Tag: Bergmeister Tour

With our first races behind us it’s time to start focussing on the BergMeister Tour 2012. It’s hard to describe what the BergMeister is all about, but I’ll try.

I have regularly spent time in the South of France, visiting my sister, who lives and works there and I became enamored with the landscape of the Alpes Maritimes. During day trips my wife and I would criss cross the landscape in rental cars, looking for vantage points for photo’s, and at some stage I decided we needed to take the R Gruppe down here.

I gauged the interest among friends in the USA and at R Gruppe Treffen in 2009 the BergMeister Tour was born. TwinSpark partner John Glynn was there and the pals of Zuffenhaus and Steven Harris. Although in the end out of that group onlyJohn and Steven joined us on the first Tour [...]

Today the men were separated from the boys. We had a very full program on Winter Trial 2012. The roads were very tricky due to alternating wet, icy and dry surfaces. One 911 driven by a WRC crack team folded itself around a tree, some of our friends got threatened by an angry farmer, but all of us came home with a smile on our faces.

If you didn’t keep pace today, you were sure to make a steep drop down the leader board, because there were so many opportunities to lose point you wouldn’t believe it. The terrain here in Slovenia is quite rough and there were several outstanding opportunities to launch yourself into a 700-metre abyss. We gracefully declined those invitations, but a Jag just ahead of us got dangerously close.

The tests today were a lot of fun, but driven on dry surfaces. This means [...]

Under grey skies we entered the Black Forest, where we encountered the first heavy snow cover.

Gorgeous landscape and great driving roads. Somewhat icy remnants on the road made for fingertip handling of the steering wheel to nurse Silverado downhill. We ran three regularities today and had a few misses which were partly recovered. The field was very close after yesterday, but today the last regularity seems to be keeping many people busy, as it’s somewhat quiet in the bar. Here’s a link to some video:

Winter Trial 2012 Test 1

We took off in 24th position, due to my mistake on the first test, but because the first day was not very challenging, the field was very close together. We had 5 minutes between number 1 and ourselves. In this rally damage is usually measured in hours in the end, so we plod away and hope to make fewer mistakes than others.

To avoid [...]