t moved an inch since waking up. When the alarm went off, I simply turned on the light on my nightstand, reached over to the deskchair parked next to my bed and fired up the laptop sitting on its seat. Before I fell asleep I’d already pre-programmed the Sepang 12 Hours website to appear automatically at start-up, so all I had to do was click the ‘play livestream’-button and I was all set to watch the race from the comfort of my bed.

It hasn’t been entirely clean sailing though. It’s so early that the ancient heating system in my house doesn’t work yet, so every 15 minutes I start to feel cold and have to pull out an extra blanket. By now I’m covered with a tiny mountain of blankets. The height of the pile sometimes makes it difficult to peer over it and watch my computer screen unobstructedly. Still, at this time of morning nothing will make me sacrifice my warmth. I’ve already completed all of my assigned Freezing Cold Hours for this year during track visits to the Nürburgring, thank you very much.

Oops. I nearly did it again just now. I almost fell asleep.

Sometimes I wonder if watching the Sepang endurance race live is really a good idea. I’ve worked too many hours this week and the weekend would probably be better used catching up with the 10 hours of sleep I’ve missed out on in the past few days. But if I did that, I would miss one of the few GT races driven this winter. I would miss things like the Audi 16 starting from the pitlane and cutting its way through the field, all the way into the top 10, within the first half hour of the race. I would miss things like the three-way battle for P2 or the leader going wide and losing P1. I would miss everything. And come afternoon, I would bitterly regret it. You can blame both my love of motorsport and my overall insanity for that.

So if you need me in the next few hours, my bed is where I’ll be; soaking up as much of this race as I can, before social obligations planned for the afternoon will drag me away from the livestream. And I know I’ll be tired for the rest of the day because of this. I also know I currently look nowhere near the likes of a styled-up breakfast show presenter, but sod all that. Right now, I’m happy. 🙂

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.)

Super Duper GT3 Finals Weekend

In my sheer unending brilliance, I once claimed you can never-ever-ever have too many GT3 cars. I’m not sure when I said that. Probably somewhere in 2012 or 2013. I truly believed it at the time too, but fast forward to 2016 and I’ve come to realise it’s not entirely true. It turns out there is such a thing as too many GT3 cars – although only when the cars come spread out over three racing series over the course of one and the same weekend.

The weekend of 1-2 October is about to prove it. Due to a small blip that occurred last winter in the department of Racing Series Calendar Planning, next weekend is filled to the brim with GT3 races. Not only is there a GT Open round planned at Monza, there’s also the grand finale of the German ADAC GT Masters taking place in Hockenheim and there’s the Blancpain GT Sprint final in Barcelona. This sudden onslaught of GT3 events has caused quite a mess over the last few weeks.

You see, even though GT racing requires multiple drivers per car, the pool of available GT3 drivers isn’t as big as many might think. As a result, PRO-drivers often sign multiple contracts per season and compete in two or more GT3 series simultaneously. Many combinations are possible, but for European racers the combination of Blancpain Sprint and GT Masters is an extremely common one. So with the finals of both these series clashing over the upcoming weekend, many drivers have been forced to choose between doing either the one or the other.

Haase with teammate Parisy at Blancpain Sprint Nürburgring

Take Christopher Haase, for example. He competes with Saintéloc Racing in Blancpain Sprint and with Land Motorsport in GT Masters, but for this weekend he’s opted to race GT Masters in Hockenheim. Consequently, Saintéloc was left with an empty seat for Blancpain Sprint Barcelona and had to find a substitute racer. Which it did. In the form of Marco Bonanomi. Yes, the very same Marco Bonanomi who normally races with Aust Motorsport in GT Masters and who will now, as a direct result, miss the Hockenheim final! In order to make up for Bonanomi’s sudden disappearance, Aust has had to beg the Audi factory to send them a replacement. Which they did – they sent them Pierre Kaffer. Of course, under normal circumstances Audi would’ve sent its main spare driver Marc Basseng, but since Car Collection had already been suffering an empty seat since August when the aforementioned Haase hopped over to Land Motorsport, Basseng had already been ordered to go and help out the Car Collection crew by the time the Aust call came in and thus wasn’t available.

