The Ultimate European Road Trip? Part One #blogpost

3 cars, 6 petrolheads, 2500 miles, 8 days in Europe, the ultimate driving holiday?

A story of my 2015 European road trip.

From the v-max attempts on the unrestricted sections of Autobahn in Germany to the stunning Alpine passes of Italy and Austria, those roads were the best I have ever driven! Along with some boiling coolant, fiery brake pads and German highway police officers who have a slight discrimination against Japanese cars, this was definitely an unforgettable trip.

Last year I went on a trip that I have been dreaming about taking for years, a petrol powered holiday with some like minded friends who all love cars. This is the first #blogpost I have ever written on Car Throttle, the story of this trip is a long one so I’ll be posting it in small sections of what happened each day of our Europe tour, I hope you guys enjoy it!

Part One: Gentlemen, Start Your Engines!

I seemed to have the same conversation in the office with a few people in the run up to the trip, all of them non-petrolheads.

“So where are you going on holiday this year?” is how it would start
“Me and a few friends are going round Europe, Germany, Italy, Austria, I’m really looking forward to it” I would reply
“Wow, so are you flying to different cities? or taking a train?”
“No we are driving”
“Oh…….so like renting a car for you all to drive around in?” Now they had a confused look on their face
“No, we are taking our own cars”

And it’s at this point that the confusion would disappear and be replaced with a look of shear horror

“Why would you want to do that?”

I would try to explain but it wouldn’t matter to them, it was a stupid idea and that was the end of it. Spending my money to be lying beside a swimming pool in the sun for a week would have been so much better………….

Non-petrolheads just don’t understand the lure of a real road trip. They think they do, but they don’t. Facebook is always covered in posts over summer “woohoo, look at us in a car! #roadtrip” normally accompanied by a selfie of some sort.

Well that just doesn’t count! Just because you’ve driven 20 minutes to your local beach and bought an ice cream, it’s hardly the Mille Miglia is it?

A Real Road Trip

"The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself" - William Least Heat-Moon

My GT86 was loaded up with my bag and all of camera gear for the weeks trip, I set off at 5am to meet up with the rest of the guys who were joining us. I’ll quickly go over the car lineup, first up was my own Toyota GT86, it was completely stock with no modifications, and in the car with me was my co-driver Daniel. Next on the list is Brett and Rhys in Brett’s Porsche Cayman S, it had a cat back exhaust fitted to it which made it sound brilliant. And last but not least we had Ali and Colin in Ali’s Honda S2000, fitted with an Invidia Q300 cat back exhaust and an AEM V2 air intake, so you can imagine how awesome it sounds!

After a couple of photos we were ready to go, our aim for the first day was to make it to Hull to catch the overnight ferry to Zeebrugge in Belgium, ready to take on Europe’s best roads! To be honest the drive down from the North East of Scotland was pretty uneventful as I’m sure you can imagine. We got used to driving in our mini convoy, made sure our radios we were carrying to keep in touch between cars were working and tested out some GoPro camera angles to see if they looked good.

We made it to Hull later that day and loaded on the cars.

The Excitement Grows

By the time we had got to the ferry port in Hull the check in was busy and we sat in traffic for about half an hour, after the paperwork exercise of handing over booking confirmations and passports and being given a big green paper hook thing to go round our rear view mirror it was time to climb the ramp into the belly of the ferry, the car deck echoed with the slightest noise which of course was a cue for Ali in the S2000 to give it’s Invidia Q300 exhaust a roar, a noise we would soon grow to love in the many tunnels we would come across on the continent.

Cars parked up, bags unpacked, it was time to sit down to our evening meal and a drink and set sail. Europe’s best driving roads awaited……..

On The Other Side Of The Road

Once again the S2000 and the Cayman used the waiting time wisely by checking the acoustics of the cavernous car deck by revving their nuts off and making their upgraded exhaust systems heard to all aboard, to the pleasure of ourselves and the low number of fellow car enthusiasts on board, and to the annoyance of those people who find that sort of thing a bit out of order. The GT86 however, with its standard exhaust, did not join in, it would have been pointless over the deafening tuner-esque sound of the Honda’s Invidia Q300 and the Porsche’s lovely exotic note coming from its modified factory exhaust.

