Team Moo-Moo Nurburgring trip May 2008FRIDAYBlippity blip! Blippity blip! What the faaaaark? Ah yes. It's Ring day. And it's ten past fuck-all in the morning, time to get up, as
the alarm on the mobile phone is merrily reminding me, blissfully unaware of the wall it's
about to be introduced to.
The time has been carefully chosen to allow only enough time for a cold wake-up shower
(I turned off the hot water last night to minimise the morning's to-do list). I can only
imagine how wanky Mike and David must feel right now, having come from Cheshire, driving through
the early May sunrise. I pause for a moment to imagine a deserted M6 toll road in the majesty
of a mint 964 Turbo 2 and a mental smile flickers across my bleary mind.
Braced by my icy drenching, I put on the pair of jeans that will need to contain my sweaty bollocks for the weekend, pick up the keys and venture outside. My steed for the trip is a standard black 1998 Elise S1, my pride and joy since the day I found I could make good money from making computers do what other people wanted them to do. Well, I say pride. Most people who take pride in their cars do tend to wash them occasionally, so maybe pride isn't the right word. However, today is different. Today the Elise is not caked in crap, because my lovely sister washed it for me, after I laid a small but pertinent guilt-trip on her. Today the morning sun glints off the paintwork and the wheels are silver instead of their usual shade of brake-dust black. Today is going to be a good day.
It might be the chilly shower or it might be the anticipation of our Euro-jaunt, but something has perked me up. The 80 mile sprint to Maidstone Services passes in the blink of an eye, and allows Chris to test the Garmin he's provided for the trip - it threatens to be a bit of a faff to use but seems accurate and we arrive within 5 minutes of the pre-arranged time. Ben's orange 350Z is easily visible in the car park, but Ben himself is less conspicuous. After a lap of the breakfast area, we decide to brekkie up and ring him from our sun-scorched table, in view of the car park. As I pick the phone up, a text from him arrives - by now our scheduled meeting time has long gone and it turns out he'd arrived well ahead and has been rating arses for the past half hour. Chris and Ben introduced, we settle down to devouring our hideously overpriced but surprisingly edible breakfasts and share some preliminary banter about cars. Shortly afterwards, Mike and David appear in the car park, and I'm mildly disappointed to note that despite parking next to it, neither of them notice that the Elise has been cleaned for the first time since before we met. I knew it wasn't worth the effort. Well, my sister's effort. It also transpires that one of the headlights is out on the Pug, so we'll have to re-bulb it. And, as usual, none of us have thought about the Euro regulations about reflective jackets, warning triangles and so on, so we drop a few more quid at the shop just to keep us on the right side of the law.
The M20 vanishes and the English Channel appears. The Norfolkline desk is dispatched without incident (unless you count immigration control using the same channel as our walkie-talkies and Mike's "contributions" to their conversations) and the GB stickers are whacked onto the arses of the cars that don't have Euro plates. We all wangle our way onto the truck deck (low ground clearance, donchaknow) and wander up to the top deck for a bracing chat about nothing in particular. A couple of lattes later, Dunkirk hoves into view and we're on our way. It happens every time. In France, the locals drive reasonably well. You cross the border into Belgium, and IMMEDIATELY they all turn into suicidal knob-jockeys. Not only that, the roads turn into Beirut High Street and everything smells of shit, and if you speak the wrong language to the wrong person they become inexplicably offended, as if somehow we should be able to tell in which particular vanquished nation their heritage belongs. But I suppose they do speak English, which is handy because no-one else speaks phlegm-ish. This year, the lesson learned is to fill up with petrol in Dover and drive all the way through Belgium, because the Texaco station we've stopped at completely defeats me. "Cards only," it says (in English), but there's no card slot and the pump stubbornly refuses to release any petrol. Fuck 'em. I'm only filling up because we've stopped anyway. I can hold out until we get there. Probably.
