The Ultimate European Road Trip? Part Two #blogpost

BMW World, Leaving Germany, Heading To Austria And Our First Taste Of The Alps In Italy

Part two of the story of my 2015 European Road Trip

If you haven’t read part one yet, you can find it here

Before I continue the story I’d just like to say a massive thank you to everyone that upvoted my first #blogpost about this trip.
I never thought anyone would read it, but at this moment while I am writing this it has over 225 upvotes and was even an editor’s pick! Thank you so much CTzens, you guys are the best! :D

Part Two: The Adventure Continues

It’s safe to say the Frankfurt hostel we spent the night in was in a bit of a rough area! The hostel itself was really good, just the street where the cars were parked was a little bit dodgy to say the least! But anyway, onwards to Munich!

After making our way through the morning traffic of Frankfurt which included an older German woman being grumpy at me even though she was an inch from taking the front end off of my car by trying to push her way across lanes while we were stopped at traffic lights, which forced me into the wrong lane and had to do some “interesting” manoeuvres further up the road to get back on the correct route! But it wasn’t long until we had regrouped and were back on the Autobahn and following the signs for Munich. Combining the amount of lorries, road works and lack of unrestricted sections on our blast down to Munich we didn’t build up that much speed, when we could we cruised at 120MPH, which as I said previously is an amazing feeling. When the GPS says 120 miles until destination it doesn’t feel too bad, it’s only an hour away! Those Germans sure know how to build a motorway network and keep them running efficiently!

Munich came into view and along with it a tall building bearing the mark of one of the biggest German car manufacturers, BMW. We were heading to BMW World or BMW Welt as they call it.

It is an awesome looking building, filled with all of BMW’s brands, BMW itself of course, along with BMW Motorbikes, Mini, and Rolls Royce. As far as i know, if you order a brand new BMW you can even arrange the ultimate BMW collection from BMW Welt but i’m sure that would come at quite a price!

Welcome To BMW Welt

Even the underground car park felt kind of special, it seemed like we were the only non-BMW cars in the place apart from an Audi Q7 we had found ourselves parked next too, there were M cars everywhere, beautiful luxury BMW’s and classic BMW’s as well filling the hundreds of parking spaces. We grabbed our cameras, headed to the very modern looking glass elevator and headed upstairs.

At this point I’ll let some of the photos speak for themselves from inside this striking building, I have to admit I never was a huge BMW fan, but did this place change my opinion? Maybe, just maybe…….

We aimed straight for the M Performance section first. I spotted their M4 and was keen to have a closer look. After sitting in the car and playing with some of the controls, it’s a really nice place to be, and I would imagine it would be a brilliant weapon of choice for the trip we were on!

We decided to get a closer look at the heart of the beast, so we popped open the bonnet. As we expected, as is the case with most modern cars, there wasn’t much to see apart from plastic covers, but there is an awesome looking carbon fibre strut brace which looks very cool, unfortunately I didn’t get a photo of it!

BMW Welt had provided us with a perfect break from that morning’s mileage and it was soon time to jump back into the cars.

On The Road Again

We made the most of the last section of German motorway before we crossed into Austria. 80MPH speed limits and a lot of speed cameras was our initial observations, but the amazing views of the Alps in the distance made up for this and fueled our imaginations for the next few days of driving that would be coming soon.

Our goal for that night was to make it to the Austrian town of Innsbruck, nestled in a valley it is surrounded by beautiful mountains, and was a welcome sight after a couple hours on a motorway with speed limits!

After arriving in Innsbruck and finding somewhere to park the cars, it was time to grab our bags, get something to eat, get a drink and get some sleep.

The next day would be our first chance of the trip to explore the Alps.

The first job of the day was always giving the cars a check over, oil, coolant, tyre pressures, even windscreen washer fluid, the cars had been driven hard in temperatures pushing 40 degrees Celsius, so we didn’t want someone breaking down in the middle of the Alps.

