When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
Did the Nürburgring Academy's Permit B course yesterday.
We where about 30 cars so it was not exactly crowded on the track
First it was a couple of hours of How to drive in races at the Nurburgring. Then two hours of follow me: 8 laps and then about two hours of free driving.
I was in small group of three cars, 991.2 GT3 MR PDK a BMW Racecar and me.
Dale of Bridgetogantry was out instructor.
The 991.2 was driven by a very nice French Porsche Junior Works driver Julien who will amongst things drive WEC this year in the RSR.
A modest, thankful and obviously talented young man.
So I drove RCN 1 together with my good friend in his BMW M3 E46 SMG in class F5.
We came 2nd in class and group and 34 in total of 157 cars.
We are glad everything went well in the end and that we didn't get any penalty points..
Our timing equipment failed totally so I had to use the paper tickets we use to keep track of which lap you are on and with that the manual stop watch.
To understand the problem I'll explain the structure of this particular race.
We used the 24H layout of Nürburgring this weekend which is a longer version of the VLN layout: You drive the GP track plus the Nordschleife.
In RCN you drive 13 laps on this layout and the laps looks like this:
1 Set time lap
2 Sprint lap
3 Sprint lap
4 Sprint lap
5 Confirmation lap: Set the same time as on lap 1 +/-10 seconds
6 Cool down lap lap
Driver change/Refuel
7 Warm up lap
8 Confirmation lap: Set the same time as on lap 1 +/-10 seconds
9 Sprint lap
10 Sprint lap
11 Sprint lap
12 Sprint lap
13 Cool down lap
Waiting for the start
So I'm sitting on the grid realizing that the automatic timing doesn't work so i pickup my manual $9.00 **** stopwatch and try to start it at the start line. Missed by a couple of seconds - it is kind of stressful at this moment
When I come to the end of the Nordshleife: The Gantry I pickup the watch and checks the time: 12.11 (Ahhh easy time to remember I think). I put away the watch and little bit later I take it up again only to find that I accidentally stopped the time at 12.11 (Yes, I was very upset now).
So I started the watch again and tried to estimate how many seconds I missed.
Driving down the long straight and onto the GP track front straight I pickup the watch and stop it on what I think is the finish line. I look down on it to see that it stopped. It had. Then I started to think of how many seconds was missing and other important stuff you need to think of when starting a sprint lap. Did the hairpin and looked down on the stop watch again to read the time... This time the watch was reset and show 00:00:00 (f*ck!, f*ck! , f*ck! but in another language).
So now I'm supposed to drive as fast as I can in car I haven't driven for a year, on a tire brand I never used, trying to figure out what my options was: What can I do to try to guess my lap time?
If I miss my laptime with 30 seconds then I'll get a time penalty of 200 seconds (30s-10s)*10s
So it is important to make the confirmation lap as close to the set time lap as possible.
The only thing I could do was to try to arrive at the Gantry at 12.11+the seconds I missed out when starting the clock.
One practical problem is that when I need to start the clock again I come at full speed on the straight. Of course I missed the start again with the stop watch.
So I now I needed to add some more seconds to the time I thought - In hindsight I could just ignored the extra seconds because I had extra seconds on both laps.
Anyway: I arrive at Gantry at 11.45. I remember that I drove Döttinge Höhe really slow on the confirmation lap and now I needed to drive it even slower.
I try to repeat my drive from lap 1 up to the finish line.
The problem is that it is like you are playing dart but you have no idea of where the dartboard is. You are driving almost blindfolded in a sense.
Well , I finished the lap did the cool down lap ( fast ) went to the pits for driver change.
Now it turned out that the live timing on the internet been very unstable so the team didn't know my set time. Remember that the next driver need to do a confirmation lap too.
So the second driver with some luck of the internet gods finds the time on the web and drives his laps using his wrist watch.
Fast forward to parc fermé and the glorious beer. We where two happy drivers - we did well in the driving that which the most important thing but we where frustrated that the timing failed so badly.
Finally we got the chance to see the live timing and it turned out that I missed the set time with 9 seconds and my partner 8 seconds. More then 10s would have resulted in time penalty. Joy!
04-14-2018, 05:03 AM
