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Intro

To bend this digressing intro back towards Porsches: I also ferried a sweet 1979 911SC Targa from one end of the Netherlands to its winter storage at the other end. A car like that provides an interesting contrast to the 964: it makes you realise how much more modern the 964 is. Which is both good and bad. Being able to shift quickly without concentrating very hard is nice. Being able to fit behind the wheel is nice too. On the other hand, the raw immediacy of the SC and its less dampened engine sounds make it a winner in its own right.

Nürburgring

I won't try to provide you with a proper summary of the full report, but a few highlights are worth mentioning here. When I arrived on Thursday evening it was wet. Very wet. After a bit of chatting and some standing around I decided to do a very slow lap anyway. It's a good thing I tried to be slow: the usual slippery-when-wet spots were indeed slippery, but there were some new slippery-when-wet spots too. One of those was the left kink before Bergwerk, where Niki Lauda lost most of his ears, and where I lost the back of the 964 a bit after turning in. Luckily at a sedate pace, and a single correction sent me on my way to the next corner in the generally approved fashion (i.e., with the rear wheels following the fronts).

During that same trip, Ben had to use a fire extinguisher on a Golf to prevent it from burning to the ground. During the winter months I'd already acquired a fire extinguisher, but I hadn't gotten round to fitting it in the 964. I made a mental note to take care of that. It took until the end of the season, but I now have a fire extinguisher mounted to the passenger seat, courtesy of Rennsport Breda.

A more touristy highlight was a walk up the old Steilstrecke. It's a shortcut that bypasses the famous Karussell corner. "Steil" means "steep", and steep it was. Soren and I were taking some pictures and doing some spectating in that area, and decided to take the short but steep way home. It's difficult to imagine just how steep it is, until you've stood on it.

The entire weekend reconfirmed how much fun it is to drive your 964 on a challenging track. A nice side effect is that you usually end up with some pictures of your car in action. Most of them are nothing special, but this weekend Jeppe took an outstanding picture of my car in the early morning fog. Thanks Jeppe!

Stelvio, and other assorted passes

My 964 was the odd man out: it wasn't silver, and it wasn't a convertible. The rest of the group consisted of a Boxster-S (Soren), an Opel Speedster (Keith), a Honda S2000 (Robin), and a Lotus Elise (Joerg).

Traveling in a 5-car convoy attracts a bit of attention now and then, especially if the convoy consists of sportscars. On top of an Italian mountain we'd parked our cars in a neat row, and within minutes groups of boys and girls went over to the cars to have their picture taken while posing in front of one of our cars.

During this trip we didn't see much of the modern passes. Instead of those new-fangled highway things we took the old roads wherever possible. Driving a cobblestone surface at speed was an interesting experience. In many places weeds had grown in the cracks between the stones: apparantly most people favour the smooth new highways instead of the twisty narrow roads of old.

The mountains provided some good backdrops for car photography. Some passes that we drove: Klausen, Glaubenbüelen, Glaubenberg, Gotthard, Nufenen, Grimsel, Susten, San Bernardino, Julier, Flüela, and course the Stelvio. There were some more passes, but I don't recall all the names.

The Stelvio pass itself was brilliant, despite crappy weather. Lots and lots of switchbacks, going higher and higher, without ever seeming to end. As if to compensate for the crappy weather on the way up we had snow during the night. Soren called me at some stupidly early hour to tell me that there was a thick blanket of snow covering everything, and that I really should get out of bed and climb the nearest mountain. To put the amount of snow in perspective, I took a picture of a footprint with my Porsche keys next to it. The snow was easily 5cm deep.

After arriving at the top, we were treated to a spectacular view. A 75x50cm print of this picture now hangs on my living room wall. Without the bunny logo, of course :)

With the sun starting to shine most of the snow that covered the cars was starting to melt quickly. Without too much delay we made our way down the Stelvio on the other side, again stopping off for an impromptu group picture on the way down.

Shortly afterwards Joerg had to peel off to attend to some family business, and after some quick "see you soon!"s we went on our way, in the general direction of home.

This handful of pictures and assorted paragraphs really can't do a trip such as this one justice: it is one of the best trips I ever did.

More Nürburgring

I won't bother you with the details of every single Ring-trip, but my testdrive in a Boxster-S may be worth singling out. To kill some time while we were waiting for the boys at Ring Racing to change tyres on a mate's car, Soren invited me for a testdrive in his Boxster-S. Judging from the size of his smiles every time we came to the top of a mountain pass during our little trip through the Alps a few weeks earlier I concluded that the Boxster was good fun to drive. Now it was time to find out for myself.

Since the sun was shining we started by putting the roof down. Cool. We took a twisty mountain road that I was familiar with, and the Boxster was indeed a blast to drive. It was almost too easy to go quick in it, and the PSM didn't interfere with normal spirited driving. I liked it very much, even more than I'd expected. It's quick, it makes all the right noises, and being able to put the roof down makes it even better. The one thing that I didn't like was the position of the steering wheel. It was too low for me, causing the same problems as I had in my 964 before fitting a steering column extension.

