Never Count Your Chickens Too Soon

For years I’ve called the Nürburgring my second home, but I’ve never been so foolish as to consider her my friend. I’m not sure she has friends. I know she sometimes comes across people she likes and is willing to favour for a while. When in her good graces, these people are able to dodge tricky track situations or miss going off-track by millimetres. But the Ring takes at least as much as she gives. The very people she favours one second, may find themselves thrown against a barrier the next. This principle goes for competitors and fans alike. Maybe it even goes doubly so for fans, because they can’t run to the pit building for cover when the weather games come into play.

The first time I visited the Nürburgring was in the spring of 2005. I’d been told the weather would be ‘nice and sunny’, but I quickly realised ‘crisp and toasty’ was a more accurate description. My friends and I sat on a grandstand at the exit of the Dunlop Kehre, where there were no roof or shade in sight, just endless square meters of concrete that projected the sun’s heat right back at us. Sunscreen was no help against that kind of heat, so we were forced to keep ourselves wrapped in blankets all weekend long to avoid being burned alive.

When I returned in the summer for my second visit, the Ring had undergone a makeover. She’d turned grey, cold, foggy, and her rain fell uninterrupted so that within the hour I was chilled to the bone. I’d been smart enough this time to buy a ticket for a roofed grandstand, but the Ring didn’t permit me any solace. It turned out the grandstand roof had sprung a leak, naturally, directly above my head. The stream of rain drops that dripped down my head, shoulders and inevitably my neck seemed endless and I can still remember it well to this very day.

Over time I’ve learned the Nürburgring enjoys switching between hot and cold weather. Sometimes she even fancies having both in one weekend, like during the GT Masters weekend in 2014 when she dropped temperatures by 29 degrees overnight. But on the whole it seems she prefers cold weather. As a regular Ring visitor you learn to expect this and dress accordingly. Still, last October during the vln9 qualifying my six layers of clothes were useless against the frost. Not even the two scarves I’d wrapped around my head could stop the wind from biting my face. After 50 minutes my body had gone so numb I knew I couldn’t safely stay where I was. So I stumbled away from the track towards the nearest piece of shelter, my personal Walhalla, my own piece of heaven on earth: the loo cubicle.

I sat out the last half hour of qualifying there. Perhaps it’s a somewhat embarrassing place to be, but at the time I thought myself pretty smart. I’d outfoxed the Nürburgring! I was within earshot of the track speakers and could still follow the action, but was out of the icy wind’s reach! However, I’d counted my chickens too soon. Shortly after qualifying I learned my favourite driver’s car had been crashed beyond repair. And before the race had finished I was running a massive fever. It was obvious the Ring wasn’t amused with me. I’d ruined her little game and she was making me pay for it. Still, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Thirteen days until my next visit.

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.

Poster Wall

The Poster Wall wasn’t always a poster wall. It started out as the Wooden Wall; 2.8 meters wide, plain-shaped, brownish-yellowish in colour, and consisting of 46.5 identical slats (I counted). However, it turned out there’s a limit on how much brownish-yellowish identicalness  a person can handle. As a result the wall soon became known as the Ugly Wall. And not much after that it was dubbed the Ugly BORING Wall, at which point I decided something had to be done. Covering it up with things that weren’t brownish-yellowish and/or identical seemed the best – or at any rate the cheapest – solution to the problem. Cue the posters.

 The original version of the Poster Wall had a rather ambiguous personality. I didn’t own too many posters back then and had to use literally all I had to cover the full span of the wall. In the bottom left corner I put a poster of a long-haired Heinz-Harald Frentzen, posing next to a pile of Good Year-tyres. I’d gotten it half a decade before from a friend of my father’s who wanted to be rid of it. (I can’t imagine why.) The top and middle of the wall I covered in posters torn from F1 magazines. In the centre I placed a picture of my back then recently deceased Pomeranian dog. And on the right side I placed the biggest Lion King-poster the world has ever seen. My aunt had won it at the neighbourhood fair. It was as tall as the Poster Wall itself, bright orange, and no matter how many pins I stuck in it, it’d invariably fall down every 2 weeks.

 At first I only changed the Poster Wall lay-out sporadically, as it was hard finding new posters. (Needless to say that, when I finally did find some new ones, the Monster of Loch Lion King was the very first to go.) Nowadays, with all the races I visit, the search has become much easier. If I wanted to, I could change a poster every month. But since it’s a rather time-consuming job, I usually limit myself to one extreme make-over every December. This year I’ve decided to replace 12 of the 17 posters that were on the wall. The only ones that get to stay for another twelve months are the FIA GT event poster from Zandvoort 2013, the old Formula Abarth-poster of a now-GP2 driver and Audi’s  Nürburgring24 First Victory-poster. Oh, and the picture of my dog is still there too. It’s been on the wall for so long now, it’s become tradition.

Sometimes I do wonder if I haven’t gotten a bit too old to own a Poster Wall.

 I probably have. Way too old.

