Sunday

There was a slight delay when we had to scrape the ice of the windows: it had been a rather cold night!

It's amazing how quickly you get used to a coupe heater that defrosts your windows for you and warms up the car before you leave the house. Here's a before/during/after set of pics, and a pic of the improvised but sturdy under-dash mounting.

Again the track had just opened when we got there, and we went straight out for two laps to get a feel for the conditions. Matt was leading the first lap, and we swapped places for the second lap.

A 996 4S was closing fast on the way to the Karussell. I tagged along for a bit, but couldn't match the pace.

The track and the surrounding countryside looked very picturesque in the early morning light.

In the carpark Matt tried to find a place to put his second waterbottle.

At 9am it was still quite chilly. Chilly enough that some people kept their helmets on.

I also spotted an early candidate for the "I need two spaces" parking award.

A 7-series pulled up to show off its 22" rims. The rims made the brake discs look a bit puny in comparison.

An early sighting of the Ringhaus Golf (which Ben was supposed to be driving) caused some disbelief, as Ben doesn't do mornings, but we saw that someone else was driving it.

Tom then kindly took me round in his new 3-series. Seems like all non-CSL 3-series are available in 9 different colours, as long as it's black :) At the beginning of the lap something special happened: we were held up by Sabine in the Ringtaxi. Because she was chatting with a marshall in the middle of the road, but hey, not that many people can truthfully say they were held up by Sabine.

The sun was starting to shine in earnest now, and traffic was picking up a bit. Mind you, only a bit. Most of the time there was nobody around.

In the carpark I gossipped a bit with Christer, who'd had a good time teasing Niek about his Adenauer Forst crash. He'd already come up with several candidate nicknames (Nieknames?). Based on his alleged ambitions to become a drift king, several alternatives were proposed, including drift jester, drift courtier, drift prince, and drift queen. Drift queen seemed to be the most popular :-)

Somewhat related to this topic, last night's dinner party had tried to calculate the safeness of drivers by dividing their nummer of accidents by the number of laps driven. In this calculation Niek managed to forget about at least one incident: running into and knocking over a stationary biker in the carpark...

Anyway, suffice to say that some piss was taken. Which continued when Soren finally showed up, enabling an in-depth scientifical analysis of yesterday's performance at the F1-track. This could basically be summed up as: Soren and Lasse flatspotted some new tyres, and Christer was fastest by a long way, even though videotaped evidence didn't bear this out. Not to mention that the tape ran out before the really quick lap were done. Naturally.

Lucky was there too (pity I missed him), but we've all lost count of the number in his "Lucky times X" designation. From what I heard the "X" was incremented a few times this weekend, thanks to trusting Bren when it came to the amount of fuel left in a certain gastank, and for being so sensible to refuse the offer to borrow a boik.

I'd spotted a group of old cars earlier in the weekend that belonged to a stag party. One of their number, in a Rover V8, was parked near the snackbar. I wandered over to have a look and a chat. The Rover had been bought for 350 quid. Add a CB radio, some tie wraps and an orange hose, and of course some fitting stickers, and you have the perfect stag machine.

Then Tony arrived on his German boik (with an Austrian engine), which had some nifty features such as a programmable shift light, and a built-in lap timer with 40-lap memory. A bit like my watch, really. I did wonder why he'd stuck all those carbonfiber pieces to his boik, but he claims that's how the boik leaves the factory.

He then proceeded to set a record for the fastest out-and-back again, as they'd closed the track for boiks only seconds after he'd started up and pulled away.

With my morning shower a bit overdue I headed back to the B&B. On the way I spotted Niek's car, and couldn't resist taking an "after" picture. At least Niek has the excuse that he was provoked by Ben to drive beyond his capabilities.

Late morning and most of the afternoon was spent taking loads of pictures. When I arrived at Brünnchen, the carpark was still quiet. Expecting a large crowd later in the day I elected to park across the road in the empty overflow carpark.

I'd only been at Brünnchen for a few minutes when Jochen showed up. If memory serves I'd never taken pictures at this exact spot before, but it seemed to work pretty well. I couldn't resist playing with Steve's picture a bit. At first I thought the silver car on the black & white background lacked a bit of punch, but it's starting to grow on me :)

Some more pics:

At the first closure I moved up the hill.