The 2004 edition of the "Swedish Weekend" (funny how a name sticks sometimes; I coined the phrase in one of my Nürburgring trip reports as there were loads of Swedes around during one particular weekend, and now the full weekend in September when many of the Swedes make an annual trek to the Ring is called the Swedish Weekend) started by enlisting a bunch of Ringers to give me a hand swapping my road brake pads for Pagid Oranges. To be more precise, I retrieved tools and took pictures, while most of the enlisted guys stood around watching Adri and Dave doing most of the work.

It didn't look all that complicated, and I resolved to do the next swap myself. We did notice that the brake wear sensors were a huge PITA. As I don't really need them anyway as I change back and forth between track pads and road pads on a regular basis, I arranged to meet Adri at a friend's place later that year to get rid of them.

Time flies when you're having fun, and the long weekend went by in a flash. Of course I couldn't resist taking some pictures of the nice machinery going round the track, such as ThoRSten in his 964RS.

Annual service

The work that needed to be done was a regular 20k km service. Of course there were one or two little things that only get noticed when you start taking things apart, such as the rubber boot around a drifeshaft, or a little resonance in the intake. All in all I was pleasantly surprised to receive a bill that was markedly lower than I was used to, for the same quality of work.

A nice side effect of going to an independent is that it seems to attract more Porsche enthusiasts, such as Ben Kooijmans. I'd met Ben previously during a trip to Zandvoort, where he took passengers around in his race-prepped 911. Since then he's traded his black 3.2 for something a bit quicker (and more noticeable).

Handling training

The aim of the training is to develop a better feel for the way the car behaves. When does it let go, and how do you control once it does? Having done "regular" anti-skid trainings, including a full day of Porsche-specific training at Lelystad, I felt it was time to do a more advanced training. Which is exactly what Stéphane offers. As a test driver and race driver he has access to several facilities, and can put together a made-to-measure training. In my case that was lots of drifting, which also teaches you quite a bit about vision and weight-transfer.

A training like this one is quite hard work, but it's also great fun. Let's face it, how many opportunities are there to play around near the limits of adhesion in a car like the 964? On a closed-off training ground you can experiment all you like without fear of running into something.

Some things worth noting:

• Controlled prolonged drifting in a 964 is bloody difficult.
• Even the pros initially have a hard time getting it right, even if they owned a 964 C2 themselves.
• According to people who drift cars every day of the week to earn a living, the 964 is the most difficult car to drift in the 911 line-up. The 993, 993RS, SC, 3.2, 996, GT3 are all easier. There must be a technical explanation for this, but nobody seems to have it.

2005: Even more Nürburgring

At one point I was comparing the braking point for the chicane near the end of the F1 track with a mate who drives a stripped and fully track-prepped BMW E30. He braked a little after the 100m sign. Which surprised me a little as I was coming into the chicane at a significantly higher speed, and I braked about halfway between the 100m and the 50m sign. Just for kicks I braked at his braking point with him in the passenger seat, and we nearly came to a full stop before the chicane. Yup, those brakes are pretty good, especially for a car with 200,000km on the clock. Instead of taking a picture of the odometer rolling over to 200,000 I decided to take the car round the Ring for another lap to make it roll over in the proper environment.

The trip ended with some unexpected damage: I hit a bird on the way home. The bird was walking across the road, and braking wouldn't have done much good. Now, if I was a bird I wouldn't walk across a road, I'd fly. Then again, this particular bird proved it wasn't very good at flying... There was just enough space in front of the crossing bird to get by without hitting anything. Until the damn bird decided it needed to practice its flying skills, and managed to end up exactly in my path. The resulting cloud of feathers was rather impressive, but I was less impressed by the fact that a little plastic cover between the turn indicator and the fog light had come loose. At least it didn't crack my window or put a dent in the car. A quick call to Rennsport made sure that the proper part was in stock when I dropped by a week or so later, and within 5 minutes the 964 was restored to its original good looks.

A visit to Auto Jetten

Naturally, I've seen quite a few garages and showrooms from the inside over the course of the years, but this one was by far the best. In this case it's not just the attention to detail that was impressive, or the well-chosen colours, or the natural use of the available space, or any of a number of aspects: what makes this garage great is the well thought-out concept and its consistent execution. I haven't seen an official Porsche Center yet that achieves the same level of perfection. If I were them I'd sell the whole package to an architect.

To entertain the wide range of visitors a balloon contest was organised, along with testdrives in a Speedster. They also managed to put together an impressive line-up of Opel oldtimers. To provide a contrast, I just had to put my 964 in the display area in front of the building before I left. On the way out the Speedster with its regular driver was just coming back in, allowing us to exchange thumb-up signs.

Upcoming work

Money permitting I'll get lots of seals and rubber tubing near the engine replaced over the winter. I might even get the paint touched up in one or two locations where it got damaged because of a mirror-glass that came loose and dangled in the breeze scratching up the passenger side door.

Other than that, the car is running as strong as ever: it fires up at the first attempt every time, idles smoothly, pulls hard, and makes all the right noises.