Axis Ring Part III.

Waking up to rain after spending the night digesting the light German cuisine and trying to figure out how to brush your teeth in the miniscule bathroom in the room at the Ringhaus - Altes Forsthaus St. Hubertus was a bit disconcerting.... but hey, you have to get in the spirit and we certainly came too far to be fussy about it.... we just pretended we were crazy English types.

The cool thing about the Ringhaus is that it literally is on the track (in the red box in this photo).
and while the rooms are....spartan, the owners are friendly and apparently they have essential tools for rent if you need them.























So we made out way to the parking lot and our first surprise, it's tiny! I cannot imagine the chaos there on a really crowded day. At the same time everything is a lot more casual than at a typical US track day. For one thing all cars have to be road legal so you don't really see trailers or people putting slicks on their cars.... we didn't even see anyone really working on their car for that matter.
Anyway, we bought our 15 lap ticket and off we went!
You probably heard about the ban on cameras at the ring so we were quite shy about taping. For sure we did not want to get kicked out for doing that...but we did manage to tape one of our first monstrously slow laps, I'll post it eventually but really...what's the point when there are people there who can do this and get away with it?:


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Our jaws dropped to the floor when we saw that, for sure when he was coming down the hill I was sure he was going to end up on his roof or in a massive fireball.... Check out the chops this guy has: look at how he puts the inside wheel on the curb. It was so cool I just had to make some cheesy 80's sounding music for the clip....it seemed like the right thing to do at the time! The lady pronouncing the turn names in the soudtrack comes courtesy of Ben Lovejoy's essential Nurburgring website.
(BTW if any of the ringers list regulars know more about this Opel dude, I'd love to find out more and give credit where it's due...)

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More Tomorrow...

Part I
Part II
Part IV