Sunday

Some people had come prepared for the extreme conditions.

According to some Brits the track was very slippery. Slippery enough that they'd banged up their rental a bit.

Within minutes of my arrival at the track the distinctive sound of a CSL announced the arrival of Thorleif. This quickly led to a bunch of passenger laps on a rather damp and very slippery Nordschleife. The air was still very moist, bordering on foggy.

The new surface at Hocheichen was an improvement in griplevels, but you still had to be careful there in the cold and wet conditions.

This didn't mean that we didn't overtake anybody. On the contrary: we overtook quite a few cars, and some of those were definitely not hanging around.

The end of the season was near: in many places there were lots of leaves on the track. Mostly off-line, but still.

On the way to Kesselchen we overtook a Dutch BMW 5-series (that could use some M030 anti-rollbars) and a stripped Golf-3. A bunch of cars had parked in front of the gate of Steilstrecken, for some reason. It's not the first time that I spotted somebody there, but I'd never seen 4 cars parked in that spot at the same time.

While going up Kesselchen we'd already seen an E36 further up ahead. Despite being in an M3 CSL, we were only slowly catching him. By the time we entered the Karussell, the E36 could be seen going the other way, about the exit the corner.

It took some committed driving to close the gap, but by the time we came to the big jump at Pflanzgarten-III we were on his tail.

Including traffic we'd just done a 9.20-something lap on a cold and (sometimes very) damp track. Pretty impressive.

Thanks to Ed I know that I have better than a 12-lap stomach, so I didn't have any issues with going straight out for another lap.

Conditions hadn't improved much, but with more knowledge of where there was (and where there wasn't) a decent amount of grip available, Thorleif stepped up the pace a bit.

Despite the cold, several spectators were still watching the cars go by at Adenauer Forst.

From the general absence of cars (let alone boiks) from the track I deduced that most people (the sensible ones) were either at home (where it's warm and cozy) or in the carpark, waiting for better track conditions. We did see a UK Elise going down to Wehrseifen, a car parked at the exit of Ex-Mühle (for a picnic maybe), and a Dutch Megane, but that was about it.

The approach to the Karussell was interesting: halfway up the hill the rear tyres broke traction for a second. A dry line was slowly starting to appear, but it was still quite slippery.

With the car running strong, fuel in the tank, and not much traffic on the track, what do you do? Indeed, you go out for more laps. The first car we saw was Karl in his Bastardwagen. He'd just gone through Flugplatz rather quickly, but had to move over for the CSL on the fast section to Schwedenkreuz. It was interesting to see that he wasn't far behind when we started braking for Aremberg.

Apart from a VW estate going through the slippery compression in Fuchsröhre while braking (luckily nothing untoward happened), the rest of the lap was pretty much uneventful.

My recollection of the bit from Schwalbenschwanz to pulling off at Döttinger Höhe is a bit hazy, as I was distracted. In a repeat of yesterday's question, Thorleif asked me if I wanted to try the CSL again. On the Nordschleife. Things like "treacherous conditions", "crash", "armco", "insurance" went through my head, along with "woohoo!" and "of course, twist my arm!". The sensible thing to do was of course to say "Thank you very much for your extremely kind offer, but the track is very slippery, and I don't want to risk bending your beautiful car". Instead I said "yes".

This resulted in some interesting looks from Sir B. that I interpreted to mean "you're insane to go out in somebody else's CSL in these conditions". But I figured that if I could take my 964 around in similar conditions, I would be able to bring back the CSL in one piece while still being able to enjoy the car.

And I did enjoy the car. Obviously I took it easier than on the GP-Strecke the day before, but the CSL was again a joy to drive. Not that I'd expected anything else, but the Nordschleife is a different animal than the GP-Strecke, so you never know.

Well, driving the car out on the Nordschleife was just as good as on the GP-Strecke, if not better. It's a good thing that I have a bit of experience driving on a wet Nordschleife though. The conditions were very variable, and the surface didn't provide all that much grip in most locations. The DSC seemed very nice: it let the car get out of shape quite a bit before it would do something about it. In fact, I don't recall it triggering at all, despite going a bit sideways near the end of Hocheichen and while exiting Hohe Acht.

Of course I didn't really push it, but you could still easily see the potential of the car. It accelerates like a bat out of hell and has excellent feedback through the steering. In fact, the whole car seems intent on getting messages through to you. I love the SMG gearbox: it's a faster-shifting equivalent of my now dearly-departed Alfa 156 Selespeed box.