Time to get ready to head to Italy, we left Innsbruck and headed south using Austria’s speed limited motorway network again, crossing the Italian border and arriving in the small town of Vipiteno in northern Italy to get all our video recording equipment ready. All of the cars were kitted out with various small action cameras to capture the jaw dropping roads that were soon to come. My GT86 ran with one camera on the bonnet (a Contour Roam 2) and another on the roof (a GoPro Hero 4 Silver). Inside the car I had a second GoPro (a Hero basic released in 2014) on charge so it could be swapped out with any of the other cameras if their batteries died, but at the same time it could be fitted to my headrest mount that was attached to the passenger seat. My co-driver Daniel was in charge of hand held video using my Canon 650D DSLR camera, fitted with a Rode VideoMic Go shotgun style microphone so we could pick up those awesome tunnel sounds from the cars.

Bella Italia

Time to head for the hills! This was the start of the Jaufenpass in the Tyrol region of Italy. The views were outstanding! The colours seemed so vibrant! And the roads were just fantastic! Our first section had an alpine forest at either side with only glimpses of the height we were gaining seen through the dense trees. The road climbed higher into the mountains by the use of hairpins so the driving style was, foot down up to the corner, heel and toe down a gear and let the engine and gravity take some speed off of the car, turn in tight with a small amount of throttle to keep momentum, then as the car starts to straighten up get back on the power, and repeat as necessary! In the Toyota, I made sure that I had my traction control switched off, I didn’t want any movement in the back end of the car to result in the traction/stability control to kick in and power being cut to the rear wheels when coming out of the tight corners. There was plenty of grip but I did enjoy the moments when the back end would kick out a little bit!

We pulled over to take in the views and let the slower traffic we had become stuck behind build up a head start before we chased them down again. Awe struck at the scenery we checked our cameras and continued onwards and upwards. Soon the upwards gradient had ended and we were now on the downwards slopes.

This was hard on all of our cars brakes but the Cayman S with its Porsche branded Brembo’s handled it the best, the GT86 handled it the worst! Not in terms of brake pedal feel and braking ability but in terms of heat management it was definitely the worst, let me explain why. As we descended and braked heavily into the start of the many switchbacks on the road I was sure I could hear a noise, it sounded like a sort of on-off scraping noise as something rotated on a wheel I prayed it wasn’t the start of something bad and plowed on down the hill. Maybe I’d picked up some debris from the road, a fallen twig from a tree? A stone caught in something? As long as it didn’t get worse, or even better if it went away it would be fine. It did get worse. A lot worse, the sound got louder and louder, at this point I was really worried. Daniel radio’d the other cars asking if they could pull over so we could investigate. Once we did get stopped I stared at the four brake assemblies hoping to see some simple solution to the noise, I couldn’t see anything, all was well, but the heat coming from the brakes was insane! They had been pushed very hard and this would seem to be the obvious cause of the sound issue. They had done well though, they hadn’t faded too much, I doubt I would be here writing this if I had got to a corner and the brake pedal had went to the floor!

We continued on down the string of hairpins to the bottom of the valley, as the road slowed into a small village the sound of my tired brakes eased off and we took the opportunity of stopping at a restaurant for lunch. Since we were in Italy it would be rude to not have a pizza!

We sat outside and the sun quickly cooked our group, a blaze from the sky that would result in the worst sunburn of the trip so far for us all! We sat and discussed the possibility of buying a big house with an even bigger garage and leaving some track focussed cars there for the luxurious summer holidays we would have, everyone is allowed to dream aren’t they?

We refuelled ourselves and admired the beautiful scenery. The cars ticked as they cooled down in a shaded spot in the small car park, soon to be back on the road driven harder than the morning’s activities, Austria was calling us back from over the mountains……..

Once again, thank you for reading!

Still to come……..

Heading back over the Alps into Austria via the Timmelsjoch Pass and tackling the Silvretta Hochalpenstrasse before another long drive to Heidelberg in Germany