Back on the road and it's only moments before the Garmin and traditional knowledge fall out. Chris and I are leading in the Elise, being the only car with a driver and navigator, and the satnav insists that we want to turn away from the E40 earlier than intuition and experience dictate. Grudgingly we do, accompanied by the only fully-heard walkie-talkie sentence in the entire trip, "wrong way guys!" but the Garmin would do us proud. A couple of uneventful hours later, with the Elise so low on fuel that it's running exclusively on Chris's farts, we arrive in the cosy familiar town Adenau and pull up in Eddy Mathey's "Hotel an der Nordschleife" to pick up the guesthouse keys. A quick blat up the hill later, we're settled in, but it's nearly 24 hours until the track opens. What to do... dinner at the restaurant down the road goes down easily, with the conversation lurching across quantum physics and some fascinating did-you-knows before settling predictably on cars. Several Konigsbachers later, an early night seems like a good idea after our transcontinental four-country pilgrimage. That is, until we find out quite how loud Chris's snoring is... 
SATURDAYThe castle! Yes, of course. In trips past, Monday has been the day with time to spare, but Das Schloss is always closed Am Montags so we've never made it up there before. €2.10 later and we're at the highest point for miles around, surveying the cranes messing around with the Ring museum (sounds like something you'd find in Amsterdam) and watching the cars blatting down the Dottinger-Hohe straight - no ticket barrier in operation today. With a tick finally placed in the visit-the-castle box, we make a quick stop at the massive Brunnchen viewing area and a little tootle up the side lane to the quick bit after Pflanzgarten, where some filthy reprobate has written Moooooo on the track in four-foot high spray-paint. Honestly, the childish antics some people get up to.
Oh bollocks. This isn't a good sign. The car park's full already. Ah well, better buy some laps anyway. HOW MUCH?! It's a double whammy this year - the Euro/sterling exchange rate has gone the wrong way and the Ring prices have gone up by 10% - a 4 lap ticket now costs €70, up from €64 last year, making it around £15 per circuit. This is going to be an expensive weekend. Ah, car number three has arrived. Nick's been driving my NSX over, with Rob riding shotgun, and he's just arrived, so I nip out and let him into the guesthouse. Good grief, the NSX is clean too! Not only that, Nick's covered up the chunk missing from the front spoiler (a previous Karussell war-wound) so it looks the hound's hairies once more. Itching to unleash the beast on track, we hurriedly unload, but a rather ominous text from Mike advises us not to rush back ... apparently the queues are monumental. Tits.
Unsurprisingly, with all this traffic, some clod(s) stuffed their pride and joy into the barrier, so it was all for nothing in the end as the track closed before we could get on. Earlier in the day we'd booked a table at the highly respected Nurburg restaurant Pistenklause, so we migrated over there for some Argentinian cow's bits on a hotplate then back to base for some mini-bar action and a chinwag with the stag party that has joined us in the guesthouse. There's always tomorrow. SUNDAY
Boing! Awake! It's only 7am, which is normally the end of my day rather than the beginning, but there's no problem getting up today. The Nordschleife is open to us from 8am until 7:30 tonight, and we intend to be there for every minute of it. Continental breakfast dispatched, we're at the track with time to spare, and oh my, it's busy already. I've never known the car park to be full at 8am when the track opens, we usually get some quiet time to do our sighting laps with no-one around to laugh at us. Chris is first out with me, the Elise freshly shod on Toyo Proxes, finally committing the previous set of disastrous Ventus rubbish to the history books. Ah, that's more like it. I can really lean on these tyres without feeling they're going to kill me. Most of the track is where I left it last year, which is nice, but I seem to have forgotten some of the lines. Coming up to Eschbach I have one of those bugger-it's-the-wrong-crest moments and lose myself completely on the wrong side of the track, but no harm done, there's no-one at Brunnchen laughing and pointing. Every other car is piloted by a clueless Brit anyway, so I'm fitting in nicely.
