Friday

Shortly after I got back the track closed for a long time because of an accident. The time was spent productively by adding a new-style Ringers logo to the rear side window of the 964 (courtesy of TrRRish and Tom). There was also ample opportunity to look at Tom's new M3, which was having some minor problems with sumps, baffles, and oil. Or something :)

Sir B. provided me with directions to a good spot to take pictures: the outside of Schwalbenschwanz. It's a bit of a climb but well worth it. While there I took pictures of several more or less familiar cars and faces. This time I even managed to spot a boik: Jocke. Even though he didn't have his pig's ears on and despite him keeping his front wheel on the tarmac (very uncharacteristic, that) ;-)

At around 1300 I walked back to my car and spotted Laurens' Peugeot parked at the entrance to my photo location. It turned out that Esther and he had spotted me and had decided to pay me a visit. Somehow we managed to miss each other though.

By this time it was time to go to the pre-organised Ringers Porsche photoshoot, where I was supposed to take pictures of the enormously large contingent of Ringers' Porsches. The bright idea of the instigator (who shall remain anonymous) was to assemble in the Brünnchen car park. There's only two problems with that: this Friday, it was full. The other problem is that at that time of day the sun is in the wrong place. Anyway, I parked on the opposite side of the road but couldn't find any other Ringers. Of course no-one was answering my calls on the Ringers PMR frequency (7-30), but while hiking to the other Brünnchen car park I met TrRRish. Shortly after that Keith called, saying that he was parked close to my car. When we met up he told me that Ben had said he couldn't make it. We therefore decided to go ahead with the Official Ringers Porsche Photoshoot.

To get a better picture, we decided to move all the cars (ahem, both of them) down a little lane. Which was a good idea, except that I managed to get stuck. Fortunately a friendly German lady in a little green 4x4 came along and towed me out with the help of Keith's tow hook and my own towing cable. I'm sure that it was very entertaining to watch for the people hanging around the carpark. Photo by TrRRish.

Back in the carpark things were getting really busy: Lars K. did a Niek on the car behind him (i.e. running into it at low speed), an Ultima kept going round the car park, a GT2 in the ugliest colour I've ever seen managed to park in everyone's way on three consecutive occasions, and the track closed again for a long time. This time a car had crashed at the compression of Fuchsröhre.

In the meantime it was time to catch up on the latest news. It turned out that Ralf Kelleners had managed to get Niek's car banned from the track for the rest of the day by going a bit faster past a yellow flag than the marshall liked. It must be said however that the marshalls sometimes make it a bit difficult to respond quickly to a yellow flag. For example, a marshall was waving a yellow flag on the INSIDE of the approach to Eschbach. As soon as I spotted him I hit the brakes hard, feeling the ABS kick in once or twice. Still he wasn't pleased with the way I slowed down, which was kind of difficult to understand, as I couldn't brake any harder. Now, if he'd decided to stand on the other side of the track, approaching traffic would have been able to spot him from a much longer way off.

As the end of the day (and dinner and beers) was nearing, the volume of traffic was starting to come down a bit. I managed to snag Euan in the queue before the barrier and hopped into his passenger seat. He seems to have gotten the hang of the 968 quite well very quickly. BTG's were about 8.50 (after compensating for the diversion at T-13). After two laps he had to go pick up Sir B. I decided to round up the day with a not-too-fast lap. I've no clue how fast or slow it really was, thanks to the ban on video recording :(

The slightly early end of the day gave me time to pop over to Sliders, change and freshen up a bit, and still make it to the Fuchsröhre in time for the first Ringers dinner. Despite having a seat without associated table space, I enjoyed a nice steak. Søren had finally gotten his new Bilstein PSS9 coil-over suspension, but hadn't had time yet to try it out on the Ring. Sir B. was hatching another Ringers Discount Deal: details to appear when the Time Is Right (tm).

An anonymous Ringer showed a recording of what happens when you miss a shift, but as videoing isn't allowed we didn't see anything, Jeppe didn't bring his projector into the Fuchsröhre, and there was no big cheer and a round of applause at what we didn't see ;-) Oh, we didn't see it twice AND in slow-motion, naturally :-)

Mark and Claire (from the Beautiful Black Boxter-S) showed up a little too late to not see the anonymous Ringer's footage (from last year, naturally). They could admire the improvised projection screen (a white bedsheet) though :)

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