Hi all. Last weekend was all about the Ring. For those of you that haven't got a clue as of what I'm mumbling on about, I'll explain this 'new' term a bit. For starters I'm not referring to that movie threesome, you know the trio of which two have those dreadful open endings (*grin* sorry Stevie, I could not resist another chance bringing that one up again ;-) and it's not about some scary (but pretty good) movie with a videotape and bad things happening either. So what's it about then? A track. A Formula One race track to be exact. And to be more precise: one the most outrageous race tracks ever. Never has there, nor ever will there be a track like this. Picture this. A normal Formula One track is roughly, say, between two and a half and five kilometers long. The Ring isn't. It's length stretches over twenty kilometers long. A fast driver will still need about eight minutes to go round. And that's just one lap ... A normal Formula One track normally is quite flat. The Ring isn't. It's located in the Eiffel mountain area in Germany and that's not the flattest part of the country. The overall altitude of the Ring varies a whopping 300 meters! A normal Formula One track can, up to a certain point, be somewhat forgiving for driver errors. The Ring won't. Because most of the Ring basically is a street course you don't have many places you can have a run off and still be in one piece. This list can grow much longer of course. Only no track in existence can match the Ring, on whatever area of comparison. It's just that awesome. The Ring is the kind of circuit you treat with deep respect and be careful with. It's either that or it has it's terrible revenge and you'll end up with a broken car and ditto ego ... IF you're lucky. So what's so great about it then? How can you love a track as unforgiving as that specific one? Why is this track so fantastic to drive? I'll try to explain to you the way I personally see and experience the Ring. First of all I have a confession to make. I just love long tracks. Simply can't help it. With GPL we have for example the circuits of Spa, the Ring (of course) and the fabulous Isle of Man to name a few of my favorites. By the way, loving those tracks does not automatically mean that I'm lightning fast there (I whish), it's just that I really enjoy driving them very much. For EA's F1 Challenge (and it's MOD's) we have the Ring too and the Le Mans track which are by far my favorite two tracks to drive. And even with the brand new race sim GT Racing there is already a good version of the Ring available. Just give me that Viper GTS-R and the Ring and you won't need to worry about me getting passed the weekend ;-) My first encounter with the Ring in Grand Prix Legends was simply devastating. I remember driving it and about every 3 minutes wondering weather or not I had seen that part or bend or tree before, and which lap I was in and what time I did etc. Then after a twenty minute drive (and numerous new BRM's) I came to a building I knew for certain I had seen before. There even was a sign with my name on it. The street I drove through was called Pit Lane or something ... Okay okay, so maybe you guessed it a little sooner than I did. The Pit Lane thing was a joke of course, but the building was the one that's next to the main straight and after my twenty minute lovely country side drive I had finally finished one whole lap! Wow! After a couple of days my lap times started to drop below fifteen minutes and a week or so later I broke the ten minute barrier so life was smiling on me again. These days I'm stuck somewhere on the nine minute line with the BRM but with my 'normal' racing car, the Lotus 49, I've reached an cool eight twenty four something this weekend, which is not too bad. The benchmark for this circuit is an eight minute twenty one seconds so there's plenty room for improvement there. However, even though it might sound rather strange, finding as little as three seconds within eight plus minutes of lap time on a track that stretches over twenty kilometers is definitely not as easy as it sounds. Here's the thing. Finding a couple of tenths of seconds on Zandvoort for example is much easier. Every one and a half minute you start a whole new lap with new chances, new ways of improving yourself and you can remember that you should take that second corner just a little tighter than the lap before whereas when you have one hundred and seventy four turns and corners it gets truly difficult remembering what you did wrong at turn X. So before you actually are ready for improvement on a track of that size you have been driving around for days, weeks, sometimes months even. This is the challenge bit of long tracks. Getting better at driving them is so immensely rewarding. The only downside in that same challenge bit is that when I want to drive for half an hour the longer tracks give me less laps. In half an hour I can do fifteen to twenty laps on Zandvoort, but on the Ring only three ... The effect of this is that I don't start practicing the Ring unless I have a lot of time. There's no such thing as a quick lap around, I just end up really annoyed about crashing just about every other corner, because of the lack of concentration. The other aspect of long(er) tracks is the change of scenery. When the same road, houses, trees, etc passes you by every minute and a half you tend to doze off. Now I realize this may be a bit hard to believe. No matter how exiting racing in competition is, no matter the challenge you can find in a track, when you're there just 'doing' the laps you might slide into 'autopilot mode' and as a result your concentration might drop just a little, resulting in that earlier spoken of broken car. With longer tracks on the other hand, this kind of boredom seldom happens. You just have to stay focused all the way in order to make it home, and this is specially with killer tracks like the Ring. And on the occasional place where you can look up from the track and around a bit, you'll often be rewarded with the most beautiful view one has ever had ... from a racing car ;-) Next Thursday we have our race on the Ring, with the Dutch Simracing Zone, and I'm looking forward to it very much. I know already that there's no chance in life I'll win it, unless someone takes out the whole field, excluding me, with the start ... Since that isn't going to happen very likely. it's just going to be me, enjoying it all the way and feeling extremely proud when I pass the checkered flag in one piece when I survived the Ring. Thanks for listening :-)