The Poster Wall

The Poster Wall wasn’t always a poster wall. It started out as the Wooden Wall; 2.8 meters wide, plain-shaped, brownish-yellowish in colour, and consisting of 46.5 identical slats (I counted). However, it turned out there’s a limit on how much brownish-yellowish identicalness  a person can handle. As a result the wall soon became known as the Ugly Wall. And not much after that it was dubbed the Ugly BORING Wall, at which point I decided something had to be done. Covering it up with things that weren’t brownish-yellowish and/or identical seemed the best – or at any rate the cheapest – solution to the problem. Cue the posters.

The original version of the Poster Wall had a rather ambiguous personality. I didn’t own too many posters back then and had to use literally all I had to cover the full span of the wall. In the bottom left corner I put a poster of a long-haired Heinz-Harald Frentzen, posing next to a pile of Good Year-tyres. I’d gotten it half a decade before from a friend of my father’s who wanted to be rid of it. (I can’t imagine why.) The top and middle of the wall I covered in posters torn from F1 magazines. In the centre I placed a picture of my back then recently deceased Pomeranian dog. And on the right side I placed the biggest Lion King-poster the world has ever seen. My aunt had won it at the neighbourhood fair. It was as tall as the Poster Wall itself, bright orange, and no matter how many pins I stuck in it, it’d invariably fall down every 2 weeks.

At first I only changed the Poster Wall lay-out sporadically, as it was hard finding new posters. (Needless to say that, when I finally did find some new ones, the Monster of Loch Lion King was the very first to go.) Nowadays, with all the races I visit, the search has become much easier. If I wanted to, I could change a poster every month. But since it’s a rather time-consuming job, I usually limit myself to one extreme make-over every December. This year I’ve decided to replace 12 of the 17 posters that were on the wall. The only ones that get to stay for another twelve months are the FIA GT event poster from Zandvoort 2013, the old Formula Abarth-poster of a now-GP2 driver and Audi’s  Nürburgring24 First Victory-poster. Oh, and the picture of my dog is still there too. It’s been on the wall for so long now, it’s become tradition.

Sometimes I do wonder if I haven’t gotten a bit too old to own a Poster Wall.

I probably have. Way too old.

But it’s such a fun way of tracking how life changes. At the start, the wall was full of F1 cars because I foolishly believed F1 was the only racing series worth watching. Now that I know better, there’s not a single F1 car left. It’s mostly GTs and junior formula cars now. Also, if I’m entirely honest, I’m a bit scared to take the posters down. In the last days of the Ugly BORING Wall I was literally prepared to take an axe to it, no matter the consequences. Imagine what I might end up doing if, starting tomorrow, I’d be confronted day in day out with a Restored Ugly BORING Wall ft. Ten Thousand Tiny Even Uglier Holes. I guess I’d rather be childish than find out.

On the Road

“I’ll admit it. That Worst of 90s Music-CD was a good idea.”
“I told you it’d make the road to the Nürburgring more fun.”
“But some of these songs are really jogging my memory.”
“Surely you know this one.”
“Ehm, the intro does ring a bell. Faintly.”
“It’s the Vengaboys!”
“Oh! With Up & Down!”
“YES! It’s brilliant for a sing-a-long! Up. And down. Up. And down.”
“The lyrics definitely aren’t hard to learn, haha.”
“UP! AND DOWN! UP! AND DOWN!”
 “That’s it.”
“UP! AND DOWN! UP! AND DOWN!”
“You know, technically that’s wrong. It’s not…”
“UP!”
“It’s just…”
“DOWN!”
“We’re in the Eiffel after all. There are hills everywhere. So sometimes you go…”
“UP!”
“But right now we’re just going…”
“DOWN! Mmm, good point.”
“Really?”
“Yes. DOWN! AND DOWN! DOWN! AND DOWN!”
“Ah.”
“DOWN! AND DOWN! DOWN! AND DOWN!”
“You’re not seriously going to keep this up for the whole way…”
“DOWN! AND DOWN!”
“I guess you are.”
“DOWN! AND DOWN! DOWN! AND DOWN!”
“Oh, look. Yay! The bottom of the valley!”
“DOWN! AND DOWN! DOWN! AND…”
“No. No. NO. We’re at the low point! It’s level ground!”
“Spoilsport.”
“No more ‘down down down’, hahaha!”
“But… do you know what happens when you leave a valley?”
“Huh?”
“You can see it happening just ahead, over there.”
“Oh, no. Please, no.”
“Oh, yes! You go… Up! And up! Up! And up! UP! AND UP!”
“This isn’t funny.”
“UP! AND UP! UP! AND UP!”
“Just shut…”
“UP!”
“Yes!”
“AND UP!”

Flame War!