Am I still making sense? I hope so, because the confusion’s about to get worse.

Both the Blancpain GT and GT Masters standings are currently being led by the same driver: Christopher Mies. Since Mies isn’t an amoebe (not as far as I can tell anyway) and can’t split himself into two separate entities to fight for both titles at the same time, over the last few weeks he saw himself forced to choose which title he would like to win the most. He could play it safe by opting for Blancpain GT, where he and Enzo Ide have an 18-point lead in the title battle. Or he could go for glory by choosing GT Masters; if he and teammate De Philippi can somehow claim the title for Audi despite the GT Masters’ extremely limiting 2016 Audi BoP, that’d be a massive coup for Ingolstadt. In fairness, there’s something to be said for both options. However, no matter what he did, Mies knew he would unavoidably have to disappoint one of the teams he’s loyal to – and in the end he decided he couldn’t do that. So he put the decision in the hands of the Audi bosses, who at length decided that he should fight for glory in GT Masters.

Christopher Mies will race for Land Motorsport in Hockenheim

Audi’s decision meant that last week there were even more changes made to the GT3 driver distribution. I could tell you all about  those changes. If I wanted to, I could tell you everything I know about how WRT decided to put Robin Frijns in Mies’ empty Blancpain GT seat, how this left WRT a driver short on one of their other cars, and how they had to call on the Audi DTM squad to ask if they perhaps had any GT3-savvy drivers available for the weekend of 1-2 October.

But I don’t want to do that.

It would just make for another complicated explanation that takes up too much space on the internet and that’ll give me another ginormous headache. Instead, I’m inclined to remember the words of a man I once met in Zandvoort. He told me that the really important races shouldn’t be discussed, no matter how intriguing the factoids might seem. Instead, such races should simply be experienced. I’ve decided that that’s what I want to try and do this weekend. I want to forget about all the mix-ups and the fact that so many drivers are in the ‘wrong’ car. Instead, I just want to enjoy the action. Because I’m pretty sure it’ll be one hell of a ride.

Bring on #SuperDuperGT3FinalsWeekend

In at the Deep End (with Ben Barnicoat)

I love GT racing to the point where I’ll get up for it in the middle of the night if necessary. Unfortunately, some of my friends struggle to share my enthusiasm. They prefer to stick to what they know; aka single-seaters. I’ve tried to win them over by bombarding them with GT fun facts, but the results of that method have been mixed. So last weekend, while attending the Blancpain Endurance Cup at the Nürburgring, I decided to try something new. The event didn’t just mark the end of the Blancpain Endurance season, it was also the GT debut of Formula 3 ace Ben Barnicoat. Barnicoat was confirmed for Blancpain Nürburgring only 40 hours before the start of the event and barely 24 hours after his first-ever GT test (yikes!), which makes him as new to GT racing as my sceptical friends. If my friends won’t take my word for it that GT racing is cool, then maybe they’ll take that of a single-seater racer who’s crossing over. Guys, this one’s for you!

Out of nowhere WRT announced you’d be driving the Blancpain Endurance final in their number 4 car, alongside Pierre Kaffer and Adrien de Leener. Can you explain how that deal came about? Because I never saw it coming!
“To be honest, I don’t know how it happened either! I just kind of found myself here… On Tuesday the 6th of September I got a phone call from the Racing Steps Foundation. They told me WRT wanted me to test with them in Barcelona, on Wednesday the 14th. I was really excited to get that opportunity, only I’d never driven a GT car before. The test was my first time driving the car and I tried to learn everything I could. I did a qualifying and a race simulation, which went well. At the end of the day the gap to regular WRT-driver Robin Frijns was only about three tenths. I was very happy with that!”

And then they told you the drive was yours?
“No. I thought it was just a test. I had no idea there was any chance of a racing drive, so I just went back to the airport to catch my flight home. At ten o’clock that night, when I was still at the airport, I got another call from the Racing Steps Foundation. They said “okay, you’re going to the Nürburgring this weekend to race Blancpain Endurance on the 17th and 18th”, and I was like “Oh wow… OKAY!!”