The beauty of the NSX is its schizophrenic nature. Cruising across Europe it feels like a GT, show it a track and it's a racer. It's always felt short on horsepower, a feeling not helped by the under-reading speedo, but it will crack a genuine 160 (GPS-confirmed) so maybe it does have all the 276bhp it was born with after all. What it doesn't have is a working clock, cruise control that will set at anything over 50, a radio that'll go above 90 FM and a traction control switch that works reliably. Not that you ever need to turn the traction control off, it'll happily doughnut with it turned on, as I would gleefully demonstrate to James the Stag the following morning. But I'd better stop rabbiting about that as we're just coming up to Flugplatz. The back end feels a little wobbly, but I don't mention that to Chris, who seems to be enjoying his first Ring laps too much to care anyway. It suits my driving style, as one of the boys would comment later, "he likes to lead with the rear," which I assume was a comment on my driving rather than an unsavoury aspersion on my sexual preferences. Coming down to Adenau I can hear David's words ringing in my ears "the Pug's brakes ran out on the downhill section," and I recall that first track day in the NSX at Rockingham where the corner at the end of the banking came and went without the brake pedal doing much except sinking to the floor...
No such problems here, and the V6 shrieks its head off after Bergwerk on the run up the hill. Once bitten twice shy around the Karussell, so it's around the outside I tootle as yet another GT3 RS knocks out its owner's fillings around the banking. At Brunnchen the crowds are beginning to gather and I imagine a few what-on-earth-is-that queries as the fresh rears soak up the oversteer, but I'm still being overtaken by every man and his caravan. "That's no standard Volvo," I mumble into my helmet, trying to convince no-one but myself as it sashays past, "and that driver looks suspiciously like Kimi Raikkonen." Back over the Mooooo and round the Mini-Karussell and my embarrassingly slow lap is at an end. We don't time our laps in fear of binning it while chasing a time, but it feels like it's ten-something bridge-to-gantry. Not really satisfactory in a car that can lap well into the 8s in experienced hands. Well, I'm too old to be the new Senna anyway. In the meantime, Rob's been down to RSR in Adenau to pick up the Caterham he's hired for the day. It's over 600 quid for the day but does save the hassle of towing or driving a bathtub across the continent. I mean "bathtub" in an affectionate way, I had one myself for a while. Then it needed cleaning so I sold it.
Before long another monkey has presumably run out of oil or talent elsewhere on the track as it's all gone quiet. Our voyeuristic fun is halted for a while, so we adjourn for lunch. There's nothing quite like Currywurst and chips mit mayo, and the cafe in Adenau outside the Hotel an der Nordschleife does it very well, as the local biking fraternity seems to have discovered in its entirety. Strangely there are a lot more bikes in the town than there are on the track - I guess they're here to soak up the atmosphere rather than donate an organ. In what seems like a matter of minutes, the engines are roaring over the bridge again, signalling the afternoon session is underway. We're in no particular rush as the half hour post-lunch is a classic time for prangs on any track day, so we're expecting wreckage. Sure enough, it's not long before the apologetic German voice rings out across the car park, the track closes again and we all silently hope the culprit still has all his limbs.
Ben's smooth and swift pilotry brings the lap to a close remarkably quickly and without incident, but it's not long before some poor sod incurs a hefty armco bill and the track is yet again closed, this time for the day. Off we troddle to Pinocchio's in Adenau for a delicious meatball pizza the size of a dustbin lid and a healthy helping of beers, reassured by the knowledge that we have nothing to do tomorrow morning. Ah, lovely beer. MONDAY
3 o'clock rolls up before we know it, so it's back to the track for our last few hours of Nordschleife action for this trip, and it's pleasantly quiet, at least compared to the manicness of yesterday.
