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Gratuliere ist einer tolles leistung

Original von sechzehnvau
Danke an Erik...

Da nich für, Oli. Es war mir ein Vergnügen an Deiner Seite zu schrauben :]

Original von sechzehnvau
Jooooob... wo warst Du plötzlich??

Oli

Gratuliere mit dem Resultat, wir entdeckten leider waehrend der erste rote Flagge das Oel aus den Dichtung zwischen Getriebe und Motor kam. Es war zu risikovoll um weiter zu machen. Kein Geld ins Moment fuer ein Neues

Hier is die ganze Geschichte fuer wems interessiert. Ist auf Englisch fuer Ringers forum und referiert unter anderem an ein unsere Beste Freunden Joerund, ein unheimlich talentierte motorradrenner, der dieses Wochenende vor 4 Jahren auf dem Ring verstorben ist, so es war ein etwas surreales Wochenende fuer uns.

Ich habe leider jetzt keine Zeit das alles nochmal an zu passen und zu uebersetzen auf Deutsch. Hoffe es macht doch ein bischen Spass:

Racing is a dangerous activity. Arno Klasen discovered this again whilst overtaking a 964 RS at Mutkurve that was not watching his mirrors enough, resulting in both that car and Klasen's Manthey 24h winning Porsche being write-offs or something close to it.

I myself discovered this whilst eating Chinese food on a rickety chair in Adenau (pictures surely to follow). Luckily both Arno and I escaped unscathed

Unfortunately this almost sums up my VLN race this weekend, after starting out so nicely on Friday. I arrived early on Friday afternoon to do Friday practice and had my 3 year old nephew Jack in tow to start indoctrinating him as early as possible. Wanting to buy him a Mercedes jacket in the Museum shop, he unfortunately saw a huge amount of bright red clothing from some other car brand and I lost yet someone else to the dark side, although I gained a very happy toddler in Ferrari team gear for the rest of the weekend.

Friday practice started at 16:00 with Euan, my co-driver from Scotland, scheduled to arrive at 16:30. RingRacing had prepared everything already so it felt like a real arrive and drive affair, a nice change from our past with the Audi TT. They had put the pax seat in, but my parents, who had also come out, politely declined a pax lap (murmuring something about my driving style on the way over or something in a similar vein ) and risking my sister's wrath by taking Jack out did not seem smart either, so some other bystanders got lucky/scared. Everything seemed to run fine apart from some intermittent fuel starvation (which we put down to the high ambient temperatures and lack of a catch tank) and I also met some guys from the factory in Stuttgart who run a 2.5-16 themselves and managed to get some useful tips from them. (das seit Ihr, Oli )

Euan's plane was late and since he was accompanied by Ross and they first went by Bren who then called Karl... In any case Joerund was duly remembered, Adenau ran out of booze, Ross decorated the rental Beemer in his own special way and Euan never made it to the track on Friday although he did discover a talent for singing German drinking songs whilst being accompanied on the guitar. Preparing for a solo drive on Saturday I had an early dinner with the family at the Pistenklause and tucked in early.

Walking out the door of Am Tiergarten early on Saturday, there was a neat row of 3 Carrera GT's in blue, black and yellow, flanked by a GT3-RS, even for Nurburg standards quite a sight, with the fuzzy dice in Gary's car topping it all. Nice touch.

Arriving at the track at around 07:00, I was pleasantly surprised to see Euan arriving just a few minutes later without any apparent signs of the night before. The Scots must have a special anti-hangover gene mutated by centuries of drinking whiskey for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I predict a Nobel prize for the first person to isolate this gene (and clone it into a sheep of course ;-))

After the usual driver meeting with cautions to be careful (apparently in the last VLN race for 24h a new record of 512 meters of armco had to be replaced, oops) and the also usual rush to get our plastic bracelets, we went to the pitbox to get ready for timed training. With some drizzle about most teams opted to wait a bit for a dry line to emerge and after about 20 minutes, Euan went out first for two laps and after he came in I got in for my laps. Since the tyres were shod and we wanted to save the new set of slicks for the race we did not expect much from training, but we turned out not to be to far behind the rest of our class even with the engine still experiencing hick-ups, cutting for example our topspeed at Dottinger Hohe by more than 20 km.

A series of about 25 Porsches from 1967 till 1995 were having a two hour race within our race and we managed to keep most of those behind us in timed training. This of course was mainly due to most of them not knowing the track very well and also probably being a bit intimidated by the total number of cars on the track at the same time (more than 170, a nice turn-out after the carnage at 24h). In any case it was a very expensive weekend for them with their cars crashing left and right in training as well as the race, with the Manthey incident being the most obvious.

