2 Laps of the 'Ring, or maybe 3...

Let me start by saying to sorry to all the decent cars that were out on the ring at lunchtime on the 5th July 2009. It's not that we wanted to drive slowly, but the car was just not that quick. Everything was quicker than us, in the same way that Concorde is quicker than a Cesna, we did our best, but at every corner we had to move away from any racing line to let quicker, and much better cars past. Marc drove the first lap and to be honest we felt like we were rookies taking on the Luftwaffe. The rear view mirror was full of German machinery bearing down on us with headlights blazing.

Admittedly the box of dry ice, crates of beer, cooking and camping gear were not helping our cause much either, nor was the 196000 recorded miles on the odeometer but, now committed we pressed on.

.....and this is it.

Well we finally arrived, parked up and paid for our "Ring Card" which we loaded up with 2 goes, one each.  We felt that one lap each would be adequate, bearing in mind we were slow on the open road....

You can see the back of Marcs head as he looks up how to say "can we take our really cheap car round your lovely track with the Lambo's and Porsches please?" in German

We are here at last....

After breakfast were headed to the Ring, the sat nav was generally unhappy with the destination however and so refused to pinpoint the location for us, undeterred we resorted to the map book.

Not so good as the whole of Germany is only a page wide so it's level of detail was, shall we say insufficient, a bit like looking for Silverstone using a world atlas.  However in time we sighted a Renault Five Gordini so we opted to follow it as surely it must be heading our way.

The Renuault 5 Gordini is quite quick, so we didn't follow it for long, our camping gear, box of dry ice and crates of beer were taking their tole on speed / handling.  Its a shame we are heading for a race track really.....

To cut a long story short we had to ask for directions to find the entrance, we drove under and round the ring for a while, we could see it, hear it we even tried following some exotica but we were always left behind.  Looking good for the actual Nurburgring then.

The photo at the top is us,  lost within a quarter mile of the ring, the problem is this; the ring is almost 14 miles long, so we did not know which side of the ring we were on in relation to the entrance,  so it was a reasonable trek to keep going round the outside to find our way in, plus we wanted to be on our way to the next stop (Wurzburg) by mid day.  The photo was taken at around 11 am so we are running late allready.

Sunday morning saw us up and for the first time attempting to fold up our "pop up" tents.

Hmmm

The best analogy I can conjure up at present is it's like trying to fold springy wire into a Tupperware container and putting the lid on, although I will probably think of a better one after this is posted.

Now the night before we had inspected the showers, 1 token for 7 minutes. No problem. In the morning I was up and first in the showers, token in the slot me in the shower what could go wrong.

Let me tell you. After 3 or 4 minutes standing (running in and out) of a shower so cold I swear slush was forming on the floor, I gave up, wiped the soap from my hair, dried myself off and warned Marc who by now had arrived. I watched amazed as steam rolled from the cubicle, so I dived back into my shower by now so hot the tiles were melting for the last 30 seconds of my tokens time....

Tents away we headed off to find a cafe or such, which we did by chance within 5 minutes of the camp site, very good coffee and rolls. Then onward to find the Nurburgring

We tried very hard to get to the Ring on Saturday, but what looked like a short dash on the map was in reality a long drive, with early evening threatening to become late evening we realised that

A) We were still 20 or 30 miles from the ring

B) We had no idea as to the location of the campsite

So we started looking for any available campsite, youth hostel,lay bay or hollowed out tree in which to spend the night.

As luck would have it we found a really nice campsite near Gerolstien, the owners had long since stopped serving food but were happy for us to pitch anywhere we liked, so with our new"pop up" tents we happily parked near the stream and amazed the other campers as our tents erected themselves in less than 3 seconds. Magnificent.

Some more random shots that might not fit elsewhere..

Let's break out the improv ' air con!

As previously mentioned the air con is dis-functional, therefore armed with much cunning and a box of dry ice we "chilled" our water sprayer so it would deliver fine mists of cooling air.

As you can see from the pic we may have over estimated the temperature of the ice which meant that we had a bottle of ice and no method of keeping cool.

The temperature outside was staggering, so we did several hundred miles with the windows down and the sunroof open being sun burnt and deafened

Next stop Nurburgring

Well we are now on foreign soil and eating up the miles on our way to Germany, the car is outstanding and driving like a dream, it's times like this you are glad you have left the Camaro at home. Let's be honest it would have got stuck on the ferry anyway.