I'm in full flow now, so I hop into the Pug and realise it's my first lap in it. In fact, I've only driven it a few miles up the road and about 20 laps of Goodwood in the rain, so David has by now driven it about five times further than I have. That's a weird thought. Chris is in the passenger seat with me, undoubtedly expecting a rather tame lap considering the car's lowly origins, and I don't do much to dash his expectations. It takes most of the lap for me to get the feel for the car - after driving mid-engined rear-drivers all weekend that require precision, it takes something of a mental reset to adjust to a hooligan front-drive car like this. The more I sling it into a corner, the more it responds, and by the end of the lap I'm feeling a lot more comfortable with the degree of hoonage demanded by the tenacious little Pug.
Back in the car park for a breather, I realise Chris has been passengering the whole weekend and must be itching for a go. He's been here once before, but on a bike and ... well I won't embarrass him here by telling the story - suffice to say he never got to see a lap, let alone drive one. The Pug's stopped pinging by now so I toss him the key and hope to god he can drive ... OH MY GOD! BRAKE MAN, BRAKE! GO LEFT, GO LEFT! These are all things that never crossed my mind, much to my relief. A brief reminder at each of the blind bits was all the prompting I did, and I'm not even sure if that was necessary. The phrase "Ring virgin" never sounds entirely sanitary, but whichever way you look at it, Chris has lost his Ring cherry. As we let the car cool off again, Ben arrives back and immediately shoots off to enjoy the free tuition he's somehow managed to wangle. It never ceases to amaze me the things Ben can get done - if he were to meet Derren Brown, he'd have Derren clucking like a chicken by tea-time. Later Ben will enjoy a maximum attack lap in a 911 GT3 RS before getting stranded on the track for twenty minutes while the marshals peel another biker out of the trees who went arse over tit after hitting oil dropped by an expired sump. Remember kids, motorsport can be dangerous.
An hour and a half later, one roll of shiny tape, several foil barbecue trays, a few metal strips scrounged from a building site and a tub of stuff that looks and smells suspiciously like dog turd are affixed to the exhaust and it just might hold. I love it when a plan comes together. Cheers boys. TUESDAY
The next hundred miles is entertaining. Germans in the slow lane are looking skywards to spot the Messerschmitt that's about to land on the motorway so they can make room for it, before realising it's just another crazy Englander. Pit stop in Belgium ... "hey David, bearing up OK? How're your ears?" "WHAT? TEN TO TWO. YES, VERY WARM!" Ahem. OK. "Like me to drive for a bit?" "ABOUT ANOTHER HUNDRED MILES I RECKON! SHOULD BE ON TIME!" Riiiight. Time to go I would say...
Still a hundred miles to go before the safety of suburbia, I have to navigate four motorways while paranoidly scouring for anything white with a trace of electrics on the roof. There's no explicit law about the level of noise you're allowed to make, but people do get done for excessively noisy motors, and this one definitely falls into that category right now. I'm barely out of the port before a Highway Patrol car hoves into view, doing a painfully slow 60mph on a lightly trafficked M20. They don't have the power to ticket me, but they can call their colleagues to pick me up, so I stay a few hundred yards behind, losing Chris and Ben in the process. As the Patrol slips off, I breathe a sigh of relief and tenderly tease the LOUD pedal back up to 70. On the short stretch of M26, I have to laugh as a BMW Z3 gently cruises up behind and pulls into the hard shoulder, only to re-emerge a few seconds later. No dear, it wasn't your car making that nasty noise, mwahaha.
