I tweet on my own behalf, but I’m by no means the only girl who talks racing. I’m surrounded by a tight group of (girl)friends who all enjoy watching racing. I even met most of them on race tracks. Maybe that sounds strange, but it isn’t. Not really. The hard-core motorsport fangirls’ community is a rather small one. And only a small percentage of the fangirls in that community are capable of paying regular visits to race tracks. So during events you quickly start running into the same people, over and over again. It’s practically impossible not to form friendships.
But don’t be mistaken. It’s not all sugar and spice. Sport doesn’t just bring people together, it can also drive them apart. This has lead my friends and I to pick up a few odd habits over the years. Most prominent among them is our tendency to keep a Flame War going amongst ourselves. I can’t even remember how it started. Probably really innocently. Gags usually do. But after nearly a decade, it’s become a monster than can hardly be ignored. It works more or less like this: once it’s become known that one of us supports a certain driver, nearly everybody else will instantly develop a grudge against him (or her). This leaves the fangirl in question to defend every single move of ‘her guy/gal’. The fierceness with which this needs to be done varies from day to day, message to message.
Most of the flames I receive are messages like “why did your guy push mine into the gravel?!” or “HOW does your guy dare to qualify in front of mine?!”. During a race things sometimes get a bit more heated: “No offense to your guy, but my guy is faster so I’m going to tell him TO CRUSH YOURS.” But all that I can all handle. What I find difficult is talking my way out of the messages that tend to arrive, out of the blue, on week days: “I just saw this photo of your guy on twitter. Explain. Those. Flip-flops.” When something like that comes in, you have to have an intelligent retort ready in an instant. If you don’t (and I often don’t!), your only option is to try and improvise your way out. Luckily that’s more up my street. For example, whenever my Nico Rosberg-supporting friend puts me with my back against a wall and things get hairy (pun very much intended), I always find a way to remind her of the existence of My Little Nico:
Source: WTF1
That usually annoys her so much she forgets what she was on about before.
But even though I love annoying my friends on purpose, the best thing about the Flame War is that it can become a Lame War in a matter of seconds. Take this year’s Nürburgring 24h weekend, for instance. My friend and I had been arguing for literally days about whose favourite would come out on top. But when my guy got pulled into somebody else’s crash 45 minutes into the race, the bickering stopped straight away. All of a sudden everything was forgotten and we were on the same page again, supporting each other as well as our drivers. I guess that’s the beauty of friendship. No matter how much of a git you’ve been, friends will still be there for you when it matters.