I was helping lay the concrete base for a barn this morning so I didn’t go running, but I thought you might like to get a sense of what it’s like to be in my shoes from the following short video, taken on Monday. And for all of you that have been putting off going out running… get on out there, the weather is lovely!
From the mouth of babes
Nick & Anna’s son Sam is just as much of a car nut as his Dad and whenever they see a fast car, he points it out. His speech is not yet fully formed, so he says far-ca. He has also grasped the idea of more than one and pronounces another as ‘nuvva.
So you can imagine Nick’s blushes in a crowded supermarket car-park the other day when Sam saw first one, then a second fast car. Look daddy daddy… ‘nuvva far-ca.
Bless!
Lost and found department
Found: one black sock with red stripe in the shower room.
Any takers?
Update
Just a quick note to highlight the fact that I’ve now finished Nice’n icy… and added in Dessert for good measure.
And while I’m about it, can I mention that my legs are really stiff after my run yesterday?
Dessert
After all the serious fun… there was a day of ice-karting!
Last year I won the ice-karting and could have written loads of stuff about it.
This year I came third so I’ve not much to say for myself.
Except that I didn’t start using the brakes until we were messing around after the final. That’s when I started to remember how to go quickly! DUH!
Tracks in the UK would be unfamiliar with the concept of letting the punters carry on driving, round and round, until they actually get tired of driving. Or it gets dark. Which in our case happened around the same time! In fact, at one point Benny even re-started us in the other direction so that it would be more challenging!
The casualty of the day was my boot, which now has a radically remodelled sole… on account of me trying to warm my feet up by putting them too close to the fire! It actually took an hour in the jacuzzi and ten minutes in the sauna for me to feel my toes again at the end of the day. And a large G&T, a terrific bottle of wine and another evening of hilarious conversation to stop smarting about losing!
I must work on that!
Was Dai lost?
I’m really sorry Dai… if I’d realised it was you I would have offered you a lift mate! You must have been perishin’!
And knackered by the time you got home!
Nice ‘n icy
A couple of busy days later, I finally find time to upload a couple or three photos of the lake at Alvdalen. But it’s time for bed so I’ll have to fill in the details later!
And here are the details.
After another four-thirty alarm, I drove to Stansted in the pouring rain, left my car with a delighted parking attendant and checked in. And all before coffee, which I find remarkable. My traveling companions were Mark and Mike, both IT consultants and David, a dentist: all easily identifiable as fanatics by the stack of car mags in their bags.
We flew in to Skavsta, which is to the south-west of Stockholm and picked up our hire car: a Saab 95 2.0t estate, which by the way, is an excellent car with a whole lot of space. With four trained drivers, the journey north to Alvdalen was very pleasant, but contrary to previous years, the roads were largely tarmac coloured. I managed to get the graveyard shift at the end, which although only 45 minutes out of an almost six hour trip, was had by far the most interesting conditions. Here the roads were white and it was now dark, but the car was capable and we made good progress to the hotel.
At the hotel were the other three members of our group, Simon, Richard and Victoria, but also the previous group of friends which made for an excellent evening full of discursive conversation. Also present were our host and trainers from Volvo: Bert, Jerry and Tomas basically think we’re weird as, despite meeting a large number of highly committed drivers and test-drivers every year, we are apparently the only group that can spend the evenings discussing steering methods or the optimal order in which to train novice drivers in advanced driving techniques.
Out on the ice the next day, they were also surprised. They expect a very high standard of driving from this group, but despite having four ‘ice wirgins’, they didn’t have to pull a single car out of the bank in the whole day.
I should explain: we are on both a test track and a lake (with a frozen surface about half a metre thick), which are to all intents and purposes, low grip. Not slippery enough that you have to fight for balance (although Victoria did slip over a couple of times) but enough that you will stand stock still with your wheels spinning beneath you if you are too boisterous with the gas on take-off. The tracks are created at the beginning of the season by compacting the snow and they are then lovingly cleared, groomed and tended-to by Benny each night, much like a piste, so that all the car makers, tyre manufacturers and test drivers using the track have optimal conditions.