Back at Chris's, he's keen to have another stab at the repair. It only needs to last another 50 miles so I can drop it back with Lars tomorrow, but Chris doesn't like to do half a job. Watching him working in his garage is like watching Leonardo da Vinci in full creative flow. The garage is full of stuff, items that look completely random to me, but they all have specific meaning to Chris. As he bangs and tweaks, he reaches for tools in boxes full of seemingly identical metal doohickeys, naturally putting his hand on the right one for the job, often WITHOUT LOOKING. Here is a man at home in his environment, a man fulfilled. I almost feel sorry to take it away from him at the end, but I can sense Chris's pride in a job well done, and I hope he can also sense my gratitude. It was a trying incident getting the little froggy motor home in one piece, but now it's done it feels like an achievement, a team effort. It was Nietzsche who claimed you couldn't appreciate an achievement unless you suffered on the journey, and in a perverse kind of way I really feel it was a better trip as a result. I'm sure when David's ears stop ringing, he'll feel the same... Jimbo |
By now David will already have picked up my 306 from its
Oxford-based custodian Lars - it's no track warrior, but it's beautifully balanced and
betrays little of its purpose from the outside, a set of Corse alloys and a slightly
more purposeful stance being the only clear visual clues to the underskin tweakery.
Look inside and the four-point harnesses, Recaros and Alcantara trimmings wave back, while the
exhaust bark allows the ears to confirm what the eyes have already decided. The ears,
as we will find out later, will suffer for their tardiness.
Ten minutes down the road and Chris sees me coming and darts out of his house with unusual gusto,
weekend bag and skid-lid in hand. Ah. Elises are designed to carry helmets *or* luggage, and I
brought a helmet too, so the spare pants are suddenly looking distinctly superfluous. Fortunately
though, it's pretty chilly at this ungodly hour so the roof is on, which gives us just enough room
for Chris's squashy bag in the roof's cavity behind the seats and ensures Chris will be wearing
creased clothes all weekend. You and me both, my friend.
Our ferry leaves at 10, so we should probably leave the services at 8. At 8:30 we concur with that diagnosis
and get up from our table. This is a boy's driving weekend, so there's a subconscious collective agreement
that we should leave it tight and thus have an excuse for ragging it down to Dover. It's allowed, and we all
understand. David has brought walkie-talkies, which is a brilliant idea, but all Chris and I can hear is
mmmmfmmgggmmm *OK* mmgmmsmmff *cunt* mmmfsgmmmgivmmsmm.
By now it's getting sunny and the Elise's roof is looking distinctly dumpable, but we have nowhere to stow it.
A sudden a-ha moment results in us dumping the crash helmets in the 306, thus freeing up space for us to stash
the roof and travel al fresco for the rest of the weekend, as the roof would never emerge from behind the seats from
this moment on. And so the sunburn begins.
It looks like driver training day today, so we settle down and count cars. 35 cars belt past, 20 of which are
Porsches of one flavour or another (all 911s but for one solitary 924) but the big surprise is TWO Gumpert Apollos.
Which brings my lifetime spots of Apollos to ... erm ... two. But enough of that, the track's open in half an hour,
time to buy some laps!
He's not wrong. Half an hour later we rock up, only to join the end of a long queue just to get into the field.
Yes, the field - not even the car park. We can see from the road that the field is full already and the traffic
ain't moving. Twenty minutes later we've crept about ten car-lengths up the road (thanks to the ten cars that
gave up and turned around) and my thinning bonce is starting to feel tender, but I sure am glad the Elise has a
new fan, replacing the old one that had rusted solid last week. It's getting a workout right now.
Blippity blip! Blippity blip!
Lap completed in what feels like about 11 minutes, it's time to hop in the NSX and warm it up. It's not a standard
NSX, but the mods are mostly cosmetic. The exhausts don't look normal, the body kit has flap-all ground clearance
and there's a Type S badge on the back.
Turns out they didn't make the Type S in 1991, so it can't be a real one. Don't tell anyone.
