Chapter 4: Tu Felix Austria

I was a bit nervous. It was the last Sunday before school. Our morning ritual was a well-practiced routine by now. I woke up with my gorgeous naked girl in my arms, we did our morning hygiene, and then went for a run. I worked out in the morning and then helped Regina erect the big tent over the pool.

In Germany September means 'game over' as far as the summer is concerned, so we would soon start to heat the pool and there was an oil-oven for the tent as well, so we could even use it at the height of winter. In those parts of the world that's an immense luxury.

Jenny and I spent the afternoon wading through the textbooks we'd need for the next day.

Since we we wanted to keep up our morning ritual, school days meant getting up at 6am, a short splash in the pool and then a short run. Thankfully school was just a ten minutes walk away.

What I realized immediately was that Jenny was obviously a rather sought after catch. Quite a lot of guys gave me a openly sour or challenging look when we walked onto the schoolyard with Jenny holding my hand rather possessively.

The inevitable didn't take long to happen. A stocky guy obstructed our path and looked at me with 'challenge' written all over his face.

"Jetzt hör mir mal zu, Ami. Unsere Hühner treten wir selber. Laß das Mädel in Ruhe oder Du kriegst es mit mir zu tun."

Jenny looked terrified, so I guessed the guy had a bit of a reputation. It took me a while to make sense of it, but the gist of the message was that the local male population reckoned they didn't need an American to help them fuck their girls properly and that I would get into trouble with him if I didn't stay away from the girl the uncouth Y-chromosome brigade apparently considered theirs.

He forgot the rest of his rehearsed speech after I'd wordlessly buried my steel-capped Doc Martins in his crotch without warning and he landed in a puddle of his own vomit. Just his rotten luck. I had enough experience with being bullied back home. I never went into places with lots of people without steel capped boots and pepper spray.

For obvious reasons the principal was not very fond of my way of introducing myself. I explained the situation to him and Jenny backed up my testimony. With a final warning that this was East Germany and not the Wild West he let me go without further action.

Unlike the big boss, a lot of peers seemed to be rather happy about the way I had handled the situation. The guy, his name was Michael Günther, had apparently tormented a lot of people over the years. I was confused. I mean how hard can it be to just kick a guy in the nuts? They could have solved that problem years ago. I never had any understanding for bullies.

The first day was a slog right away. I had no less than eight lessons: German, Math, Biology, a Physics double lesson, Geography, History and English. The latter for me was of course a crash-course German lesson, much to my elation, taught by none other than Regina. But don't think we goofed off or something. If anything, Regina was a hard task master when she slipped into teacher mode.

When we walked out of school at 1600, Jenny and I went straight to the track to get two more hours of practice in before it went dark. September would be the last month of practice for the year. Starting from October it went dark too early and the temperatures were too low anyway.

The week continued as it had begun, as a hard slog of seven or eight hours a day and just as I had expected, German was really giving me headaches. Those advanced grammatical concepts and deeply philosophical discussions about literature left me scratching my head constantly. Thankfully Jenny was sitting next to me and the teacher did not object when she was whispering to me in class, explaining things I had trouble following.

Thankfully I had the Friday off as we had to get going to be in Austria for the first race. I was especially happy that Jenny and Regina went with me. They weren't part of the active racing team, but as a teacher Regina had a bit of pull and got the principals permission to take a day off. The team had already left during the day, while Regina, Jenny and I left home directly after school.

Going in her little Golf would have been supremely uncomfortable, but during the week a Mercedes E class wagon in team colors had been delivered with a signature under the contract that looked suspiciously like dad's.

The drive down to Spielberg in Austria was 480 miles through the Czech Republic. Folding down the rear seats made space in the large car to shove in a double-size mattress, so we had basically a double bed on wheels. Jenny and I didn't need a second invitation. Being the detail obsessed man he was, dad had even ordered two harnesses to be installed that allowed us to sleep in the back while being properly secured in case of an accident. It restricted us in how closely we could cuddle up to each other, but holding Jenny in my arms was not worth risking our lives or Regina's license. Holding each others hand was enough for us to feel connected and we slept through most of the ten hour drive.

We had arrived sometime around 4am and Regina just left Jenny and me sleeping peacefully in the car. It was seven when we woke up almost simultaneously. We trundled into the hotel and the receptionist had obviously been informed, handing us our key. Regina hadn't even bothered booking separate rooms for us. We had a double suite with a single king-size bed.

The A1 Ring in Spielberg, Austria was a relatively short but scenic track, but sadly only a mere shadow of the once legendary Österreichring. The long sweeping corners of the old track had mainly been replaced by tight right-handers and hairpins – just another track lobotomized by Hermann Tilke.

I had practiced the track on my computer, using Microprose's Grandprix 3, so I had a faint idea where which comers were going. I spent most of the free practice getting comfortable in my car on a different track than the pancake-flat Eurospeedway. The A1 Ring has quite a few elevation changes and the altitude of 800 meters above sea-level put a noticeable damper on engine performance.

Runaway championship leader Nico Rosberg of Germany and local heroes Reinhard Kofler and Hannes Neuhauser of Austria were trading fastest laps and I was actually quite pleased with my 13th position in free practice, the second best B-car.

The first qualifying on Friday afternoon was a disaster. The track temperature had gone up by over fifteen degrees and thus my tire pressures were all wrong. I was sliding around as if I was driving on ice and ended up a disappointing 18th grid position for the first race. Five other guys in old cars had qualified in front of me.

