 This has been such an epic week, I don't even know where to begin with the stories. hopefully when Greg gets back off a plane he can help fill in the blanks, but in the meantime, ill see what I can do. basic story goes, i moved to Germany from Australia back in March/April this year, and last sat (24th) finally tied the knot with my long suffering fiancé here up near Denmark. yeah, so, boring? yes, indeed. however, 2 good mates Greg and neb managed to make it over here from Australia for the wedding, so i thought it only fitting that we try and organise a bucks week that was so totally kick-ass that it made their 24hr flight a meager speed bump on the path to awesomeness. so, firstly a massive thanks to Greg and neb who made it to the other side of the world to help celebrate my wedding and drink an enormous pile of German beer, and secondly, let me show off a few photos of our 'week of awesome'. now ill try and keep this primarily car related, but forgive a few side tracks!  SO...
Sunday started off in Amsterdam. yes, farkin Amsterdam. Greg had yet to arrive,
so neb and i got completely shitfaced in his honour, and roamed the red light
district for about 4hours weighing up the pros and cons of banging a Dutch
supermodel for only €50. not to say the locals in the daylight weren't a bad
bunch either, with blondy the waitress below a prime example of why i want to go
back to Amsterdam, and sit and drink becks all day in her cafe. anyway, Greg finally got to Amsterdam late on Monday, so we felt obliged to get shitfaced again, and roam the red light district yet again till the single digits, with bad bad thoughts, and a pocket full of €50's burning holes in our pockets. enough of that story. Tuesday morning we left Amsterdam for the Nürburgring. about 3.5hrs drive where we were destined to pick up a lotus 2-eleven at 4.30 in the afternoon... we were late I had arranged accommodation previously with a bunch of guys (from these forums - shout out to mark and Steve!) from the UK. basically scored ourselves a few rooms in a palatial house on beautiful grounds just on the fringe of Adenau beside the ring. these guys had brought with them an SC'd exige, two Vauxhall vx220's (one turbo, one na i think) and then there was us with the 211 and my POS a-klasse daily.  we briefly met up with them, then scrambled to pick up our lotus (from Ring Projekt - highly recommendable), get our shit together, and get to the track by opening time at 5.15... we were late weather held itself together nicely, and i think in total we managed to put down 5 driving laps from 5.45 - 7.20 (ring closed early due to some gt3 fucking his car and a bunch of Armco out of the forst, requiring a track closure and cleanup crew). we were slow on driver change overs, plus we really had no clue, so were taking things slowly. don't try and be fast on your first laps! what an unbelievable circuit. i mean, fark me, its not a circuit, its the worlds most awesome driving road... with rumble strips! the Norschleife is about 21km for the touristenfahrten loop, and 'unofficial' timing runs from 'bridge to gantry' just either side of the pits area. a few locals and regulars told us that for ring novices, that we should be expecting between 12 and 14mins for our first day. with a few gps failures and no video on that first day, best guess at lap times appeared to be in the high 10s (10.50 i think was one of mine). given that a whole number of screaming fast sections of track are paved with blind crests, blind corners, off camber 90deg bends, fall-aways etc etc, its hard to describe how HARD it is to go fast into sectors. you're just shitting yourself every 200m or so, eventually you just have to accept that you 'think' you know where the track leads, and just ghost it over the crests! keep in mind that over 21km of track, even a 'slow' 11min lap will put you up at 115kmh average speed! and so, tues evening we went and bought a metric assload of beer, some bratwurst, and i think there may have been some salad as well, though the idea of salad in Germany seems dirtier than the hookers in Amsterdam. below is a pretty pic of the ringers we were staying with from the UK, plus Greg thrown in over on the right tues night was spent sitting outside under the stars, drinking beer, telling bullshit stories about cars and women, and on the back of 2 benders in Amsterdam, we went to bed at the early time of 2am. awesome beds by the way!  wed morning rolls around, and by about 11am everyone is outside with a massive cup of coffee and sunglasses. one of the locals had swung by and mentioned there was a chance of rain for the afternoon track session. that would be severely fucked if it did rain, and we would prob not even bother picking up the car again. the 211 is apparently notorious for aquaplaning and turning 180deg without blinking. not good. so we spent the day praying to dear god that the sun would keep shining, or at the very least that the rain would stay inside the clouds that had started to brew. we went and bought a bunch