OK, time for some soapbox action: I don't get all this SMG/Selespeed/...-bashing. Car magazines and TV shows (mr. Clarkson in particular) always seem to think that

• these boxes don't shift smoothly
• these boxes do unexpected things
• these boxes shift slowly

• if you drive them right, these boxes can shift smoothly. One of the benefits of upshifting is that you can do the same speed with less throttle. Therefore, if you do not adjust the position of the gas pedal while shifting, you get a rough shift. What did you expect? The engine revs don't match the revs of the bit of the tranny that's connected to the driven wheels, because you just shifted gear. With a bit of practice in taking back just a bit of throttle mid-shift, you'll find that you can shift very smoothly without operating the clutch yourself.
• these boxes don't do unexpected things. If you think they do unexpected things, you need to do two things. Three actually.
  1. Read the f*cking manual, think about what it says, and act on it. I.e., most car journos were complaining that the Selespeed shifted dog-slow. If they'd bothered to RTFM, they'd know that the Selespeed has two shifting modes: the leisurely slow-shifting mode, and the sporty fast-shifting mode. The fast-shifting mode is only used iff revs are above 5000rpm (IIRC; it's been a few years) AND throttle position is >80%. And I'd love to see a car journo do a manual 2rd to 3rd upshift as fast and as precise and as consistenyl quick as the Selespeed box did it in sports mode...
  2. Put it in manual mode. It's a manual box, for crying out loud! If you want an auto, buy an auto. But even then, point (1) mentioned above applies. Before carkits were mandatory, I used the auto mode when answering phone calls on my mobile. Worked pretty well, but you do need to get a feel for how the gearbox thinks. And believe it or not, the manual can give you a few hints.
  3. If you've done (1) and (2), read the manual again, and think about what you've just read.
• these boxes don't shift slowly; it only feels slow because after pressing the shift button or flipping the lever, there's nothing for you to do but wait until the box completes the shift. In a manual car you're busy with the clutch and messing around with the gear lever. Believe it or not, that takes time. So, time your own shifting (starting from the moment you begin pushing the clutch!), and compare the results. I did, and I was surprised. Yes, in leisurely-shifting mode the Selespeed was slower. But hey, it might not feel spectacularly fast, but in sports mode it was just as quick as I was, if not faster. Which might say more about me than about the Selespeed, of course ;)

After all this excitement we stopped by Thorleif's hotel to discuss our little winter project. After that it was straight back to the track: Thorleif's little boy wanted a ride too. Since I've been slacking and a bit more time than usual has gone by before I sat down and wrote this trip report, I haven't got a clue what Ross was saying. It must have been funny though, or I wouldn't have taken the picture.

This late in the year the trees and shrubbery around the track had all kinds of different but very pleasing colours. That's the good thing of being a passenger: you have the time to notice these things. While I was admiring the scenery, Thorleif was busy overtaking a GT3.

An Audi estate in an electrifying yellow paintjob and an Audi TT in the standard exquisitely boring grey were the next cars to be overtaken.

At Adenauer Forst we spotted an RX8 (also yellow) and a GT2 (also grey). Both were moving at serious pace, as it took us quite a while to overtake them. Actually, Thorleif did the overtaking, while I was admiring the view of the Nürburg castle off to the right.

The outside of the Karussell and the climb to Hohe Acht still wasn't completely snow-free, despite the autumn sun.

The lap ended by overtaking another GT3, this time a red one.

The little boy in the back seat definitely wanted more of this fun, so we went straight out for another lap. A dry line was developing, something we used to catch up to a UK Alfa 75 that was in need of some magic anti-roll bars.

A bit further in the lap we saw the stripped Golf again. He was doing lots of laps too.

Up Kesselchen we had another look at an improvised tyre barrier, and overtook some more cars.

One section that I myself don't feel very confident is Wippermann, and Thorleif showed me his line there. Immediately after that we got stuck behind a UK Fiat Marea estate (with a towing hook; he could have been Dutch) that didn't really look in his mirrors much.

After a bit more scenery-admiring it was time to thank Thorleif for letting me loose behind the wheel of his CSL again and for all the entertaining passenger laps.

To finish the day I did two more laps in the Squealmobile. After an afternoon of CSL-fun, the Squealmobile was a bit of a let-down. After a few corners I got semi-used again to the lack of power, the understeer and the bodyroll, and enjoyed the remaining 1.5 laps before going home.

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