You’re new to GT racing. What has the experience been like so far?
“It’s been a really big eye-opener. From the first I was happy about getting this opportunity, but I didn’t realise until I started my preparations how high the level of the Blancpain series is. Obviously I knew it was a strong series from back when I was racing NEC Formula Renault [=a Blancpain support series] in 2014, but I never realised just how much the manufacturers were involved and to what extent they’re pushing the cars.”

And was that the only surprise?
“Everything’s new for me, so there’ve been many surprises. The car, for example, is much harder to drive than I expected. I thought it’d be a little easier than a single-seater, but if anything I’m finding it harder at the moment. I’m also impressed with the high quality of the drivers. Take Robin Frijns. From what he’s done in his single-seater career I knew he was a good driver, but being his teammate and seeing his data… he’s just really, really good! This weekend I’m going to try and learn as much from him as I can. And then there’s the traffic. In single-seaters, if you want to finish well, it’s all about where you qualify; but here in GT, it’s all about who can pass the backmarkers the fastest. I’ve noticed that the bronze drivers, and some of the silver drivers too, don’t always move out of the way straight away, so for a GT newcomer like myself that’s tricky.”

How is the transition going from having your own car to sharing one with two teammates?
“Pierre’s an experienced driver and he’s helping me a lot this weekend. Adrien’s also very kind. It’s nice to be in a car with two such nice people. At first I thought they might be worried because this is my first GT race, but so far I’m showing strong pace and they’re happy with the job I’m doing. So no problems there. But you know, I’ve yet to do a GT-pitstop with a driver change. That’s going to be a challenge.”

As long as you don’t climb out of the car and fall flat on your face, I think you’ll be fine.
“A lot of the guys told me that that was what they expected me to do during my first practice, but luckily it wasn’t that bad. There’s room for improvement, but I always pull it off quickly enough. At any rate, I’m planned to do the last stint of the race so I’ll only have to climb in!”

I have some GT-sceptic friends. Is there anything you’d like to say to them?
“After driving the Audi GT3, I’d say they should definitely give GT racing a chance. As an F3 driver I can say it really isn’t any easier than single-seaters. Also, GT drivers are just as talented as single-seater drivers. Again, Frijns is the perfect example. He probably should’ve been an F1 driver, but in this field he didn’t even qualify in the top two. It just shows how strong the drivers and the teams are. Come Sunday there’ll be some very good battles. It’s well worth watching – and supporting.”

Barnicoat and his teammates had a strong start to their Blancpain Endurance race, but ultimately finished in 29th place after suffering a puncture. If you want to see their race, click here.

No Pressure

Dear 24 Hours of Spa,

How are you doing? I’m fine and I hope you are too. I know we haven’t spoken in a while. It must have been about a year. I guess the silence has been mostly my fault. I wasn’t very nice to you in 2015, when it rained heavily during all the days of your event. I can particularly remember the Saturday. By the time I got back to the hotel, my socks were soaked, there was a centimetre of water in my backpack, and even my skin was wet. I know I used some very choice words then, especially as I was wringing out my backpack, but I hope you know I didn’t mean them. I was just very tired. That was all. I swear!

Right now it’s my biggest wish that things between us can go back to how they were before. Not just because I genuinely want to rekindle our friendship, but also because I need your help. (And when I say ‘I’, I technically mean ‘me and all endurance fans everywhere’). You see, it’s been a tough season for 24-hour racing.

At the 24 Hours of the Nürburgring, the weather was deplorable. Hail balls cannoned from the skies; and at one point there was even snow! But the real hitch of the event was the finish. Some fifteen minutes before the end of the race various strange things happened within the Mercedes camp, which lead to the two frontrunners switching places on the last lap and the eventual number two-finishers accusing the winners of ignoring team orders and claiming they’d been robbed off the victory. One of the drivers of the number two-car even refused to go on the podium and only one of them showed up for the press conference. The mud-throwing went on for days afterwards, tainting the entire race.