of ring merchandise (being the well seasoned professionals that we now were, of course) and visited the new McEleventyBillion dollar renovation to the GP circuit facilities where we had a spank over a few radicals, a couple of carbon r8s, and this totally sex gulf optik gt40 ..... oh baby anyway, rain did hold off (just) and we went and pick up our refueled, mechanically cleared 211 for another thrashing. i swear there's something liberating about driving a hire car to within an inch of its life....  a few bits of exotica turned up to the track this afternoon as well. not that any of them truly seemed to be tracked with any meaning, but it was nice to see that the owners were at least marginally interested in getting them onto the course. the Exige and the vx220s are the boys who we were staying with, the rest, fark knows, but they were cool...  and so, a few spots of rain to test out the semis on the 211, and freak the fuck out of a few of us with the odd tank slapper, wed afternoon saw us knock over 8 more laps in 2 hours, with 3 of us sharing the driving, as well as hoping rides in the Exige and the turbo'd vx220 (and vise versa) my best time was the very last lap of the session, and knocked out an 8.58 or 8.59 depending on how you want to measure it. don't really care as its sub 9min, and for a 190hp NA 211 I'm fucking stoked! another 10 laps and i think there'd be another 20-30secs, but ill not piss into that wind till i get back there and actually have something to talk about! the 211 is an excellent little car, perhaps a little underpowered for the handling capabilities it has, it sticks like a beer turd to a blanket and is a very safe car to take on the ring as a first timer due to its firm-footedness and very predictable handling. not to make it sound boring far from it (190ps and 800kg) just saying it 'could' take a lot more power because it handles SO damn well. still, i should be happy we didn't find a wall with it, but it does leave a taste in your mouth like, hmmm I wonder what the SC version would be like. Id be stupid if i said i wanted to take some spastically powered supercar around there right now, fuck no, id die. but I'm keen as shit to progress through some faster more powerful vehicles and see what we can make of them. unfortunately doing that with the rental guys starts to get prohibitively expensive. we'll see how that goes.  On
that note. Ring Projekt is where we scored the 211 from. they're a little
complicated to explain in terms of their business structure (they're not
'really' a car rental place, they're a workshop in Adenau that manages a few
cars for customers of theirs on a consignment basis), but long story short, ken
and the car he manages are great. their rates are around the cheapest you'll
find (for the 211 we paid $69 per lap inc fuel, tyres, insurance, NOT including
insurance on the 211 itself, but you can buy liability cover for the 211 as
extra) which all things considered isn't bad.  maybe
we could rent this thing?? new merc slc... had a fucked up door, duct tape
with corner weights, carbon discs and a bunch of dead bugs stuck to the front
grill. the way it SHOULD be for one of these things. farken NICE anyway, after the session ended, we dropped the lotus back to ken, and headed out to pistenklaus... the restaurant owned by Sabine Schmitz' family (aka the chick in the transit van off top gear). very cool restaurant with loads of memorabilia and historic photos stuck everywhere. but all that aside, they had the best fucking steaks I've had in Germany yet served raw on a glowing hot lump of stone. 10/10 to the Schmitz family! danke!  at least for today's session half of the timing gear was working, along with the video (will update youtube link in a sec) so that evening we had 4 laptops running downloading data and vids, and spent another 2-3hrs sinking piss and getting argy-bargy about what lines people were taking etc.  anyways, we finally had to leave the ring and get towards a wedding some 700km away. i still needed to pickup a pair of trousers, plus had some paperwork to do before the sat, so Thursday we left the ring nice and early, got home, and got stuck into wedding shit... ...so skipping that boring, 2 days after the wedding i had been promising the guys that we would take my go-kart out to a demilitarised airfield near my house. check out...54.626819,9.346776 so, weather was good, and we went out to do some speed runs kart is a Swiss Corse 125cc 2st 6sp (superkart type thing) putting out around 42hp and 80kg (no driver) basically we had the place to ourselves, and cut some skids around the taxi ways in front of the old blast proof hangers and bunkers, before heading out onto the runway proper for a thrashing. i keep the 2st oil mix up on this occasion as I'm not sure what 13k rom for long runs is like on these engines. but either way... i think we knocked over 140kmh (prob a hair more) but again data logger was malfunctioning... POS here's an epic panorama Greg took from off the
top of one of the hangers/bunkers |
