Monday

On the second lap I followed Kurt in his rented BMW 1-er for a bit, which was good fun. Halfway through the GP-Strecke I decided to feed in a little more throttle though, and pulled away from the under-engined 1-series.

After two laps I was ready to be driven around for a change: for some reason I'd only done the one passenger lap with Jochen so far. First I wandered around the parking area a bit, surprised at how empty it still was. Having parked next to two BMWs, I again noticed how small the 964 really is.

Around the corner John Felstead was having a good look under the bonnet of a 550bhp Scooby that was suffering from a small coolant leak. Ed and I were to go out with Matt in his 1-er, but Matt got more than a little distracted by the Scooby. Better bring your Scoobynet T-shirt again next time, Matt! ;)

Finally Matt managed to tear himself away from the lures of Scooby-power and fired up the 1-series. Kurt was polite enough to wait for us after cones. To even things out he too was carrying two passengers. Jochen joined the convoy just for fun.

Apart from Jochen (who didn't have any passengers on board) it was a fair "race": Kurt's car was fully loaded (with options, not with beer) but had winter tyres, and Matt's car was rather sparsely adorned with gadgets, but had summer tyres.Jules was out there too, stretching the legs of The Noise.

For most of the lap, the two BMWs stayed close together. Looking backwards at Kurt unsettled my stomach a bit though, but not enough to require Ed's expertise in cleaning rear seats.

Up Kesselchen Jochen couldn't bear it anymore, and sprinted past the two little BMWs to lead the convoy for a little while. Approaching Hohe Acht he lifted off and let the BMWs overtake him again.

There was an interesting moment approaching Eschbach, as it seemed that Kurt had caught up to us very rapidly. Another look showed that it wasn't Kurt who'd found a bottle of nitro, but an M3 CSL of the same colour as Kurt's 1-er. Best move over, then :)

Back in the parking area some fresh air quickly settled my stomach. Which was a good thing, as I managed to weasel my way into Jules's passenger seat. Gary was following us in his Manthey-prepared GT3 to see how Jules's rear end behaved.

I don't know how it looked from behind, but Jules is certainly not afraid to slide the car a bit. The Noise wasn't as loud as I was led to expect. It did sound very nice: your regular throaty flat six roar but a bit louder. Nothing like the 3.6 engine of Tobias for example, which is much louder. Anyway, this lap in the Noise was definitely a good justification for staying another night.

When we got back the track was closed. Stelvio was the first who could tell us something about what had happened: a Dutch 911 had crashed on the approach to Miss-Hit-Miss. Ben was at the scene helping out, but it was reportedly a heavy crash. The length of the closure was consistent with the severity of the situation. It took a long time before I received a text message from Ben to let us know that the helicopter was about to depart, and that he expected the track to re-open in 30 minutes.

Ed was at the scene too. First reports of the condition of the driver were favourable: even though the initial impression had been very worrisome, by the time the helicopter lifted off he was conscious again, able to give his wife's phone number, and asking for pictures of the crash.

Meanwhile, in the still mostly empty carpark I spotted a stylish license plate on a Brit M3.

After duly admiring M3 John's pristine M3 and discussing some of the minor improvements (such as a KW coil-over suspension, uprated brakes, and a DTM-spec engine that revved all the way up to 9500rpm), I had the good fortune of going for some passenger laps with John. The car was as immaculate on the inside as it was on the outside. The engine sounds were something else: a bit like being in an Integra Type-R, but beefier. Fortunately the track was reasonably quiet, and taking the T-13 diversion avoided a lot of the traffic that had left the gates ahead of us at the end of the closure. The acceleration up Ex-Mühle and Kesselchen was very impressive. The overall feeling came quite close to that of a 964RS, though the RS still has the edge in the braking department.

Some extra functionality had been added to the interior in the shape of a shift warning light. Very useful if your engine is capable of doing 9500rpm, and your rev counter stops at 8000rpm. Other non-standard instruments were a wide-band oxygen sensor to tell if the engine was running rich or lean, and a multi-function display for fuel pressure, oil pressure and the like. In contrast to some other mods you see, these had been done in such a way as to minimise the impact on the original interior. For instance, the multi-function display with 4 digital readouts fit neatly into one of the center vents in the dashboard.

On the second lap we encountered Stelvio in Wehrseifen. Given the amount of lean I sincerely doubt his stories of how he is so slow. Then again, I know next to nothing about boiks.

At the end of the second lap John checked the amount of fuel left, and decided that we could do one more lap before filling up. Of course I was happy to go out for another lap, even though the seat was starting to feel a little narrow.

After returning from the Ed Tankstelle, I levered myself out of the seat, admired the M3 once more, and then took Jocke out for a pax lap in the 964. Well, that was the idea, anyway, as Jocke was nowhere to be found. Instead I ran into Ben, who didn't hesitate to fill the void in my passenger seat. Thanks to what I later discovered was unequal tyre pressures in the left and right rear tyres, the lap was a bit more slidey than usual. At the time I thought it was due to the condition of the rear tyres. Anyway, the GP-Strecke offers plenty of room to go a bit sideways now and again, so it wasn't that big a deal. On the Nordschleife I dialed it back a bit, as I didn't want to force any more hospital food on Ben. I was under the impression that he'd had enough cheese already. Even though I went a little slower than usual, Eschbach was interesting in that the rear end decided to slide a bit. Not that that's very unusual, the rear end tends to move around a bit anyway when you're going reasonably quick. From the corner of my eye I saw Ben's hands fly towards things to get hold of, and I could almost hear him thinking "Not again!" :-) I guess such a slide feels a bit more spectacular from the passenger seat than from behind the steering wheel.

Upon returning I dropped off Ben, did a cooling down run, and went through the parking lot once more to see if I could spot Jocke. This time I did, and shortly afterwards we were on our way. Jocke was fiddling with his GPS-receiver a bit, but I didn't take much note of it. This was the last lap of the weekend, and I wanted it to be more towards the relaxing end of the scale than towards the white-knuckle end. Consequently I skipped the GP-Strecke, short-shifted a lot, followed an Audi S3 for a bit (until he pointedly pulled over, indicating right), and cruised up Kesselchen in 5th gear. A yellow flag situation in the Brünnchen area slowed us down quite a bit too, so I was quite surprised when Jocke told me we'd just gone round in 9.03 BTG.

The trip home went a lot smoother than the trip from home to Nürburg, except for hitting a stupid bird when I was nearly home. The bird was walking across the road, and braking wouldn't have done much good. Now, if I was a bird I wouldn't walk across a road, I'd fly. Then again, this particular bird proved it wasn't very good at flying... There was just enough space in front of the crossing bird to get by without hitting anything. Until the damn bird decided it needed to practice its flying skills, and managed to end up exactly in my path. The resulting cloud of feathers was rather impressive, but I was less impressed by the fact that a little plastic cover between the turn indicator and the fog light had come loose. At least it didn't crack my window or put a dent in the car. A bit of hosing down and replacing the plastic cover should restore the 964 to its normal good looks.

Summary

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