For those of you at the Annual Dinner you will already be aware of this event. We're still putting the finishing touches to it but already have most of it done. Hotels are confirmed for almost all locations and the Michelin Test Facility at Clermont Ferrard is confirmed in association with our friends in France.
Until I have more details to confirm I thought I'd at least show you what we've been doodling in our spare time!
Well finally sorted out my tyres, decided to plump for a new set of Dunlops which I'm getting fitted at Oxford HPC on Wednesday morning en-route to Folkestone!
I'm a few days ahead of you on my own personal (solo) European roadtrip. The main purpose was to visit a huge model making show in Dortmund at the end of the week coming up, but it gradually turned into a tour of other places, mainly car museums, and I've never been to Green Hell....so I thought I'd give that a go - just arrived here, ready for tomorrow's public day.
I did notice a few solo members of your trip and I thought I'd give a couple of tips (from my own experience over the last 3 days) of driving a R35 solo in Europe.
The First Peage you'll come to after the tunnel has ticket machines on both the left hand right sides of the car! Wind down the driver side window, press the button, Perfect........but it'll be the only one you'll see!....The next one I came to was manned (well, womanned) and she just couldn't be bothered to reach at all through the left hand window - so I hopped out and ran around - the clearance on the right hand door wasn't bad on this one but some are really tight.
A few more and I thought I had a system - approach the barrier, tight to the left hand side so you can clear the driver's door on whatever obstruction is there...stop the car just in front of the ticket machine - run round and pick up ticket or pay..........this was going good until I got to a remote off-ramp and couldn't work out why the machine wasn't giving me a ticket - eventually worked out it's because there are sensors in the road - so had to move car forward to get a ticket. Don't fall for this one!
Sooner or later you're going to have to lean over to a good 18" outside the passenger window (probably for car parks) so my advice would be don't have any clutter on the passenger seat, and practice a few times before you leave!
I notice you're going to the Porsche Museum - I was there this morning and parked in the underground car park just to the right of the museum. The car park itself has reasonable space on the entrance, exit and spaces....but on the way out you drive to the top of a slope and the ticket machine is just before the brow of the hill, so the car is 20 degrees from vertical, there's no way to get out, so you have to do the reach manouvre out of the passenger side...and then do the hill start procedure with a VW Golf right up your chuff.....If there's a group of you I would ask the first passenger to jump out and then assist the solo drivers in the rest of the group with this tricky manouvre(!)
Hope this helps
Don't know whether I should mention this...I thought the Porsche Museum was good (spent about an hour there)....but I thought the Mercedes Benz Museum (15 mins away) was Fantastic (spent a record breaking (for me) 2 hours there)
If you choose to give this a go follow signs for museum parking - you go round the back of the museum back along what looks like an access road - and you'll see parking to the right or museum parking to the left - go left - it looks like a horrendous hole in a wall, but is actually much easier that the Porsche car park (space to nip round and get/put your tickets on way out/in, decent spaces.....there's even a space for charging an electric car which I'm sure one of you could get away with!!)
Thanks for that Guy. Some really good information there.
rather than all this having to reach across milarky there is an alternative. I've never used it but the reports on it seem pretty good. Toll in France with Liber-t
For those that are interested, there is a Shell Garage at SHELL CHANNEL GATEWAY (3008), M20 JUNCTION 11 SALTWOOD. CT21 4GH . Tel 01303262242.
They have plenty of V Power petrol and is one junction before the Eurotunnel and the Holiday Inn Express. This will be your last chance to get 99 octane for some time as there are only Total with 97 octane Excellium stations for the next 160 miles in France.
waaaay too busy to even contemplate trying to join you at some point... but if you let me know when you're passing close to Milan, I'll try to see what I can do to say hello!!
Apart from those who took an extended tour over to the Nurburgring last night and will be there today as guests of Nissan all should be home safely now. The blog is a little behind but worth a read on the GTROC website. Oh, and for those that made it over to Nurburgring they even enjoyed dinner with Mizuno-san Sorry didn't we mention that beforehand?
Thanks for the feedback so far. If anyone wants to find out what they missed there is a thread in the Post-Event section and some blogs on the GTROC website (www.gtroc.org). Also, one of the magazines will be featuring the trip soon
For those that missed out we are considering running another one either as an extension to the Le Mans 24 Hour weekend or as a hook up start at the end of Le Mans. Please let me know if anyone is interested
Thank you to Bony Automobiles and our friends from the GTR club in France for a great day !
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