At the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the finish wasn’t a much more cheerful affair. Toyota had looked set to claim their first victory – at last, after all those decades of trying! – but a lousy three minutes before the clock hit zero their car broke down. The looks of the Toyota crew as they were watching it happen on tv were heart-breaking, especially if you know that this wasn’t the first time this happened to them. (In 1994 a transmission problem ended their victory dreams 90 minutes before the finish.) I’m one of those nerds who frequently cries at the end of a 24-hour race, but I swear this is the one and only time I cried for sheer sadness.

And all that, my dearest 24 Hours of Spa, is what brings me to you. You’re the only remaining European around-the-clock endurance race left in 2016. After the anger of the Nürburgring and the heartache of Le Mans, my fellow race fans and I could honestly do with a dose of proper racing topped off with some no-nonsense, unmitigated happiness at the finish line. I know the proper racing-bit probably won’t be too difficult for you. However, I am hereby officially begging you: please try – really try – to give us a nice finish, without fights, without heart-rending drama, and with a winning car that has deserved the victory without a single doubt. I don’t want to put pressure on you, but me and the other endurance fans around the world are putting all our hopes on you. Please, please make it work. Please?

Kind regards,

Girl Talks Racing

Got a Light?

I’m loquacious.

‘Loquacious’ isn’t exactly a word I use a lot. In fact, up until five minutes ago I didn’t even know it existed. I only stumbled across it in my dictionary when I decided to look up a nicer-sounding way to say that I talk a lot (possibly even too much) and if forced you’d be hard pushed to shut me up.

So again, I’m loquacious.

Ask anyone that knows me well, or even just a little. I may seem a bit on my guard when I first meet you, but once I’ve gotten used to you a bit the stream of words starts flowing. Fast. However, even I must admit that words, though my preferred way to communicate, aren’t always the best way to bring a message across. I realised that once again during the Blancpain GT-weekend at the Nürburgring two weeks ago. In between the races there was a demo by a customized truck that instantly made me think “I need to blog about this!” Unfortunately, though, with only a description in words, the demo lost all its power on paper. So I decided to convince my father, who was there too, to give me some of the pictures he took with his fancy camera – compared to his photos, my iPhone snaps are honestly worthless. I think they’ll bring the story to life much better than anything I can say. (Although I’m still going to add some worded by-lines. Ha.)

Once upon a time there was a truck, that looked surprisingly
like Jeremy ‘Powerrrr’ Clarkson had installed a huge engine
on the back of it.

 

I wonder what the purpose of that smoke is?

 

WOOOOOOOWWWW.
I definitely don’t what the purpose of that is.
But wow.

All Belgians Look Alike

I’m part of a group of girls who all love racing, but we don’t all have the same interests within the sport. Some prefer motorbike races, while others (like me) lean towards car races. Some prefer to watch single seaters, while others have a soft spot for endurance events. Within my group of friends I’m probably a bit of an odd-one-out, because my main interest lies with GT cars. Or, as my friends call them, “cars with a roof”.

It’s not always easy to have a group of friends with such varied interests. For one thing, we always struggle to plan a race visit with the entire group, because invariably not everybody will be equally interested in attending the event. Luckily, though, diversity also has its advantages. It’s an ideal opportunity to learn about new things. For example, my friends have taught me the basics of motorbike racing. Some years ago they even dragged me along to a British Superbikes event. Bike racing’s still not my thing, but it was great to get a taste of the atmosphere.

Of course it’s not just my friends influencing me. I do a good deal of influencing my friends as well – and by “influencing” I mean I shower them in unsolicited GT racing propaganda. I’m forever trying to get my friends to watch it. The results so far have been mixed, but I’ve gotten one friend hooked on GT Masters and another is now very keen to take a bigger interest in GT3 races after I dragged her to Germany last year to see VLN. My current mission is to get the latter friend to watch the Blancpain GT Series. It has big fields, close grids, fierce competition, and both sprint and endurance races. It’s ideal to get started, if you ask me.

Yesterday my ongoing promo campaign reaped its first results. My friend decided to sit down and watch last weekend’s qualifying race on the Nürburgring. Afterwards I immediately rushed up to her to ask her what she thought of it. I’m glad to say that she enjoyed the race! But at the same time I’m also somewhat humbled to admit she stumbled across a characteristic of the series that could possibly be problematic for new fans.