Only moments before Jochen shot the Easter bunny, I went round the corner. I was just in time to get off some shots at the same incredibly lucky rabbit.

Steve was doing a fair number of laps today :)

A bit further down the road I found another good spot. One of the first cars to come through was the Integra Type-R that had gone off at Hatzenbach in front of us.

The weather was nice, so I hiked a bit furter yet again.

From there I went downhill: Steilstrecke. I'd done this little descent before, but that time my camerabag was a bit lighter (not to mention that I was a bit lighter then too), and Soren and I could provide each other with moral support. This time I was on my own.

At the bottom I took a lunchbreak to catch my breath, and then continued the serious business of snapping piccies. Sabine was nice enough to put the Ringtaxi sideways the lap after she'd spotted me.

Going up Steilstrecke took a bit longer than going down, but I preferred that to the long way round. I realised that I hadn't done many paxlaps this weekend and intended to rectify that by hanging around the carpark for a bit. My cunning plan worked as intended: Steve was doing 4-up runs in the CSL. For the final lap of the day the passengers were two female boikers and yours truly. The girls complained that they were being flung from side to side on the back seat. Me thinks that Steve needs to consider doing 5-up runs next time. A third person in the back should solve this annoying sliding problem.

Other than that the girls in the back seemed to be enjoying themselves.

The end of playtime was approaching, and there wasn't all that much traffic around. Coming out of Bergwerk we spotted an Elise ahead of us: Bob. The fact that he was accelerating at a similar pace as the CSL was proof enough that it was indeed Bob with his turbocharged missile and not a regular Elise.

Coming out of Galgenkopf a Golf insisted that we overtake him on the wrong side, but Steve was more insistent that we didn't. In the end he got the message. The ladies in the back were still smiling, and quite rightly so: a lap in a properly driven CSL is always a treat.

Back in the carpark a little group shot was taken to immortalise the experience.

At the Ring you never know what you might encounter next: this time it was Ed making an entrance in a Mustang. He'd been offered a chance to take it out for a lap to show the owner what the track was like.

The Mustang was a bit blinged-up. So, if these things offend you, close your eyes and scroll down a bit.

We'll start off with a comparison between the grey, functional and rather full engine bay of Steve's CSL on one side, and the colourful and messy engine bay of the Mustang on the other side.

Now, given the small size of these pics you might have missed an important detail: the Mustang engine bay contained a proper bling gauge. It was currently reading slightly below 30 blings, but the owner had plans to add more bling to get the reading up.

So much bling was too much for Dave to handle: he closed his eyes to the horror. No wonder: if you're used to an Elise, a blinged up Mustang can be a bit of a shocking sight.

As with most bling cars, there were several tasteful additions. The "objects in mirror are losing" text was one of them. As you can see in the picture, not everybody agreed with that. You see, another reason for objects to be in your mirror is that they're faster and that you're holding them up. And as Jeremy Clarkson established, a lonesome cowboy on a true single-horsepower mustang (i.e. a horse) is faster round a track than a Mustang, a different text might be more appropriate.

This particular Mustang aimed to outrun the horse by adding some nitrous oxide injection. Of course nitrous oxide doesn't come in grey bottles; it comes in an interesting shade of purple. They only forgot to add some glitter to it. That would really have finished it all off.

The interior was also treated to the fast and furious treatment: this ranged from big red "your engine is about to blow up" lights...

...to special low-friction chrome pedals...

...and a bit of extra weight in the back to improve the balance of the car. The speakers are mounted horizontally to provide extra downforce.

The result of the extra downforce was that most of the rubber Ed wore off during the lap on the Ring was due to rubbing the rear tyres (oops, make that "tires") on the bodywork. Maybe they should reverse the polarity of the speakers? ;-)

This particular Mustang had some female touches. We've already seen the purple everywhere, and the shiny bits, but here's a new addition: in case the mirrors on the sun visors aren't enough there's a mirror fixed to the trunk (oops, make that "boot") lid.

And should you be daft enough to fall into the trunk and manage to slam it shut behind you, there's a flimsy piece of cheap plastic that might get you out again.

To slow all this bling down you need some serious brakes. In this case ceramic brakes were chosen. At least that's what the sticker said. According to Ed the brakes didn't last very long. Not even half a lap...