What had hampered us on Friday though was a blessing on Saturday morning, when we ran the qualifying for the second race. The handling of the car was sweet and I could really thrash the bugger around and qualified 10th – best of the older cars.

Jenny gave me a quick kiss before they shooed her away from the pre-start area. Junior Formula races are different from Formula One in the fact that all cars go out on track together and take position on the starting grid. We were facing the same weather change as the day before, so we hoped we had found the correct tire pressures, after effectively sacrificing the first qualifying for it.

On the formation lap I noticed that the handling was much better this time round. I thrashed the car left and right on the straights to get some heat into the tires. I had done the procedure so many times in a kart, but I still felt somewhat nervous about it.

When the lights went off I tried to stay away from everybody, even lifting slightly early before turn one. That cost me two positions, but I instantly got five back, because several guys in the midfield had not managed to come to an agreement about the running order into the races first turn. Trying to avoid the carnage I got a tap from behind, but no damaged occurred and I caught the resulting tank-slapper. The race settled down over the next three laps and I started planning for some improvements in position. Three of the older cars had been caught out in the first-turn shunt, but there were still two ahead of me – one in fourteenth, directly in front of me and the best positioned one in twelfth.

The problem with a spec series is that all cars are the same, except if you've got an older one, like I had. The 'B cars' had about eighteen horsepower less, which hurt doubly due to the altitude of the track, and we were missing some of the aerodynamic upgrades of the 2002 chassis. My direct opponent however was in the same predicament, so we were going at it with equal weapons. The car ahead was driven by a Swiss girl, who kept loosing a bit of speed by breaking early into Mobilkom-Kurve, the tight right-hander that brought us back onto the start-finish straight. At the end of lap 5 I set her up and with the speed surplus out of the last turn I sailed past her on the straight.

Unfortunately, due to her last-turn mistakes she had already lost about three seconds to the car ahead, and that one was a 2002 spec car. I switched to qualifying mode and tried to up the pace, taking a bit more risk. It helped that the twelfth-position 2001 car was holding up the guy in thirteenth, so I could catch up over the next four laps. With only three more remaining, I had to try something as we were now three cars battling for 12th to 14th. I braked late into the hairpin with smoking tires and took them by surprise, but the guy in the other B car countered upon acceleration out of the tight corner. At least I had the 2002 car behind me.

I immediately knew I had Flintstone'd my tires. The vibration from the flat spots on my front tires were so bad, I could barely see clearly. It took a few corners to get adjusted, but damn, the vibrations were an energy drain. I had gone for a little less rear wing than most other people and I had another run at the guy in twelfth at the same corner as the lap before. The problem with flat-spotted tires is that they will always stop rotating at the flattened spot, so even though I braked earlier again, I had smoking tires again. The other guy had apparently expected me to try the same stunt and had braked at the last possible moment himself. In fact, he had braked a little too late and beached it in the gravel trap.

The last two laps were torture, but I held it together and I came home twelfth – which I thought was not too bad for my debut. The race ended with an upset win by a German guy from a small one-car team. Championship leader Rosberg had only finished fifth. Our two guys in the 2002 cars finished 6th and 8th. Peter was especially happy that I had driven the fastest lap of any B car, almost a second faster than all others, but of course that had been before I had re-modeled my tires into squares. The vibrations had rattled me so badly, I was hurting all over. I could only hope Regina's training with mom had been sufficient. I was really in need of a good massage.

I gave her a questioning look when Regina stripped naked in Jenny and my hotel room to give me a massage.

"Oh come on, you like to see the two of us naked," she said with a mischievous chuckle and ground her bare pussy against my butt cheeks after 'saddling up'.

Unwilling to complain I shrugged and enjoyed the relaxing feeling of Regina's fingers kneading my tortured muscles.

"That looked so wild when you out-braked the two guys," Jenny beamed, sitting on the bed, next to my head, in a lotus position.

"Yeah, and then I rattled the fillings out of my teeth afterwards," I groaned when Regina found a particularly tight muscle strain in my right shoulder.

I thanked Regina once she had kneaded all the knots out of my muscles. She dressed again, gave both Jenny and me a good-night kiss and left for her room. We took a shower together and retired for bed. I had to run another race the next morning.

I had thought I'd been nervous the day before, but that was nothing in comparison to Sunday morning. I was starting tenth, right where the big shunt had happened the day before. I didn't even think about the fact that I was actually shooting for points.

The start was okay and I could hold my position, but my low rear-wing setting to make up for the straight-line speed deficit was making it hard in the corners. What didn't help either was that I nearly clattered into Rosberg's car. He had spun on lap 4. That gave me ninth position, but at the same time I had a veritable 'Trulli train' behind me.

For those unfamiliar with the term, it refers to a certain 'talent' of Italian Formula One driver Jarno Trulli, who was racing for the Renault works team at the time. He had a talent to put in blindingly quick qualifying laps, but wouldn't be able to follow up on that in terms of race pace. He would often hold up a lot of faster cars behind him because he was difficult to overtake.

Looking into my rear view mirrors I could see that I had at least six cars following me closely like coaches after a locomotive – hence the name 'Trulli train'. Especially the guy behind me was becoming increasingly desperate. He had tapped the back of my car twice already, trying to spin me out of the way. One of my team mates was directly ahead of me, but by lap 8 he was already five seconds up the road.

Going into the hairpin, the guy behind me was desperate enough to try the same stunt I had done the day before and went past me into the breaking zone, all four tires smoking. The obstructed view caught some other guy unaware and they backed off, so I only lost one position.