Rob has plenty of experience in Caterhams so there's no learning curve for him. From the passenger seat the front end
feels strangely uncommunicative, giving no clue how close we are to understeering, while the back end is playfully mobile,
helping the car turn in and providing ample entertainment on the way out. Arriving at Hohe Acht, we turn into the
right-hander carrying way more speed than seems sensible but, rather than sliding wide it just grips and goes. It's then
that it dawns on me - the front end isn't uncommunicative, it just had nothing to say until now. The front end has way more
grip than the rear, so it hasn't been troubled. Rob later tells me this is because it's set up for one occupant, but I
have to confess I don't understand that. You sit at the back in a Caterham, wouldn't an extra occupant shift the grip
balance towards the rear? However, what I know about car setup could be written on the back of a small beetle using a
MagiMarker with room left over to draw a set of hairy balls on it, so I'll buy the explanation provided.
Fortuitously the Ring webcam snapped us once at the ticket barrier and again at the track exit, revealing a gap of
exactly 11 minutes between pictures, so a bridge-to-gantry
time of just under ten minutes seems realistic. Very respectable in a car with the power of a light bulb.
By now it's getting stupidly busy, so we wander off to Brunnchen to watch for a while. It's a joy to see the eclectic
machinery on show, from shiny new Audi R8s to a 1920s Lagonda and an old Mercedes SLR replica, all of them being used in
the manner for which they were designed. Sabine is entertaining the crowds
as usual, her level of car control humbling everyone within a hundred miles. One drooling viewer posits the
suggestion that she might be the ideal girlfriend, while another apparently requires the extra criterion that she take
it up the shitter. You can't please some people.
The afternoon is faintly ridiculous - I do get out once more in the NSX but spend most of the lap with the right indicator
on letting people past. I've seen less traffic on the Brussels Ring Road. Slightly flattened, I decide to blag passenger
rides for the rest of the day, so I get out with Ben in his Zed. I still haven't figured out if Ben is crushingly modest
or genuinely doesn't know how handy he is, but he's indecently rapid around the circuit and knocks me into a cocked hat.
Not that I'd recognise a cocked hat if I saw one. I don't even want to imagine what it means. Ew.
9 o'clock seems like a lie-in after yesterday. The stag boys are getting ready to go home, that is as soon as the stag
realises his chums have jokingly sabotaged his Z3 by removing a fuse, and that the differential fluid sprayed over the floor
didn't actually come from his car, ho ho. The NSX is also on its way home, but the rest of us are staying another day,
as the track's open for another four hours this afternoon. With the Eifel sun still troubling our ever widening bald spots,
it's a lazy day of moseying and yakking, culminating in a pleasant afternoon leaning against the barrier at Adenau watching
the testing cars whizz by. The racing version of the new Scirocco seems to be on a push, out testing for the 24hr
Nurburgring endurance at the end of May, and the stopwatch confirms a scorching 7m52 lap - and that's not bridge-to-gantry
like we poncey tourists measure, this is the full lap including the full length of the Dottinger-Hohe straight.
Autocar would mention the car the following week, claiming 296bhp with a DSG gearbox, tested by Hans Stuck and due to be
driven by him and Carlos Sainz in the race. We can't tell who it is in the car today from our vantage point up here,
but it's certainly quick enough in the right Hans...
First up is a pax lap in Mike's 964 Turbo 2. It's a southpaw, so there's that weird sensation to get over of sitting in
the right hand side of a car without a steering wheel in front of you, but that's soon replaced by a firm hand in the back
shoving us up the road as we leave the pits. Feck me, how many horses has this thing got?
The number begins with 4, and it's not 42.
But this car has another trick up its sleeve. Rounding the last gnarly bit of Hatzenbach, I see Mike's right leg
straighten and my heart skips a beat. Yes, we're still half-way round the tight corner and the suddenly-very-close armco
has paint flecks in it from the last Porker driver who didn't know the meaning of "feeding in the power". Fortunately Mike
is no such numpty and the drama of peeling a Jimbo-shaped pancake from the wall never arrives. The car just goes. In the
middle of a corner. Nearly half a thousand horsepower through the rear wheels, and it just goes. It's a trick diff,
apparently, and it could teach David Blaine a thing or two about sitting in a box performing magic. The insistent shove
in the back returns, and we're off up the Flugplatz rise before you can say "Christ on a bike." Well, before I
can say it, but that's another story ;o)
Back in one piece and glad I chose brown pants this morning, it's time for a quick brew before venturing out again.