Slowly but surely the cars in front of us slowly rolled along their lanes and headed for the shining light of freedom at the mouth of the ship. We descended the loading ramp and made our way to passport control, after being allowed through we were now let loose on the continent.

This was it, the adventure had started now for real! We were on European soil and it was awesome! The sun was shining and the sky was a clear blue, this was going to be the best driving trip ever!

The Belgian motorway system is hardly the best in the world, that award surely falls to the Germans and I will explain why in the very near future, but the roads are fairly smooth, the traffic wasn’t too bad and with three lanes we could keep a nice pace and soak up the atmosphere, we were making our final Brussels approach within a couple of hours, our goal was right in the city centre, a car museum called Autoworld, if we were going to take in some culture on this holiday we might as well start with something car related!

Our one and only visit to a car museum for the trip over and done with we headed back to the cars.

Sat navs fired up, we were ready to leave Brussels, the GT86 running its back up TomTom due to the built in sat nav that the car came with crapping itself constantly, but I had prepared for it by taking and pre-programming the TomTom with all our stops so no problems there.

The Autobahn

Out on the motorway I spotted a sign up ahead that looked similar to the one we had seen when crossing into Holland earlier that day, the European flag with what I assumed said “Welcome to Germany” on it, in German of course, we crossed the border again without anything to mark the occasion. Next I saw a sign ahead that I was sure I knew what it meant, a white circle marked 120 with a black line diagonally crossing through it, “so can we go as fast as we like now?” I turned to Daniel and asked, and at that point an Audi RS5 flew past in the fast lane at +120MPH “well that answers that question!”

No speed limits? That sounds dangerous? Well I’m sure it can be and is dangerous in certain situations. But, being allowed to go as fast as you like allows you to actually concentrate on your driving more, and after you get over the excitement of driving at 130MPH for an extended period of time on the perfectly straight and perfectly surfaced Autobahns, you can relax and keep the car at that speed constantly and just cruise along at double the UK national speed limit! It’s the best thing ever!

But first let’s have some fun! My goal for the Autobahn was to hit 200KMH which is 124MPH, it took me less than 5 minutes of crossing the German border to do it…..

What next? Might as well just keep going when I get the chance and see what number I can get on the speedo was my theory. The Toyota GT86 will do a top speed of 143MPH and the Goodyear Eagle F1 tyres I had fitted had a V speed rating which meant they could handle 149MPH, so there was no chance of doing any damage or having a blowout………..I hoped!

The road was so smooth and so straight and the fast lane was perfectly clear, here was my chance, drop a gear and with my right foot planted, 115, 117, 122, 125, 127, 129, 132, 133, 134, 135 and at that point I had to lift off because of traffic ahead. By this time we were so far ahead of the Honda and Porsche we were out of radio range, so we pulled into the middle lane and waited for everyone to catch up. We tried a couple times over the radio to get in touch with the other two cars to no avail before hearing a crackle of “I think Scott is having too much fun on the Autobahn!” Which was 100% accurate!

For a real petrolhead the Autobahn should definitely be on your bucket list!

When we were cruising on the Autobahn a few cars beeped at us, not in anger though. Their occupants waved and cheered at seeing our convoy on our European adventure, it was funny thinking about it, this wasn’t the Gumball 3000, we weren’t in supercars, just a group of normal guys in some sports cars on the hunt for some awesome roads. But these other car guys could tell and they appreciated our adventurous spirit of seeing the three plucky Brits cruising at 3 figure speeds on their motorway network having the time of their lives.

It wasn’t long until we arrived on the outskirts of Frankfurt, after all our fun on the autobahn we had lost touch with the Cayman and we could only keep our fingers crossed that they were already making their way through the city streets on their way to the youth hostel we were staying at that night. As we made our we deeper and deeper into the bowels of Frankfurt we grew slightly more anxious that maybe we were in the area of the city that had more “character” let’s put it that way! Either way we were just happy to have somewhere to get some sleep!

If you have made it this far, thanks for reading! I’ll be adding the next part soon, heading from Frankfurt to BMW World in Munich and then to Innsbruck in Austria, before finally taking on our first Alpine pass on the border between Italy and Austria.