A real shit way to roll into 2023.

The best sound is after the sharp right at Aremberg, under the bridge at the start of Fuchsröhre and all the way down to the bottom of the Nordschleife at Breidscheid, engines and turbos spooled up and redlining. Better than the long straight of Döttinger-Höhe. That corner is where the Nürburgring starts for me, into the forest and a tight, narrow winding road with no runoff that goes on and on. I feel the velocity and get buffeted by braking and acceleration just watching laps. And the racing. All that plus terrifying high-speed passes, weather that changes in five minutes and across the 24 kilometre track. My safe space is 250 km/h down the fox hole at 24 Hour Nürburgring.
I would have watched it all night, but like last year it got red-flagged. Fog and rain and not the kind of visibility for maximum hoonage. 24 hours turned into a 3–hour sprint. And the two commentators living their best bogan uncle selves. Something about Scandinavian Flick, keto diet, taking the apex with the shopping trolley, beer bottles at the back balancing out the weight, I don’t believe you were going to the fruit and veggies, it’s beer and chips for you, broken struts, broken steering racks, making the straight race line between spun–out Audi and Armco on slippery wet grass, cutting and shaving tread into slicks to make one last set of tires.
I love the sound and noise and velocity and can smell the engines and brake pads and metal and fluids and hear the ratchets and air guns and feel the crew lying on their backs contorting themselves into the machinery and the whole process of attrition, people and engineering being worn down over those long high-speed hours, this is art.
Yeah, I binged Fast & Furious Spy Racers: Rio. Of course I did. And fuck me if Rafaela Moreno’s race suit isn’t the motorsport I live for. Very much want. Very much wish I could serve Femme Hoonage Realness like that and very much love her thrashing Group C cars around Rio. And Avrielle Corti voicing her? ???????
24 hours with no racing from before midnight till eight in the morning. So much rain. 15.452 seconds between the 1st place Bimmer and the 2nd place Audi.
Charlie Martin coming in 57th and 4th in class, and racing first and last sessions.
And how diligent and unremarkable was all the mask wearing? Maybe it’s because drivers and crews are used to wearing things over their faces, but doing a transmission replacement in the wet at midnight and keeping those noses and mouths covered shows how basic and possible it is to Wear a Fucking Mask. And as soon as the winning driver was out of his car, there was someone there with a mask.
It’s so much easier and less bullshit if the rule is you have to wear a mask at all times, no exceptions. Everyone did it, very few noses exposed, everyone did it and not just for the cameras. Maybe it took the race organisers setting the rules and consequences which achieved this level of getting it right. Drivers and teams have a very strict set of non-negotiable race rules to adhere to, making this just one more rule to either follow or not race at all. Very comfortable with doing it like this.
I truly love this race, love the Nürburgring and love that in the middle of a pandemic they did the work to create this gorgeous bit of hoonage art.
Seven hours in. Night and rain and hydroplaning and attrition. Giti ladies women Girls Only team shredding a sikk as VW Golf VI GTI. Bad weather Red Flag, all the cars garaged and crews stripping and cleaning.
And the two old Brit geezer commentators shoutout to Charlie Martin. I have never heard motorsport commentators saying, “trans woman.” Ever. Barely ever are there cis women drivers, and from Bubba Wallace in NASCAR to Lewis Hamilton in F1 barely ever seen Black drivers. They got her pronouns right, they used her middle name, Christina, also, just in case Charlie was too unisex for us hoons, they got the terminology and context down too.
Any dickhead saying this isn’t relevant / leave politics out of sport / something something meritocracy / what’s that got to do with racing, on God I will call them a waahmbulance once I’ve sorted their ‘opinions’ with my mechanic baba’s Snap-On tools.
I’ve always been a hoon and loved motorsport. I’m already old cunt auntie and Charlie racing at Nürburgring 24h, being respectfully spoken about by the commentators, all that, is so fucking important.