By this time Ben has disappeared in search of his business contact at the Alfa 75 place and David still hasn't broken the
Pug, so it's time to return the passenger experience with Mike in the Elise. I love the Elise - it was my first proper
performance car and the one I'm most familiar with. After spending the past year driving it on concrete tyres, it feels
like a new machine now, and in these sunny conditions with some laps under my belt, I'm really flying (at least by my standards).
I lean on the car more and more but it still has grip to spare, so coming up to Bergwerk I decide this is the lap to take
the Lauda kink flat for the first time. Gritting my teeth and trying not to picture Niki's flaming wreckage, I gently
pitch the car in and it glides through with not a moment of drama, the car practically mocking me for not having the balls
to do it before. Off we go up the hill, where the hungry 118 horses could desperately use some friends, we complete the
lap taking most corners quicker than I've ever done them before, and not once did the car complain, not once did the back
end step out, not once did the tyres pip under braking. Plenty more time to find then!
David's up next in the helpless seat, and it's more of the same but with a little extra push. The Lauda kink barely registers
on the rectal
pucker meter this time, and we're off and away. Pushing ever harder, I finally find the limit towards the end of the lap
in the Pflanzgarten section, where the tail cheerfully kicks wide slightly north of the ton. Later I would tell the boys
that I was flat through the whole section, but was I really? I believed it when I said it.
I remember dropping into the dip thinking that the car was clearly capable of going through without lifting so I
was going to give it a go, but whether I actually did it or not is a detail my memory has chosen
to hide. Would I have instinctively lifted with the small stab of corrective lock, or did I keep my foot in? Well, maybe
I'm the only one that cares. Whatever the truth is, that was definitely the quickest lap I've driven so far, and if that
didn't dip under ten minutes then I probably never will. Let's pretend it did, shall we?
Well, only an hour to go and we're still not dead, so let's roll the dice once more. David is the unwise one to take the
second seat in the Pug this time and he's already taken me out and shown me how to drive it -
though my spider senses tell me he was holding back a touch with me in the car, eh David? That's OK, I bought it to cane it.
By now I'm happily flinging it into corners, but I have to confess I'm nowhere near finding the ideal style for the car.
As I was to find out in the relative safety of Keevil airfield a week later, it'll let you take far greater liberties under
braking than I was prepared to commit to. I'm braking hard now, but only in a straight line, whereas the car will actually
respond to some exceptionally heavy-handed trail braking without snapping round - in fact it helps take the pressure off
the front wheels so you can power through the corner without understeering. Not that the feisty French fleabag wants to
understeer anyway - I can only imagine how hard it'll grip with the Toyo R888s installed. That, however, will have to wait
for another day, because we're through the last corner and everything sounds a bit bangy. I turn to David and say, "is it
my imagination or has it got louder?" David, ever the tactful one, manages not to say, "no shit Sherlock," and we bark
our noisy way into the car park and hug the ground as we peer underneath. Ah. How many pieces is the centre box supposed
to be in? Not that many? Bugger.
We hover for a while in the way that blokes around a broken car tend to do, one of us occasionally peering underneath and
uttering our own particular expletive. With no genius plans surfacing from anyone, we decide to trickle back to the hotel,
which will be accessible all night and has relatively easy access for a truck. By an amazing stroke of luck, I'd decided
that this trip would be the first one that I'd splash out on European Breakdown cover for. Now it turns out that despite
having Green Flag *personal* cover (meaning I'm covered for any car I'm in), they don't do that cover for Europe. I had
to pay £63 for each car (making nearly £200). If the Pug and Elise had been a few months younger, it would've cost half as much as they
would've been under ten years old. I decided to just insure the Pug as I didn't know how reliable it would be, being a
new car to me. Another lucky break ... or so you'd think. Ringing Green Flag European Breakdown to sort this out should
be a matter of minutes, but it was not to be. The best they could offer me was to wait until tomorrow, when they'd take me
to the nearest exhaust place. Ah, but I have to leave at 8am to catch the ferry, I said. Not their problem, apparently.
