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Hai Mattzel, if you take away the winning RSR and the BMW, we got a great set-up for the Spa 24 Hours

Life in motorsport can be really heartbreaking.

My job within the team is to follow the race by watching laptimes, pitstop times, keeping an eye on the competitors and is purely based on numbers.
Every unscheduled pitstop or situation quickly makes changes in these numbers and you are the first who realizes what that have in result.

We started with two cars.
#156 VW Golf GTI class SP3T
#183 VW Golf TDI class D1T running on the Continental streetlegal tires

Both cars were setup not for maximum speed, because in these classes the old endurance character is more important. It's not a sprint race like the big guns have.
BTW, the Continental tire was perfect for the changing conditions at the beginning.

The GTI was running fine until the gearbox broke.
This was the first big change in my numbers. We don't know what happened. A brand new gearbox, which should easily work with our engine, the power and the torque.
But that's racing. It tooks as around 1h(I still wish we had the changing system of the Le Mans winning Audi R8) and my numbers clearly said, that we now race for the "golden pineapple" (German saying).
Something around 10th position in class.
From that moment the car was again running perfectly. Only fuel, tires and driver change. And by using the numbers, we tried more laps during the night.

Meanwhile we were "double-digit" - a place within the top 100. Sounds funny, but you after a throwback you look for new goals, like within top 100,
3rd page of the leaderboard, within top 10 of the class and so on - and had a good chance to catch two or maybe three competitors.
Next stop was schedules for 14:24 - 1:36h or 96min before the end of the race.
We could do fast 8 laps with one tank of fuel, normal 9 laps, 10 with fuelsaving pace, but 11 only during the night -a really wide range and also depends on the driver.
Remeber one lap are around 25km! Reason for the big differences is our mapping, which needs some deeper investigation.

10 laps with 10min laptime should work, so we decided to go fuelsaving, shifting 500 rpm ealier and so on.
Enough advance to the cars behind us, but we knew two infront of us had to do an extra stop.

Car in, new tires(which are changed faster than refueling, fuel, Kai, our most experienced driver, in and out he goes.
Our realtime tracking system showed the car after Flugplatz on the way to Schwedenkreuz, when Kai said on the radio light vibrations on the front.
At the Bergwerk section "heavy vibrations, slowing down, will come in".
You already can imagine what happend to the numbers on my pitstand...
"Ich stehe vor der Steilstrecke, kein Vortrieb" (I stay infront of the Steilstrecke, no drive).
A few moments later: "All 4 wheelbolts are broken on the front left"
Suddenly, not a single piece of tiredness, quick cometogether of the team. 80mins to the end of the race.
BEcause I know a lot of trails around the track, I took the quad, my teammate Michael and all stuff we needed and decided to try to repair the car.
We had to see the checkered flag.
20mins of wild driving through/around a long traffic jam (that's why we use a quad and not a car) we arrived at the car.
Big surprise: the fans there had already removed the broken parts, one was cleaning the wheel, two were laying under the car looking for other damages while a fourth one collected the pieces.
Like a pizza delivery service we only had to bring the new parts!
Another 10 minutes later the car was fixed and back on track.

At this point a very, very big thank you to the guys from the Steilstrecke, the Captain Ahab group and who else was involved there.
That was magic!
One of the guys only said: "I keep my parking place clean" - which means that he repaired all stranded cars in this pocket.
I took some pictures of that situation and will post them later on.

The car was back on track, big high five at the Steilstrecke and Michael and I were happy and drove back to the pits.

Kai made another pitstop for a quick car check and a new tire.
The numbers were already unimportant, we only wanted to see the chequered flag.
He left the pits for the final lap.
At Brünnchen, 3/4 of the lap was done, a faster car crashed into him and let the car heavily crash into the barrier.
Out!

Michael and I arrived at the pits, were extremly happy that we managed to bring the car quickly back on track, you feel a bit like a hero and than you see the faces of the teammates.
They are shock frozen, red eyes, tears, ... that's not how heros look like...
Someone said "your car is crashed"
"No, we just fixed it, he is back on track"
"No, he crashed, it is on TV"
I still get goose bumps writing this...

Imagine a deep, deep whole and you fall into it and you fall forever.
People hug each others and a sea of tears is growing in pit #31.

Numbers? what are numbers for? These are emotions. Real emotions. It is one of the hardest, deeply disappointing moment ever.
There is nothing positive you find and immediately questioning all this.
You ask yourselve all the questions words - up and down.

Our second car, the TDI, finished damn good 3rd in class with streetlegal tires!
The car was sick with flywheel problems and we reduced speed 4,5hrs before the end of the race. The drivers did a fantastic job and drove the car home.
THere is nothing bad, nothing to say about it.

But the bad emotions are so overwhelming, that it took long for us to smile about the good result of the diesel.
Sorry to the drivers, you guys did a superb job and you deserve a much happier crew!

So we cleaned at pits up, the stuff into the truck and got our cars back.
After a short dinner, the day was over - after 39hrs awake!

The GTI has to be renewed completly. Broken wheel, brokens suspension, three times broken support frame, all bodyparts underneath the windows are hardly damaged.
Whoever hit Kai, he did a great job.

I hope my english is good enough to give you out there are a little view into racing and that racing can be very tough!
Thank you all for any kind of your support!!

Steffen
RSG Wolfsburg

Remember that Golf that crashed with 5 minutes to go?, well this is their story.... well worth a read, sums up the N24 nicely

ADAC Chairman Peter Meyer throwing a bombshell via a quote on DailySportsCar saying that 2012 might well be the last Nurby 24 Hours, "because the Nurburgring owners clearly don't know how it works". The ADAC-contract expires in 2012 and with the possible legal action coming up against those owners, they don't seem to be very eager to renew it.