“… hollow-eyed victims of some sort of weird abuse”
My absolute favourite race. It could only be better if Le Mans Prototype cars were also racing. I genuinely, completely love this.
This year, thanks to the pandemic and Europe’s meh response, the race is in autumn, a couple of weeks after Le Mans 24h, and in heaps of rain. Heaps of rain. It’s going to be messy, dirty attrition.
And! Charlie Martin is racing! No. 242 BMW M240i. Yup, there’s a trans woman exactly right now shredding the ’Ring.
Berlin getting in on the emergency bike lane trip. I had to go up to P’berg to pick up my laptop and found all of Kottbusser Damm on both sides hastily converted from double-parked cars to orange stripes of bike lane awaiting a quick once-over with the street sweeper. Dead cruisy to ride and realistically, like other cities in Europe using the pandemic as a chance to permanently improve things, this needs to stay. Personally, I’d have made it as wide as two lanes and consigned the centre one only to cars, ’cos we all know how much people love to double-park and as much as I love hoonage, private vehicle ownership has gotta go.
This is one of the better maps of the actual border of West Berlin, 1:50000 scale and traces a few parts I hadn’t seen so clearly before. Like West Berlin’s exclaves. The Berliner Mauerweg feels a lot smoother than the raggedness I saw on maps and experienced when biking, as though the act of memorialising shaved off the annoying bits, and in turn reified this version of a border. An area that shifted over time becomes a single line.
The messy bits are around Dreilinden, which leads into the exclave of Steinstücken; some of Potsdam — though the crossing of the Havel means there’s never a true way, unless I paddle myself over; Staaken and Seeburg east of Spandau; and the stretch from Wilhelmsruh up to Glienicke. Feels like time to ride the Mauerweg again.
This turned out to be slightly more involved than anticipated. I should have known: Iain Banks is always in the details. Until starting this — and I’m still reading The Crow Road, for the maybe 3rd time — I hadn’t realised how fundamentally cars and vehicles form characters in his novels, much as landscape does, and if the landscape is up the Scottish end of town, the cars are solidly British, with rare excursions to various four-wheeled hoonage from across Europe.
I haven’t really decided how to do this, making it up as I go along, I thought to include the sentence where the car was named enough to make an educated guess at, which sometimes turned into multiple lines. Published in 1992, The Crow Road is set late–’89 to late–’90, at its most current period, with narratives in a number of periods back to just post–war. I’ve tried to match cars to the periods they were mentioned in, so no car is newer than end–’80s, and ‘old’ is 15–20 years minimum, relative to the scene’s time period. I discovered just how specific Banks was in choosing the ensemble of cars (2/3 of the way through and at least 27) when I was looking for an image of a Metro — Austin, MG, Rover, it got passed around — and found there was a period when it had no marque, it was just Metro. That’s the one he was talking about. And the Peugeot 209 isn’t, so either that’s an error, or this is Banks subtly trolling his Scottish alternate / coexisting realities again, like in Whit or The Business. In this reality, probably a 205.
And thank you to Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and all the contributors, editors, photographers who enlightened and educated me, and provided the images for this banger collection of whips here.
That’s enough. Here are the cars of Iain Banks’ The Crow Road.
Instead I’d sold Fraud Siesta, my Car.
‘Lagonda.’
‘Sorry, Gran?’
‘The car; it’s a Lagona Rapide Saloon’
‘Yes,’ I said, smiling a little ruefully to myself. ‘Yes, I know’
The car came screaming up the crematorium drive, leaves swirling into the air behind. It was a green Rover, and had to be doing sixty.
Everybody in the crowd outside the crematorium was watching the green 216 as it skidded to a stop, avoiding a head-on collision with the Urvill’s Bentley Eight by only a few centimetres.
The big Super Snipe growled into the car park, heeling as it turned and stopping with the passenger’s door opposite Kennith.
‘Anyway, couldn’t we take the Rover?’ Kenneth wasn’t keen on the Morgan; its stiff ride hurt his back and gave him a headache, and Fergus drove too fast in the ancient open-top. Maybe it was the sight of all that British Racing Green paint and the leather strap across the bonnet. The Rover, 3.5 though it was, seemed to calm Fergus a little.