“So, what did you think?!”
“It was really fun! But it could’ve been better.”
“Really? How?”
“It would’ve been even more fun if it had been easier to tell the cars apart. Now I kept muddling everything.”
“Was it really that bad?”
“Yes! I wanted to follow Nico Müller’s race, but I could barely even recognise him!”
“I can sort of get that. WRT has six cars in this series.”
“Six?!”
“Yeah, and they all look pretty much identical.”
“And you wonder why I got confused…”
“But Nico is in car number 4, if that helps. He has teamed up with Vanthoor.”
“Laurens?”
“No, Dries. Laurens’ younger brother. You can really tell they’re family if you look at his face.”
“Great. So there are six near-identical WRT cars and two near-identical Vanthoors?!”
“Yes. Kind of…”
“Originality in sport isn’t a crime, you know.”
“Say that to the Belgians. Most others in Blancpain are relatively easy to tell apart.”
“True. The Nissan is easy.”
“Bless the Japanese.”

I know it’s one of those fiddly-tiny tid-bit problems, but my friend does have a point. The more GT cars a team is entering into a race, the more homogenous a GT grid tends to look. If you’re a regular viewer, that’s not a problem; but if you’re a newcomer, it could be discouraging. Although of course it could also be seen as a challenge, since recognising cars on livery colours alone is somewhat of a right-of-passage for many fans. Still, I personally wouldn’t mind if WRT became a bit more like my group of friends, with some more shades and some more colours, and generally more diversity.

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.

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.

Weird

Race tracks are usually a good place to spot weird things. Sometimes these weird things are of the technical kind, like Nissan’s DeltaWing. I’ve no doubt that car raised many eyebrows when it was first wheeled out of the truck. Sometimes these things are of the disturbing kind, like the mystery man who violently broke a side mirror off a VLN car and ran away with it, disappearing into the dense crowd on the starting grid never to be seen again. And sometimes these things are of the I-wish-I-didn’t-just-witness-this kind, like Christopher Mies going all out playing air guitar on top of a team truck at 8 o’clock in the morning while in a state of considerable undress. But most intriguing of all are the weird things of the inexplicable kind.

To give you an example, I’ll take you back to last year’s Blancpain GT Sprint weekend in Zandvoort. On Saturday I found myself standing on the pit roof, looking out over the main straight and the dunes surrounding Tarzan corner. A support race had just finished and it was one of those rare quiet moments, during which the engines of one series have gone silent but the engines of the next series aren’t ready to be started yet. More out of laziness than anything else, I turned my eyes to the pitlane below me. It was pretty much empty, apart from a single pitlane marshall who was closing the side gate through which the last of the support series crews had just left.

Suddenly my eye fell on a pitboard that was leaning against the pitwall. It belonged to Phoenix Racing and spelled out a clear message in neon yellow: PENALTY. I scratched my head. An hour or so earlier the Blancpain Sprint series had done its qualifying session, but I’d heard nothing of Phoenix being punished. Unless I’d missed the news? I pulled out my phone to check the latest updates, but to no avail. The internet was oblivious to the penalty. Even a text to my most well-informed motorsport friends resulted in nothing – although we did come up a fancy theory. Sharing pit materials is pretty common in motor racing. What if one of the support race teams had borrowed Phoenix’s pitboard to communicate a penalty-message to one of their own cars?

The theory made sense, but like all weird things of the inexplicable kind it kept bothering me. In fact, it kept bothering me so much that a few hours later – after being pushed into it – I walked up to some Phoenix mechanics and outright asked them. Their first response was a long, loud laugh. “It’s a good story you know,” came the reply at last, “Last race Niki [Mayr-Melnhof] got a drive-through penalty, but we couldn’t find the penalty-sign. No one knew where it had gone! So we had to radio him the message, which was a bit embarrassing. But during qualifying we finally found it again! So to let Niki know the good news, we stuck the PENALTY-sign on the pitboard right at the end of his final run. We were only being informative, but he jumped out of his skin and somehow thought it wasn’t funny at all. Weird, huh?”

Indeed.