They wouldn't send anyone out that evening, and they wouldn't recover the car. I would have to reschedule my return,
despite the fact that the terms and conditions explicitly say, "if your vehicle is not repaired by your scheduled return,
we will transport the vehicle and up to 8 passengers to the UK."
Now I'm not good with conflict, but fortunately David is. David took over the phone and became the epitome of calm as he
explained the situation to the Green Flag operative, who became more and more irate and obstructive the more David refused
to be riled. Unfortunately David's best efforts were lost on the monumental negligence of this particular simian, who is
called Mike Howell. If you know Mr Howell, I implore you to go to the nearest fish market, buy a suitably weighty haddock
and spend the next hour slapping him around the head with it. I'll reimburse you for your time and for the haddock.
OK, so we've established that Green Flag European Breakdown cover is completely worthless. I still have a car with a
broken exhaust and we're going home first thing in the morning. Cue A-Team music. Our A-Team contains a Formula 1
senior engineer, a police class 1 driver, a motoring journalist and a DIY magician, all of whom set to work by torchlight,
rigging up a fix that will hopefully get my injured gallic warrior home in time for tea. I'm getting the beers in.
Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's back to Blighty we go. David takes the patched up Pug into the lead and I take second, keeping a careful
eye on the exhaust. Twenty miles in and is it my mind playing tricks or is it drooping? Another ten miles and bits of the
foil barbecue trays start whistling over the roofless Elise, so it's time to pull over. It's not looking bonny for Pierre
the Pug, the heat at the top of the exhaust has been too intense and the fix is fuxed. There's only one thing for it -
David's going to have to drive it without an exhaust. Gulp. Good job he's got earplugs.
Fast forward to Dunkirk port and you've never seen anyone so relieved to hand over a set of keys. Top marks David,
you're a trooper, job well done. On the other side of the Channel, Chris's insurance covers him to drive the Elise,
so he does so while I take the shouty one. Customs is interesting. As I try desperately to coast inconspicuously into
the exit lane, it comes as no surprise when the hand comes out in a what-have-we-here kind of way. She's very pleasant,
and I'm suitably ashamed. As she starts to ask me questions I mouth, "I'd better turn it off," and she gives a lightly
amused smile. It doesn't take long to realise that if I were going to smuggle something I'd have to be galactically
stupid to do it in a car making 120 decibels, so she sends me on my way. She jumps when the engine barks back into life,
which makes us both laugh, but for me it's a laugh of relief. The man with the rubber glove looks disappointed.
All is rosy until the M25, where a police motorcycle is waiting in one of
those "police patrol vehicles only" launch lanes as I disturb the space-time continuum on my way past. Stay there, stay
there, stay there ... BOLLOCKS. Out it comes, straight into lane 3, zooming up the outside behind me. Go past, go past,
go past ... ARSE! He nearly does an endo as he identifies me as the source of the cacophany and ducks in behind me.
Jeez, you're so close, Why don't you open the tailgate while you're there, you'll see the broken exhaust sitting in the back.
The devil on my shoulder urges me to stamp on the brakes to teach him why you don't tailgate, but fortunately I hadn't had
eleven pints so the devil remains unheeded - all I do is lift off to avoid rear-ending the knobhead in front who's got scared
of the copper and has slowed to 55 for no reason. I'm hovering over the left indicator, expecting the blue lights to
come on any second, already preparing my hangdog expression ... come on, don't leave me hanging ... but no, he pulls out,
nails it and becomes a rapidly disappearing arse, much to my disbelief and intense relief. Maybe it's my lucky day after
all.