VLN - Nurburgring

On Friday I got to do my first ever dry laps of the 'ring. This was a practice session for Saturday's 4 hour VLN race which as well as the the Nordschleife included the short GP circuit making a lap just over 14.5 miles.

The GP circuit os wide and fairly simple, and then it's onto the 'ring which was pretty scary - his wasn't helped by having to take a passenger with me - So I left the traction control on (which on the M3, was working on *every* corner exit:-() - but the first lap went without any drama. I then did 2 laps with my teammate, who has raced at numerous VLN races and a 24 hour at the 'ring in the M3 - He thought I was fast but dangerous :-) But I never felt out of control.......

So Saturday came and it was a wet/cold start - we did 1 lap on wet tyres each, and still managed to qualify to start in the first group (of 3) - there were 184 cars entered!

Luckily, the rain stayed away and the circuit dried, but it was still pretty chilly @ 12 degrees.

Teo did the race start and reeled of his 7 planned laps with a best of 10:29 and a worst of 10:53.

I then took over , but after completing my out lap, the race was red flagged a quarter of the way through my first real lap - someone had crashed heavily at Atoniusbusche where even our road spec M3 was pushing 260kph. Luckily the guy was not too badly hurt, and the race restarted 40 minutes later. This means I had to do the full warm up lap followed by a rolling start - Which went pretty well and I ended up running 2nd of our group. But there were some really fast Porsches, Vipers etc and you had to watch your mirrors very carefully whilst maintaining as much speed as possible. I managed to run a good pace with only 10 seconds between my slowest and fastest to 10:08 and 9:58 respectively.

I was called to the pits but half way round my 'in' lap there were double waved yellow flags at Bergwerk - There was the remains of a white Aston (I think!) in the barriers but as I turned into the corner I came across 2 Clios on their roofs and another 2 cars which i didn't have time to identify - As I hit the brakes, it became apparent that there was oil down and I started sliding towards the crashed cars - somehow I managed to recover and squeeze through the gap - unlike the car 2 behind me which gracefully slid sideways to completely block the track - so I was expecting another red flag and it came a very quickly. And that was it!

The best the car has ever done on this configuration of the 'Ring is a 9:46, so there is a bit still to go, but as I've now done the grand total of 14 laps, I'm pretty happy with the pace.

Most folk reckon that you 'know the 'ring' after 500+ laps!

ManFlu :-(

Last Friday I was due to head down to the Daytona circuit in Milton Keynes to take on some F1 drivers (among other) in the Annual F1 Karting Challenge - but I had spent the first few days of the week suffering from full on ManFlu, and despite lots of rest and fluids, my temp was still way up on Friday morning and I had to admit defeat. Luckily, we had a more than capable Junior Rotax racer just itching to take my place, so I spent most of Saturday checking my text messages to follow the race.

The team (Declan McDonnell, Dave Morgan, Scott Mitell and Joe Wiggin (my replacement)) had managed to qualify 9th of 31 in a dry session, but with a very wet Saturday forecast, I expected them to move up a few places - which they did, running in 2nd for most of the race until a clip failed and the battery fell off, which lost them loads of time.

But they still managed to work their way back to 4th place ( 2nd of the non F1 teams) by the end of the race - a great result!

Now I have to look forward to the VLN race at the 'ring in 2 weeks.