A final (well, final, there must have been more, but I kind of lost interest. Sorry.) bit of bling was an antenna with a shiny ball on its tip. Ford really went to town there, fitting the antenna base just a bit skewed. They did use the biggest one still available.

Before we left Bob was kind enough to pose next to the V8, as he was wearing an appropriate sweater. Maybe some of the better aspects of British engineering will rub off?

The car did attract a decent amount of attention. Certainly more than your average GT3RS or GT2. Kudos to the guy to bring such a car to the Nordschleife, and for letting Ed drive it ;-) Meanwhile Robin was ignoring the bling (at least partially) and started chatting to the only female in sight :-)

For a final bit of contrast: a properly fast car. Might not have as many ponies as the Mustang, but very capable in going round bends.

As we were all feeling lucky today (and because Ross was nowhere to be seen) we were going to give the Lindenhof another chance to get our food on the table before midnight. On the way there we ran into the Swedish contingent, who'd had a lot of cartrouble this weekend. I was already beginning to wonder why I hadn't seen them much on the track. At least Thorsten had his headlight fixed :)

Now, before we get started on the evening's entertainment, here's a reminder of how normal most of the diners are during the daytime. Please keep that in mind when reading any further. (Pictures courtesy of Jocke.)

During the pre-dinner gadgetfest Jocke showed off a really neat external harddrive. It was small, USB-powered and had a blue light on it. In a word: perfect.

Hooking it up to my laptop revealed a naming scheme similar to my own. It's all a matter of definitions. Of course Tony couldn't resist that taking a picture of a computer screen was a bit backwards: the Print Screen key had been on computer keyboards for a long time now.

Whether it was Jocke's naming scheme or something else (plain hunger maybe?), there were some weird things going on at our table... Note Phil in the background, ready to Give It Some!

Tony was shoing off yet another of his branded German boik shirts. It certainly beat what he had on underneath for understated style.

Ed joined us for dinner. (If the constant changing of perspective throws you off: that's because Matt and Jocke kindly supplied me with pics to provide you with a more complete overview of the evening's festivies.)

Claire was very popular. This is Ed's hand:

The staff managed to keep up with the drinking rate. Well, almost.

This time my pictures attracted more attention. At least two out of these three people seemed interested :-)

Tony: "I always keep my beer between me and reality."

I on the other hand keep my laptop between me and reality.

Things went downhill fast after that...

...with Tony shoing off his Crayola Factory T-shirt (yup, that's colourful blob you could see peaking out from underneath his Aprilia shirt).

Phil 'give it some' was checking the nose of his beer. Or beering his nose. Or whatever :-)

With the food on the table new opportunities to have fun arose. Some people like veggies (like Tony), while others don't (Matt). Naturally Matt was assaulted by a killer lettuce leaf, almost disintegrating his glasses.

As usual, the people who sit in the least accessible position need to get rid of their beer first. Jocke had a good solution for that by walking over me.

Meanwhile the veggie war flared up once more.

Matt was in an excellent position to capture the interaction between Claire and Tony.

This time I'd opted for putting my dinner plate on the table directly, as opposed to putting it on my laptop. The laptop was parked in a corner of the bench Jocke was sitting on. Good thing Jocke isn't all that heavy.

The slideshow resumed after dinner (only 800-something pictures this time), this time with a partially new audience.

Meanwhile Matt showed how to tell people that they are a dickhead in sign language.

He also knows how to sign "right dickhead".

After all this hard work it was time for a well-deserved drink.

Oh, and did I mention that things were going downhill? I'll let these pics speak for themselves.

Ed was recounting his ice racing experiences in Sweden. Highlights (apart from the weird safety rules that allow ancient leather caps as helmets) are not seeing anything (that's what happens when you race in the dark), going quite fast (especially if you consider that you don't know the track and it's dark), tapping other competitors, and having a ball in general. Of course the story was much longer and more entertaining than this summary. Maybe I should have stuck with Ed's own summary: "Swedes are sick people" :-)

At the other side of the table people still tried to hind behind beers with varying measures of success.

After paying the bill Matt and I had a quick chat with M3John (with a Ferrari cap on; higly confusing) who'd rented a track-prepped 3-series for this weekend. His immaculate M3 should make an appearance on the Norschleife soon.

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