Keeping up with Sabine at BMW's fit camp
The competition among racers isn’t restricted to the track as Gavin Conway found out when he joined an all-star BMW training camp.
We’ll be hard to find, that’s for sure. Heading north on the A22 out of Verona, we peel off at Roverto and point our rented Punto at the Dolomites. Climbing a crazy weave of road for what seems like forever, we make ourselves small as transcontinental coaches coming down swing wide on the hairpins. Photographer Tim Wren points out the spots where no guard rails guard, points out the vertigo-inducing plummet that would ensue if I get it wrong. Then, in the closing dark, my rear-view flashes violently with mainbeam and fogs. It’s a BMW 3-Series and by god its coming fast. Opposite locking, too, out of every hairpin and now its right behind me and I mean right behind me. Then it goes past in a mad mechanical thrash of straight-six as we approach a tunnel. It’s a new 3-Series so I have to wonder. Is it one of them?
They have been making this pilgrimage for nine years. Ostensibly, it is about fitness and an opportunity for BMW’s driver squad to learn new training techniques. A chance, too, for BMW to see how their boys (and ladies) are doing. It’s also our chance to lurk about the place and watch this crew, to see what six of the most qualified racing drivers in the world get up to when they’re locked together on a remote alpine hillside. All that competitiveness, all that ego, all that pride.
It starts, as most good tales do, in the bar. Our first chance to see them together, relaxed and in civvies, and already there is a thing that unites them. Smallness; with few exceptions, the BMW squad are titchy little guys, more jockey than giant-killer. Even Jo Winkelhock, who has a heroically angular face, is compact, slightly built. This is a good way for a racing driver to be, obviously, but it lends this group a homogeneity that disguises the terrific diversity of their experience, their background. They are German, Italian, Belgian, Finnish, French and Danish. Between them, they have over 120 years of race experience.
Winkelhock, Dalmas and Martini celebrate their 1999 Le Mans victory
Yannick Dalmas and Pierluigi Martini are messing with eachother’s hair. Jo Winkelhock, waiting for his beer at the bar, gets a goosing from Jörg Müller. JJ Lehto is in earnest conversation with a madly scribbling journo, shaking his head and looking quite serious. Tom Kristensen stands shyly apart, sipping a strawberry punch. And Sabine Reck (soon to be Schmitz), the lone woman racer, is snorting with laughter, head right back and filling the room with happy noise.
Doctor Vincenzo Tota calls things to order and everybody drapes themselves casually over the scattered chairs. Tota explains – for our benefit – what the fitness program that has been running all week seeks to achieve. In spite of his massive qualifications, the Doctor, who looks after the program, is laid back, smiling, friendly. But the drivers have heard it all before, so Jo Winkelhock takes the lead in some gentle micky taking. The atmosphere is end-of-term relaxed. For these guys, it feels like neutral ground and I leave them, wreathed in Jo’s cigarette smoke, to finish their beers in peace.
The next morning starts with a gym workout. They look like a squad again, feet and arms moving in absolutely perfect synchronisation, padding out a rhythm on the floor that becomes hypnotic. Jo, though, wanders in casually late, takes his spot to do press ups against the wall. Everybody grabs their left ankle for one-handed presses. Jo goes for his right.
And then the circuit training and amid the back-slapping and shadow-boxing blokeishness, we glimpse racing drivers. This exercise requires that they complete a difficult course that includes running a slalom with small hurdles, barrel rolling over mats and doing push-ups. And they are so competitive that I desperately want to tell them to take it easy; Pierluigi Martini goes so hard on the slalom course that I’m convinced he’ll break an ankle, landing so brutally at such a nasty angle. None of them let up for an instant, and though there is still a happy banter, none can conceal that momentary flash of disappointment and anger when the times are read and they’re not the quickest. The winner – by an absolutely devastating margin – is gracious, even a bit humble. Smokin’ Jo even allows himself a little victory smoke later on.
Outside, on the mountain bikes, the guys are cutting up. Wheelies, hopping on the front wheel, trying to knock each other off and Tom Kristensen has found himself a pile of snow from which to launch his bike. It’s beginning to look like a Beatles movie; on the way back up the hill, an impromptu sprint breaks out; Smokin’ Jo cruises up behind our estate car and grabs a luggage rail. Thereby winning the race.
And Sabine just gets stuck right in. She’s as loud and laddish as the best, a perma-smiler with a ground shaking laugh. She grew up at the Nürburgring, started driving it in her mid teens, won there the year before – and many previous - in a Group N M3. “There wasn’t really anything to do in the village, so I couldn’t wait to start driving the Nürburgring,” she says. “I used to take my mother’s 325 out, and without her knowing, we would put slicks on it to make it better around there. One night I forgot to take them off and the next day, she was wondering what had gone wrong with her tyres.” I ask about her style, and she gives me the crossed-arm stance of the fully opposite-locked. And then I think of one more question for the grinning Sabine: “You don’t by any chance run a new BMW 3-Series?”
She swears she doesn’t.