 But it’s such a fun way of tracking how life changes. At the start, the wall was full of F1 cars because I foolishly believed F1 was the only racing series worth watching. Now that I know better, there’s not a single F1 car left. It’s mostly GTs and junior formula cars now. Also, if I’m entirely honest, I’m a bit scared to take the posters down. In the last days of the Ugly BORING Wall I was literally prepared to take an axe to it, no matter the consequences. Imagine what I might end up doing if, starting tomorrow, I’d be confronted day in day out with a Restored Ugly BORING Wall ft. Ten Thousand Tiny Even Uglier Holes. I guess I’d rather be childish than find out.

On the Road

“I’ll admit it. That Worst of 90s Music-CD was a good idea.”
“I told you it’d make the road to the Nürburgring more fun.”
“But some of these songs are really jogging my memory.”
“Surely you know this one.”
“Ehm, the intro does ring a bell. Faintly.”
“It’s the Vengaboys!”
“Oh! With Up & Down!”
“YES! It’s brilliant for a sing-a-long! Up. And down. Up. And down.”
“The lyrics definitely aren’t hard to learn, haha.”
“UP! AND DOWN! UP! AND DOWN!”
“That’s it.”
“UP! AND DOWN! UP! AND DOWN!”
“You know, technically that’s wrong. It’s not…”
“UP!”
“It’s just…”
“DOWN!”
“We’re in the Eiffel after all. There are hills everywhere. So sometimes you go…”
“UP!”
“But right now we’re just going…”
“DOWN! Mmm, good point.”
“Really?”
“Yes. DOWN! AND DOWN! DOWN! AND DOWN!”
“Ah.”
“DOWN! AND DOWN! DOWN! AND DOWN!”
“You’re not seriously going to keep this up for the whole way…”
“DOWN! AND DOWN!”
“I guess you are.”
“DOWN! AND DOWN! DOWN! AND DOWN!”
“Oh, look. Yay! The bottom of the valley!”
“DOWN! AND DOWN! DOWN! AND…”
“No. No. NO. We’re at the low point! It’s level ground!”
“Spoilsport.”
“No more ‘down down down’, hahaha!”
“But… do you know what happens when you leave a valley?”
“Huh?”
“You can see it happening just ahead, over there.”
“Oh, no. Please, no.”
“Oh, yes! You go… Up! And up! Up! And up! UP! AND UP!”
“This isn’t funny.”
“UP! AND UP! UP! AND UP!”
“Just shut…”
“UP!”
“Yes!”
“AND UP!”

Flame War!

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.

For the Love of the Sport

If anything, 2014 was the race season of rain. I can’t remember any other season in which so many of my track visits ended in me getting soaked. Admittedly, most weekends were doable. But some were so bad I’ll remember them forever. Take the GT Masters weekend at Zandvoort, for example.

I knew in advance the weather wouldn’t be good.  I’d read all about the “chance of showers” and the “possible winds”. But it wasn’t until I got off the train in Zandvoort on Saturday morning that I began to realise what I was really in for. The sun had risen some hours earlier, but the clouds were so numerous and dark that its rays could barely reach the ground. It was basically still twilight. When I stepped onto the platform, I got caught out by a nasty gust of wind. I stumbled and nearly dropped my bag. “I don’t like this weather,” I told the friend who was waiting for me outside the station, “Why are we doing this again?” “For love of the sport, of course!” she laughed.

We jumped into her car and soon arrived at the track, where we had a ridiculously easy time parking. We soon discovered why: hardly any spectators had shown up. The track was as good as deserted. Even the paddock looked empty, because the teams tried to stay inside the pit building as much as possible. Not long after we’d found the third member of our party (huddled against a truck for shelter) the first raindrops started to fall. We slipped into our water-resistant gear and swore we’d brave the shower like the true fans we were. But then the rain turned torrential and we decided we were cowards, really. So we ran into Mickey’s, the paddock bar. “Why are we even doing this?” one of my friends mumbled as she hung up her dripping coat. “Ehm… love of the sport?” I replied.

We spent most of the Saturday darting in and out of Mickey’s, trying (and failing!) to avoid the worst of the rain. When we left the track late in the afternoon, with water sploshing around in our shoes, we were convinced the weather couldn’t possibly get any worse. But when we returned to the track on Sunday morning, we were proved wrong. The wind had gotten so strong I couldn’t even get out of the car. The door simply wouldn’t open. In the end I had to crawl out on the driver’s side. A parking attendant who saw me do so shook his head. “Why are you girls doing this to yourselves?” We hesitantly told him it had something to do with liking fast cars.

That day even less spectators showed up. As a result, there were more drivers present during the pitwalk than fans. It got to the point where people literally looked surprised to see us when we showed up at their garage. We stayed out in the open for some time after that, but when the GT Masters race finally came round, me and one friend had had enough. We decided to watch the race from the relative dryness of the main grandstand. But our other friend decided to head to the dunes, to take some last pictures. She was already drenched anyway, so how much worse could it get? She returned to us an hour later, water running down her face and seeping out of her clothes. “Why are we doing this?!” she huffed as she dropped down in a seat next to us. “I think there’s only one true answer,” I sighed, “We do it because we’re crazy.”