The upholstery of Fergus’s Rover was cleansed of the debris and stains associated with Verity’s birth and the car continued to serve the Urvill family for another five years or so until 1975, when it was traded in (for what Prentice thereafter would maintain was a scandalously small sum, considering that the thing ought to have been preserved as some sort of internationally-recognised shrine to Beauty) for an Aston Martin DB6.
“We got into the Fiesta; she dumped the brolly in the back.”
I kind of wished I’d sat behind Verity; I wouldn’t have seen so much of her – not even a hint of that slim, smooth face, frowning in concentration as she barrelled the big black Beemer towards the next corner – but I wouldn’t have been able to see the speedometer either.
Verity wiggled her bottom, plonked it back down, calmly braked and shifted up to fifth, dawdling along behind the green Parceline truck while she waited for it to overtake an Esso tanker.
Her battered, motley-panelled 2CV had looked out of place in Ascot Square, where I think that anything less than a two-year old Golf GTi, Peugeot 209 or Renault 5 was considered to be only just above banger status, even as a third car, let alone a second.
‘I play games’, she told me.
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah,’ she nodded, licking her lips, ‘Like Name That Tail-Light.’
‘What?’ I laughed
‘True,’ she said. ‘See that car up ahead?’
I looked at the two red lights. ‘Yeah.’
‘See how high up the lights are, not too far apart?’
‘Yo.’
‘Renault 5’
‘No Kidding!’
‘Mm-hmm. One it’s overtaking?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Horizontally divided lights; that’s an old Cortina, mark 3.’
‘Good grief.’
‘Here’s a Beemer. New five series … I think, about to pass us; should have lights that slant in slightly at the bottom. ’
Verity Walker, clad in a short black dress, was dancing sinuously on the roof of Uncle Fergus’ Range Rover.
‘Ha!’ Prentice said, as the battered Cortina II drew to a stop just past them.
He helped Fergus drag the small corpse down the slope to the track, where the Land Rover was parked, and accepted a lift back to the road.
An hour or so later I saw my mother’s green Metro, just about to turn out of the drive-way of Hamish and Tone’s house.
‘Na,’ he said. The Volvo estate accelerated down the straight through the forest towards Port Ann. ‘Though maggoty meat and people with one eye did come into it at one point.’
Fiona brought the Rover to a halt behind a beaten-up Mini, standing on the gravel in front of the castle’s main entrance.
‘Isn’t that Fergus?’ he said, nodding.
‘Where?’
‘Racing green Jag, heading north.’
‘Is that what Ferg’s driving these days?’ Rory said, rising up in his seat a little to watch the car pass.
I’ve always had this fantasy, that, after uncle Rory borrowed his flat-mate Andy’s motorbike and headed off into the sunset, he crashed somewhere, maybe coming down to Gallanach; came off the road and fell down some gully nobody’s looked into for the last ten years, or – rather more likely, I suppose – crashed into the water, and there’s a Suzuki 185 GT lying just under the waves of Lock Lomond, or Loch Long, or Loch Fyne, its rider somehow entangled in it, reduced by now to a skeleton in borrowed leathers, somewhere underwater, perhaps between here and Glasgow; and we all pass it every time we make the journey, maybe only a few tens of metres away from him, and very probably will never know.
One of my pals — graduated, employed, moving on to better things — sold me his old VW Golf, and I drove down to Lochgair most weekends, usually on a Thursday night as I didn’t have any classes on a Friday.
We took Lewis and Verity’s new soft-top XR3i — roof down, heater up full — out into the grey-pink dawn and drove through Lochgilphead and then into Gallanach and just cruised about the town, waving at the people still walking about the place and shouting Happy New Year! one and all.
I parked the Golf behind a Bristol Brigand which sat half on the gravel and half on the grass.
Altogether now.