Like in Touristenfahrten you do not always get the idea that the faster cars are taking the slower ones into account and when during my run down into Fuchsrohre, Alzen passed me at full speed in the compression where I could not lift off with about 5 cm to spare, I felt a bit unnerved myself, so I can imagine what it nust be like to have this happen if you do not know the track yet like a lot of these classic Porsche drivers. Most of the time however I managed to move over and signal in time before the faster cars (Ehh, that's most of them) got up to me and had some good fun getting my training laps in.

At a little after 11:00 the formation started from the pitlane and Euan drove to his position on the starting grid to do the first stint which turned out to be a short one, due to the afore mentioned Manthey accident as well as a Fiesta deciding to self combust. It was smoking as Euan neared and just as he passed it, the engine compartment seemed to explode into flames. Euan said a quick prayer but luckily for all involved it did not go up in flames completely till the driver had pulled over and gotten out. In the end Euan had done the formation lap, one race lap and a second lap full of yellow flags before the race was red flagged the first time.

We decided to fill the car up completely and let Euan start again when the race restarted, so we would only have to do one more stop hopefully and I could bring it over the finish in glory, or so I thought... Euan went out at the restart and after he had not returned after 11 minutes, 12 minutes, 13 minutes we were just about to panic when he came into the pits. It turned out the power cut-outs had become so bad that he could barely manage 60 km/h up Kesselchen, resulting in some scary moments as a driving chicane. When we checked the car we also found that oil was leaking from a connection between gearbox and engine at quite an alarming rate, so the only wise decision was to call it a day, leaving me with yet another race without my actual driving involvement. Although we will not know for sure what's the matter with the car until later this week, Euan and I are quite convinced that as usual, it's all Christers fault

We were somewhat disappointed of course and left the track to get changed for the First Aid Course at Altes Forsthaus, so we missed the second closure, which was caused by one of the Manthey customer cars crashing at what we first were told was also Mutkurve, but later heard from other sources had taken place at Wehrseifen. This meant we all arrived early at Altes Forsthaus and resulted in the sorry sight of the risen-from-the-dead Bren, Ross and Karl all drinking large classes of Coke to help the recovery process. The smell of an order of fries was enough to send Ross out again for some fresh air, but after some delays, because of the race ending so much later, the First Aid Course finally began.

Saturdayevening we had dinner with everybody in Adenau at the local Chinese and with our Canadian intern Primus being of Chinese descent and speaking the language we were very well taken care off. As a matter of fact food was served in such abundance that I managed to crash through the chair mentioned at the beginning (must have been a severe case of casting failure in the plastic, honest ;-)) and with team photographers Jochen and JW present, I am afraid you will be able to take the piss out of me with photographic evidence for some time to come.

After dinner Euan, Jochen and myself drove by a hotel near Hohe Acht that is for sale and indulged in some dreaming before deciding it was probably just a bit too far from the actual TF entrance (or is it? ) before heading on to the PK for some nightcaps. Euan started noticing the combination of Friday nights drinking with Saturday’s 12 different Chinese courses and decided to retire to his room. However he was smart enough to turn off his phone before he went to sleep, so we were unfortunately robbed of some well-deserved fun on his behalf.

Sunday morning I had a short meeting at the TF entrance with Schwedenkreuz Anders and noticed the BMW M Coupe club out in force, before having breakfast with Euan and my family. Afterwards I took a short detour with my parents/the potential investors by the hotel at Hohe Acht and said my goodbyes at RingRacing where I noticed that an E30 M3 that also runs in our class had managed to flip his car in the last lap at the chicane just before T13, literally 200 yards before the finish and completely wrecking it in the process, so I felt a lot better about just having some engine hick-ups. Now the 6 hour race in August will hopefully give me the chance to finally get some actual VLN race laps in the Merc. Until that next instalment,

Kind Regards,

Job van de Laar

Klasse!!

2.3-16

2.5-16

Evo 1

Und Evo 2

Stern von Willich

Oliver

Ganz vorne

Man darf traumen....

Und die Letzte

Job,

danke für die Story und die schönen Bilder.
Ich werde versuchen dieses Jahr einmal an den Ring zu kommen und das ganze mal life anzusehen!
Wer hat den die Termine für dieses Jahr im Kopf?
Danke

Hi Christoph

www.amct20-racing.de

VLN


gruß Björn