I tweet on my own behalf, but I’m by no means the only girl who talks racing. I’m surrounded by a tight group of (girl)friends who all enjoy watching racing. I even met most of them on race tracks. Maybe that sounds strange, but it isn’t. Not really. The hard-core motorsport fangirls’ community is a rather small one. And only a small percentage of the fangirls in that community are capable of paying regular visits to race tracks. So during events you quickly start running into the same people, over and over again. It’s practically impossible not to form friendships.

But don’t be mistaken. It’s not all sugar and spice. Sport doesn’t just bring people together, it can also drive them apart. This has lead my friends and I to pick up a few odd habits over the years. Most prominent among them is our tendency to keep a Flame War going amongst ourselves. I can’t even remember how it started. Probably really innocently. Gags usually do. But after nearly a decade, it’s become a monster than can hardly be ignored. It works more or less like this: once it’s become known that one of us supports a certain driver, nearly everybody else will instantly develop a grudge against him (or her). This leaves the fangirl in question to defend every single move of ‘her guy/gal’. The fierceness with which this needs to be done varies from day to day, message to message.

Most of the flames I receive are messages like “why did your guy push mine into the gravel?!” or “HOW does your guy dare to qualify in front of mine?!”. During a race things sometimes get a bit more heated: “No offense to your guy, but my guy is faster so I’m going to tell him TO CRUSH YOURS.” But all that I can all handle. What I find difficult is talking my way out of the messages that tend to arrive, out of the blue, on week days: “I just saw this photo of your guy on twitter. Explain. Those. Flip-flops.” When something like that comes in, you have to have an intelligent retort ready in an instant. If you don’t (and I often don’t!), your only option is to try and improvise your way out. Luckily that’s more up my street. For example, whenever my Nico Rosberg-supporting friend puts me with my back against a wall and things get hairy (pun very much intended), I always find a way to remind her of the existence of My Little Nico:

That usually annoys her so much she forgets what she was on about before.

But even though I love annoying my friends on purpose, the best thing about the Flame War is that it can become a Lame War in a matter of seconds. Take this year’s Nürburgring 24h weekend, for instance. My friend and I had been arguing for literally days about whose favourite would come out on top. But when my guy got pulled into somebody else’s crash 45 minutes into the race, the bickering stopped straight away. All of a sudden everything was forgotten and we were on the same page again, supporting each other as well as our drivers. I guess that’s the beauty of friendship. No matter how much of a git you’ve been, friends will still be there for you when it matters.

For the Love of the Sport

If anything, 2014 was the race season of rain. I can’t remember any other season in which so many of my track visits ended in me getting soaked. Admittedly, most weekends were doable. But some were so bad I’ll remember them forever. Take the GT Masters weekend at Zandvoort, for example.

I knew in advance the weather wouldn’t be good. I’d read all about the “chance of showers” and the “possible winds”. But it wasn’t until I got off the train in Zandvoort on Saturday morning that I began to realise what I was really in for. The sun had risen some hours earlier, but the clouds were so numerous and dark that its rays could barely reach the ground. It was basically still twilight. When I stepped onto the platform, I got caught out by a nasty gust of wind. I stumbled and nearly dropped my bag. “I don’t like this weather,” I told the friend who was waiting for me outside the station, “Why are we doing this again?” “For love of the sport, of course!” she laughed.

We jumped into her car and soon arrived at the track, where we had a ridiculously easy time parking. We soon discovered why: hardly any spectators had shown up. The track was as good as deserted. Even the paddock looked empty, because the teams tried to stay inside the pit building as much as possible. Not long after we’d found the third member of our party (huddled against a truck for shelter) the first raindrops started to fall. We slipped into our water-resistant gear and swore we’d brave the shower like the true fans we were. But then the rain turned torrential and we decided we were cowards, really. So we ran into Mickey’s, the paddock bar. “Why are we even doing this?” one of my friends mumbled as she hung up her dripping coat.  “Ehm… love of the sport?” I replied.

We spent most of the Saturday darting in and out of Mickey’s, trying (and failing!) to avoid the worst of the rain. When we left the track late in the afternoon, with water sploshing around in our shoes, we were convinced the weather couldn’t possibly get any worse. But when we returned to the track on Sunday morning, we were proved wrong. The wind had gotten so strong I couldn’t even get out of the car. The door simply wouldn’t open. In the end I had to crawl out on the driver’s side. A parking attendant who saw me do so shook his head. “Why are you girls doing this to yourselves?” We hesitantly told him it had something to do with liking fast cars.

That day even less spectators showed up. As a result, there were more drivers present during the pitwalk than fans. It got to the point where people literally looked surprised to see us when we showed up at their garage. We stayed out in the open for some time after that, but when the GT Masters race finally came round, me and one friend had had enough. We decided to watch the race from the relative dryness of the main grandstand. But our other friend decided to head to the dunes, to take some last pictures. She was already drenched anyway, so how much worse could it get? She returned to us an hour later, water running down her face and seeping out of her clothes. “Why are we doing this?!” she huffed as she dropped down in a seat next to us. “I think there’s only one true answer,” I sighed, “We do it because we’re crazy.”

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