We are trying to get as close to the "Ring" as possible before we run out of day, we are heading for the main campsite that the interweb tells us is the mecca for ring users, shame we don't know exactly where it is....

We are clear and free to navigate...

Lay in a course for the Nurburgring number one...

Independance Day

We celebrated Independence Day on the M25 by flying the American Flag from the ariel, having a Snickers bar whilst playing Jimmy Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner on the "stereo"

You might like to have a listen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2bGUeDnqPY

I am sure the French appreciated this playing as we rolled off the ferry onto French soil...

Anything beyond Dover is a bonus

Friday morning saw us maintain our annual pilgrimage to the Goodwood Festival Of Speed, both myself and Marc were through the gates at 07.30 ready for a good 12 hours of petrol induced utopia., suffice to say that we left at around 19.00 that evening having crammed as much into one day as we could humanly do, takeaway was then ordered and taken back to the campsite were thoughts turned to the Nurburgring, Alpine passes and more importantly how far the car would go before we booked ourselves on Easy Jet to head home.

The photo at the top shows the tent we all used. It is the biggest tent you can erect without a licence. Probably. Marc and I had the modest task of putting it together for the first time, what the photo does not show is the temperature in which we had to put it up. Although my sun hat kept the sunburn at bay it did somewhat boil my head so the rest of the day did not go well.

Just some of the highlights....

Thought we would do a taster, just to prove we were there, in case you all thought it was a big Capricorn 1 hoax

1 day to go....

The air con is not working, the nice man at the garage who was going to fill it found a leak, and with a possible bill of up to £250 to find, repair and then refill the chance to have ice cold air evaporated. Much like the air con.

But never mind at least it's not hot outside.


Marc has bought a solar shower for camping, reckon it might be gafer taped to the roof of the car a la Clarkson

4 Days to go.....

I have just spent an unpleasant amount of time hoovering the inside, this is because I forgot to dust of my chop saw before loading it into the car and then compounding the problem of sawdust by opening all the windows on the motorway.

I have never driven a saw mill before but it is not pleasant.

The picture at the top has no significance to the chop saw at all. I just like the photo, taken from the Chalet by the way.

Tomorrow the aircon is being refilled, so i could then carry the chop saw and leave the windows up.

It's clocking up some miles now

It has now done two journeys to Cornwall to allow me to do some work on my fathers chalet, so the car has been used for lugging around almost every tool I posses, it has also lugged 3 big blokes and two huge parasols back to Bridgwater with frequent stops to prevent deep vein thrombosis taking a hold on the Pimmy in the back. As you can tell from the picture at the top he was less than impressed.

The car still pulled well though and returned very good fuel economy with a good overall layout of the major controls and I am turning into William Woolard. Pass the gun.

New wireless for the Celica.....

This is more like it, this has been donated by Chris for the duration of our trip / ownership of the car.

Just in case we forget....

Best put our destination on the car!

More stickers!

The Monte Carlo rally sticker is now on the bonnet as are the additional Castrol stickers for the back end. The red and green flashes on the tail gate and spoiler are made from the offcuts of the sticker kit. Not quite as big as the original Castrol rally car but they give an impression

Blingin' wickd sound system init!

As you can see from the photo we have found the most awful wireless in the the whole of cardom. But it works, sort of. The tone control ranges from hiss to muffled. But hey it's only 2500 miles

It hits the road!!

The car is now taxed, and insured to compliment the crisp MOT ticket. All that we have to do now is order up a couple more stickers,paint the door shuts and change the stereo.

Now the stereo is directly proportional to our budget but with the obligatory but thrown in for laughs.

We all have old CD players knocking about but we wanted to play MP3's that we have downloaded from the interweb and stuff without the complications of adding them to a cd. Because that is just one more thing to do. So we want to use our MP3 players and mobile phone which is where most of our songs are stored these days.

Now for those of you that have just joined us and may feel that we have something that resembles a budget for this project please take two aspirin and call me later. We have a budget of "as low as possible" for this whole crackpot scheme, so purchasing a stereo with MP3 compatibility, USB ports and I pod plug sockets is just (frankly) ideas of legend and myth. No what we have is a cassette adaptor to plug into a tape player purchased from the pound shop.Now this presents it's own problems. Where to find a cassette player being the biggest.....