Nordschleife

In theory, there was no real prep to do: I'd booked my flight, guesthouse and the Ringhaus Styker months ago, and all my driving kit was already at the Ringhaus. All I had to do was book a cheap rental from the airport, throw the usual clothes and gadget collection into a bag and walk out the door.

The first slight hitch in this plan was my work schedule. If anyone ever mentions the freedom of Global Sales in front of me, they will have to excuse the hollow laughter - or, at the moment, hostile stare.

After some very high level meetings last week I was left with a significant amount of proposal writing which kind of set my plans back getting some serious track time in.

I knew this was going to leave me rather knackered by Friday , so rather than having to drive to the Ring at 11pm after a very long day's work, I decided Plan A was to try to bum a lift with someone. It was the last Ryanair flight into Hahn that night, so it seemed likely that other Ringers would be on it. Except this time, it seemed.

Having done some good laps I went out for 2 laps with Freakboy as passenger. The first was pretty decent, the second started well but ended badly. Schwedenkreuz went nicely, about as good as it gets with my rather large margin (about 170km/h indicated, accelerating through the turn to about 180), on a good line into the braking zone for Aremberg, hit the brakes, pedal goes down about the same amount as it always does (with the same pushing effort), but only delivers about 30 to 40% retardation. Release pedal, brake again, same story, pushing harder doesn't help much.

At this point we're about 20m from the turn-in point, and I tell Freakboy that the brakes are gone. By then he had that one figured out for himself, I think. Speed at the turn-in point is probably about 30 or 40 km/h more than normal :(

I figured there were 2 options: either say "to hell with braking, let's turn in anyway" or go straight, try to reduce as much speed as possible and try to turn to the right a bit.

I didn't really think of it at the time, but went for option 2, as option 1 in a Seven would automatically result in a total loss of control for me. Losing control at that point of the track would probably have resulted in going sideways into the gravel, and I didn't much fancy rolling the car at 100+ km/h, or going backwards into the armco at that kind of speed.

Option 2 worked reasonably well: the gravel didn't slow us down as much as I had hoped (Freakboy told me later that he was already bracing for a head-on impact with the armco), but I did manage to alter course slightly. The grass verge between the gravel and the armco was almost wide enough and provided enough grip to get away with it without hitting anything. Keyword being "almost". We hit the armco with the left rear, but somehow I managed to avoid hitting the armco with the left front. Came to a stop about 40m after hitting the armco. Got out, examined the car, left rear bumper section FUBAR, center section looked pretty bad, right section fouls the exhaust, tiny armco mark on the left rear quarter panel, gravel marks on left side skirt, but no dents in the bodywork, seams around the rear lid not distorted, engine still running, nothing leaking out, didn't hit the left rear wheel, just the bumper.

The boys at Ring Racing did a quick repair by straightening things, allowing me to drive back to base without melting the bumper.