31.08. 2005
To finish first, you first have to (be) fin(n)ish.
OMV ADAC Rally Deutschland
Wow, what an event. Probably the highlight of the year. Jens and i have around 1800 pictures and 79 videos and i have only 500MB of webspace. Conclusion: you won't see everything here, i'm sorry.
We have a lot of material about the superstars: Super Seb, Bosse and Petter of course, not to forget Francois Duval, Marko Märtin, Toni Gardemeister, etc. But since i don't have the space to upload all of this and you will probably find tons of pictures of them elsewhere on the net, i decided to take a different approach: I will present some drivers which we somehow followed the whole weekend and most of the time without any intention to do so:
As usual, you can click on a thumbnail to open a bigger version of the image. Videos have a small v in their thumbnail.
20 - Nicolas Bernardi and Jean-Marc Fortin
in a Bozian Peugeot 206 WRC. One of the few WRCs of which we have good pictures from the start at Trier. We saw him again coming into and driving out of the service saturday morning. Later we were at the right place at the right time when Nicolas braked way too late at the second corner at SS10 Panzerplatte 2. And we have nice pictures from another corner of Panzerplatte.
Unfortunately he retired one stage later.
11 - Armin Schwarz and Klaus Wicha
in a Skoda Fabia WRC. For the last one and a half decade Armin has been the only top pilot from Germany, so of course we kept track of him during our visit to the Rally. We first saw him at the show start in Trier during the 5 minutes it was raining like hell. I was really frightened to damage my camera when i took the pictures there.
Of course we saw him on the stages we visited on friday too but on saturday all went wrong: We were waiting at the service for Armin to come in but it wasn't him driving; the mechanics had to push the car into the service area. We later heard that Armin retired at this point with a broken engine.
But despite the obvious disappointment he was kind enough to give autographs to the group of people, including us, waiting at the barrier - once again: thanks a lot Armin! We will sure miss you in 2006.
10 Gianluigi Galli and Guido dAmore vs. 4 - Roman Kresta and Jan Tomanek
in a Mitsubishi Lancer WRC. We only heard about his close fight with Roman Kresta after the rally on the Eurosport coverage. But even without knowing that he pushed so very hard to get 5th place you were feeling that he was right on the edge. Really a lot of fun to watch him.
And on the last serious stage, SS18 Freisen - Westrich, we saw live how Roman Kresta lost his last chance to get this 5th place back from Galli.
The S1600 drivers
These cars, with their 2 wheel drive, were honestly more fun to watch when the WRCs, especially on SS10 Panzerplatte. And the drivers were quite relaxed too! We went to St.Wendel on Saturday and i was kind of disappointed about the spectator points there: The best place was occupied by a Suzuki VIP grandstand.
So i decided to wait at the time control for the drivers to come by, while Jens and Thomas went somewhere else. Toni Gardemeister was the only one of the top drivers to stop in front of the tc to give some autographs (unfortunately i didn't get one), all the other drivers waited about 600m down the road and then used the way to the tc to warm up their brakes and tires.
But the S1600 drivers just stopped in front of the tc, got out of their cars and took the time to chat around a little bit with the fans waiting there. I was able to collect autographs from Guy Wilks, Per-Gunnar Andersson and Kris Meeke.
Legends from the past
I wasn't even born when these cars raced across the roads of this world. I only knew them from the excellent books by Reinhard Klein.
And it was Reinhard Klein who made it possible to see these cars for real: His group of friends who own some of the old works cars, calling themselfs slowlysideways, drove around some of the special stages after the current competition cars. And we had the possibility to see them again in an exhibition at the service park but at this point my camera was running out of energy, so we only have a handful of pictures of these cars standing still. But trust me, you don't really want to see this cars standing still.
[Fotos kommen noch, sobald ich Zeit habe]
Personal highlights
At our two visits to the service park, i was allways carrying my copy of "Rally" by Reinhard Klein with me. In this book, there is a page dedicated to all the important drivers who ever drove a rally in the last 30 years. So i thought it would be a nice idea to have a driver sign his profile in this book. What makes things difficult is the fact that the last year covered in this book is 1997. And the last drivers covered are Tommi and Colin, and even they have retired by now (allthough Colin will come back with Skoda).
But i didn't carry it around for nothing: When we arrived at the service park on friday, i saw Luis Moya (who is now working for my favourite blue team) standing around with a guy from Pirelli. And Luis was kind enough to come over and sign a picture of him celebrating with Carlos after the Safari Rally 1990 (being a codriver there isn't a dedicated profile of him in the book, which he could have signed).
