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.