The exercises we were doing were designed to challenge our control over the cars, pushing us to experience cornering, braking and avoiding obstacles at relatively high speeds. The winter tyres that the Swedes use are studded in the main, which is a very good thing: the reason that the UK grinds to a halt in an inch of snow is because we drive on summer tyres – in northern European terms, these are the prevalent conditions that we face.
With summer tyres, a corner that might be comfortable on studs at 40mph would only be possible at 10mph without a loss of control. I know from experience that in very low grip conditions (on Mira wet-grip test-track) I can drive my car neatly round a corner at 10mph or slide it sideways under control at 12-15mph, but I am totally out of control at 17mph… the window is a really small one! The problems really start to pile up for someone driving in UK snow when they think that sufficient grip extends beyond about 10mph… or beyond an almost horizontal gradient!
During the course we get to drive a mixture of front-wheel’, rear-wheel’ and four-wheel drive cars and learn how to drive each to its strengths. The biggest grin factor for me has changed over the last couple of years. It was always the rear-wheel drive cars that gave me the greatest satisfaction and though it was a real hoot guiding the limousine around our little track sideways (it has such a long wheelbase that everything happens really slowly, making for some really graceful arcs), this year the four-wheel drive cars got me hooked.
Volvo’s new V70 and especially XC70 are absolutely marvellous cars and very quick with it!
But there’s a common misperception, which is that because four-wheel drive cars accelerate more quickly in low-grip conditions, they also brake more quickly and corner at higher speeds. Alas, it’s the same old rubber at each corner whether you have the latest 4×4 or a… pedal car. Same old limit of grip to expend on either cornering or braking, or some lessened combination of the two. Sure, in the safety of our one-way track, we can slide the car sideways into each corner and neatly power out. But this surface is much more forgiving than even wet tarmac… and in the dry the speed at which the car can bite back, if you get it wrong, increases significantly!
Which brings us back to steering techniques, although I don’t begin to have enough space here to even start that discussion again!
Sheet!
Okay okay OKAY! I go away occasionally… and occasionally I go away again! But I’m back now, so I’ll be running again very soon!
In the meantime, I thought you may be interested in my latest annual Swedish pilgrimage to worship at the alter named VCDA: The Volvo Cars Driving Academy. (I hope you can read Swedish!)
I’ll write more about it later, but I just saw this photo from the route home and thought I’d whet your appetite.
It was an interesting morning, conditions-wise with roads so slippery that at one point when I tested the brakes in a safe place, the wheels locked and we shot along like a bobsleigh. It was so slippery that the anti-lock brakes were fooled into thinking we were stationery and didn’t kick in until we had almost slowed to a halt under our own weight. Although we were in our Saab hire car, to be fair!
You might notice that in the photo above, Mark seems to be standing gingerly and holding on to the car… yes, it really was that slippery! You can actually see his reflection in the road!
So I particularly wanted to thank Jerry who, on an earlier course, insisted on teaching us how to power-turn a front-wheel drive car. At the time he described the situation we had found ourselves in perfectly: having finally run out of traction on a narrow hill. Steering on full lock, engage reverse, let out the clutch and blip the throttle; then straighten the wheels as the car finishes a graceful pivot around its rear wheels.
Watching the highlights of that day’s Swedish Rally, it was reassuring to know that we weren’t the only ones finding the conditions challenging!
A sign of the times
I just read the following in a paper given to me by a cherished client:
‘The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.’
My mother has a favourite quote (mine too!) that comments similarly on our experience at work:
‘We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be re-organised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by re-organising. A wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.’
Both quotes are true of our times but the latter is courtesy of Caius Petronius, a Roman general, in A.D. sixty-six, whilst the former is a comment not on the rise of the virtual child, but on the fall of Athens over two thousand years ago, being penned by Plato in B.C.392.
Above anything else I think it speaks volumes about standards and priorities in education at the time and here Dai might agree with me, that the Ancient Greeks and Romans showed such foresight to teach their loyal subjects such perfect written English.
Waa-aa-hhhhhhhhhh!
I’ve just noticed, for the first time since putting Clustermap on here in October last year, that there were NO visitors yesterday! Does no-one want me anymore?!