Hello everyone,
Le Mans weekend coming up and the start of a week off for me. Not going anywhere except maybe day trips … just looking to chill out and there’s some stuff that really needs catching up on at home too. I’ve hit pretty severe energy debt so I need to heavily go on the recharging. I’m looking forward to the race, there’s something very compelling about the endurance racing and GT format. How about a meme though …
A couple of weekends ago, I was watching the Nurburgring 24 hours race. There are several big endurance events during the year around the various championships and Nurburgring fell at the start of June this year. It’s held at the Nurburgring Nordschleife race track in the Eiffel Mountains and I think it’s the longest active racetrack in the world at the moment.
Lots of screenshots coming from the Chrome window I was using to watch the race. The Nordschleife is a massive extension to the Nurburgring Grand Prix track which takes up the tiny little bit in the bottom left of that track layout. The track itself is 25.378km long, or 15.86 miles. This year, there were 127 cars starting the race of all of the different classes from the GT3 cars which go round the track in 8 and a bit minutes, to the front drive touring car type racers that take more like 12 to 13 minutes to do a lap.
That’s a Herbie lining up on the starting grid. This was a VW Beetle RSR, one of 5 cars in the SP 3T class for little cars with turbos. This class also had the crowd favourite Dacia Logan. The first Dacia in the race was destroyed last year in a huge crash in the night time and they came back with an upgraded one this year.
It makes for compelling racing with cars of different speeds and capabilities racing each other. The classes are limited mostly by engine size and whether they have a turbo. There’s an article about it at the link here. There is also a Balance of Performance system, which looks to even out the small differences in the cars. Sometimes they get it wrong and a car gets overly restricted but most of the time, they get the cars supremely well balanced against each other. There’s still overtaking but it means that as the race develops, you have no idea who will come out on top at the end. At Nurburgring, this goes into the pit stops as well. Instead of racing style pit stops, all of the teams have an enforced minimum pit stop time so that no one is disadvantaged if their pit area has a slower fuel pump than the others.
The race is a firm favourite with fans as well. This was from the formation lap, where the crowds are allowed in to cheer on the cars they’re following. And then they have plenty of time to retreat behind the barriers before the cars come back round, at racing speeds.
And incidents definitely do happen, with the crowds being kept well away from any flying bits of motorcar like what happened in the incident above. Both drivers ok, just shaken up. The one in the sideways car took a turn on the commentary later as well.
What happened there was another car had dropped down oil on the track, which caused the grey car ahead to have a heavy crash. The driver stayed inside until the marshals could get them, which was a Very Good Thing as the driver of the red car also caught the oil at high speed and was out of control right into when they went into the other car. Both drivers ok, the safety standards in these cars are excellent.
Incidents occur throughout the race and the teams are allowed to recover cars in trouble and attempt to repair them enough to get them back racing again. Often, I’ll have the leaderboard as the active window and I’ll be listening in to the commentary while watching the numbers on the timing screen. The coverage is free via Youtube by the way, there’s no paywall (Le Mans is either paywalled for uninterrupted coverage or 25% ads on Channel Not To Be Named).
That’s the timing screen, with the lap being broken up into the sectors. I’m usually watching the numbers for the tail end of the field, where fast cars that have hit trouble are attempting to catch back up again. Or cars like the Dacia are steadily climbing up the field past cars that have had an incident. The commentary for the race is always very clear and interesting to listen to, maintaining what they do over the full duration of the race.
Oh ! Looking in there, you’ll see some numbers like the 29:33.804 where a car has taken half an hour to catch up with someone who has crashed. It makes a delightful mess of the timing screen :-D. Or it could even be the Glickenhaus car down in 118th place there, which had just got back on the track after over an hour in the pits for repairs. (It had a new engine the night before the race and continued to have issues).
Sometimes the cars have really bad issues, or they decide to follow the crowd and start up the barbecue in the evening.
Yep, there’s a car at the end of that line of fire … Driver ok again but that car wasn’t going anywhere after that. It probably had a fuel line pop off.
But with the darkening scene above, that marks the time to start wrapping up here … I had a feeling that we weren’t going to get a full 24 hours of race, the weather prediction was showing consistent rain which means cloud. The Nurburgring is situation up in those Eiffel Mountains, which means the circuit is prone to being affected by low cloud and fog. The race was red flag stopped at about midnight 20 local time as thickening fog made it too dangerous to race. There was an attempt to restart coming up to the end, with several laps behind the safety car before …
The race was called off due to the heavy fog. A sad end to a race that showed a lot of promise for its first third, not even a sprint at the end to let them race it out for a lap or two.
So, sad end to the race this time but I’ll be looking forwards to the next one in June next year, although it looks like the actual race date will be shifted so it doesn’t clash with Le Mans.
That’s going to be my weekend after tying up loose ends at work tomorrow. Hope it’s a good race ! Have a great weekend everyone.