With that in mind, I’m posting a picture plus a couple of paragraphs from my trip to Belgium earlier this month. The only thing I knew about Namur before I was given the chance to go and give a presentation there was that the town had a football team called UR Namur. Predictably, I learned that morsel from a computer game, namely Championship Manager 03/04, when I plucked a team called Spa from the depths of obscure Belgian football. During my trip I also learned that Belgium is a rather small place, as in my travels I passed many, many of the places that I’d ‘visited’ on virtual cup ties. They all looked like dumps in real life, especially the ones with pretty sounding names like Chatelet and Charleroi.

En route to the stadium

Given this was the only thing I knew beforehand about what turned out to be the pleasant but unassuming university town of Namur, I thought I owed it to myself to go and visit UR’s ground after my conference finished. I could maybe even try to buy a scarf or something. So with the route to the stadium – an agreeable 10 minute walk along the residential riverside – punched into the iPod, I made my way out there.

The stadium was pretty small, with one of the advertising boards hanging loose and blowing in the wind, perhaps smacked by a wayward shot (search UR Namur on YouTube, it ain’t pretty). All the gates were shut apart from the main entrance, where a van was parked apparently on maintenance business. I walked along a gravel road by the pitch to where the hospitality suites (a line of portakabins placed end-to-end along the touchline) were, and opened the one entrance door. Two guys were in the next room talking, and the younger standing one beckoned me in. I explained my situation and curiosity in my erratic French, and was politely but firmly told there was ‘rien’ for enthusiasts. So that was that, and I went on my way.

I’d probably have received similarly short shrift if I went to a similar size ground in Scotland, and it seems there are plenty similarities between Scottish and Belgian football in terms of low quality and a lack of impact (I did hear though that some of the rivalries between wee Belgian teams are pretty fierce). UR Namur are languishing at the bottom of the Belgian fourth division, and if my French reading is half accurate they’ve been in a bit of financial bother recently. Bug that could just be my limited vocabulary, who knows.

Needless to say I didn’t get a scarf. But I did manage to pick up a Standard Liege hat in town, and with it the epiphany that I really must be careful about being interested in obscure football teams. After all, if I behaved this way in relation to music, people might start to call me a hipster…

What you have actually just reached is one of the most important buildings in the last twenty years of world motor sport and performance car engineering. A building that changed the game in endurance racing, fuelled one of the most competitive arms races in sports car history and gave some of the European performance car makers a huge fright. What you are facing is the head office of Nismo, the official performance division of Japanese car giant Nissan. And there’s a dirty Primera parked out front.

Out front at Nismo

The Nismo head office isn’t completely nondescript, though. The big red ‘NISMO’ lettering is visible from the elevated train tracks, and an R390 – still in full race livery and bearing the scars of twenty-four hours pounding round the Sarthe circuit – sits parked up parallel to the full-length glass section of the ground floor wall. There’s an A4 information sheet in Japanese about the ‘390 Blu-Tacced to the window, but that’s all. Not even any lamps to illuminate the multi-million pound machine in the fading light. The room behind it contains some chairs and tables laid out in a classroom format with a projector screen at the front. Apart from a few photos of race-winning cars spaced out around the room, the walls are bare.

The place looks so closed that I’m already preparing for the jolt that will come when my hand pulls on the locked door. I can see a couple of bone-dry umbrellas in the stand just inside the door that could have been there for weeks. To my surprise, the door opens and I enter the foyer. No lights are on. A plastic chain cordons off the staircase and narrow passageway to the left that lead to the room with the R390. One would need a good zoom lens and a back capable of stooping low to get any kind of good photo of the Le Mans machine from here. Ahead of me is a panel onto which are screwed and stuck various entry plates for famous races – Le Mans, Sebring, Daytona, Suzuka – and a low wood and glass cabinet with a few small trophies in it. A laminated A4 sheet lying on top of the cabinet describes an employee’s success in a recent clubman race at Fuji Speedway.

Not a soul is to be seen. The only sign of recent activity in the place is the large Christmas wreath that has bizarrely been bolted to the wall next to the race plates. Some light streams out through the only connecting door onwards, but it is partially blocked by a large red tool-chest and a stack of wheels. It looks like the kind of place one would get shouted at if one entered.

Note the Christmas wreath

Wondering if there’s anything else here before I head back to the station, I head back outside, make a left turn and wander down the side street that the Nismo building borders. This is where things get interesting. The industrial unit stretches backwards, the full-length glass windows on the ground floor blocked by tool chests, stacks of tyres and exhaust pipes. Behind is a semi-covered car park, empty save for a few performance Nissans – a stunning white R32 GT-R, a fierce Stagea estate and a tuned-to-the-hilt Micra. There’s another, bigger garage behind the front building, some other garages that look like they might belong to someone else on the right, and, just in front of a gate at the end of the road, a red-and-black Nismo Performance Racing team truck. Interesting. Very interesting. It’s clearly a place of some activity, but there’s none of the showboating or fanfare one might find at Maranello.

Through the exhaust pipes to my left, I can see a small illuminated shop. There appear to be a few magazine racks and a couple of cases containing parts and equipment. And at the end of the room, a man is sitting operating a computer. It has to be worth a shot.

I don’t want to seem like some kind of crazy foreigner who’s jumped on the train and come to an uninspiring part of town just to snoop at some pimped Japanese cars – even though that’s exactly what I am – so I take a minute to think through a few questions to ask first, all of which are to a lesser or greater extent actually genuine. Would like to buy an old Skyline but they’re very rare in the UK, what’s the parts situation like in Japan? Started a new job and wanting a performance Nissan, what would you recommend in terms of running costs? Interested in a Fairlady, but not sure if my wife’s feet will reach the pedals.

I head back round the front and walk into the shop/office. The guy at glances up from his computer, welcomes me with the bog-standard ‘irrashaimasse-e’, then looks straight back down at his computer. The front office, if it can be called that, consists of a wall of parts, a couple of magazine racks, a small display of merchandise and a television showing Nissans being driven quickly from a variety of angles. Crucially, however, one wall has a large window cut into it, through which the garage floor can be viewed. This is essentially like the room at Kwik-Fit that you can sit in and watch while the mechanics set about your car.

No caption necessary

Not even South Kensington Kwik-Fit would have cars like this in it, though. There’s an R34 Skyline GT-R closest to me having the brakes done, a 370Z behind it with a laptop plugged into it, a 300ZX cabriolet with a tarpaulin stretched out across the front, and an R34 Z-Tune up on the ramps. Oh, and there’s also a brand-new caged track GT-R being tended to in the background. If I wake up tomorrow and find every other person on the planet has disappeared, I’m coming straight here.

There’s only so much flicking through of magazines and looking intently at catalogues I can do, though, and I’m conscious of the fact that the vehicles being worked on that I’m gawping at are customers’ cars. If I were a garage owner, I wouldn’t be too hot on folk coming in and peering at my business, and if I owned a tooled-up Nissan I’m not sure I’d want folk looking at it unsupervised either. Maybe I’m just too conscientious and not ballsy enough, but I decide it’s only polite to ask a few questions and attempt to buy something. Once the guy at the computer has finished booking someone in for a service over the phone, I saunter over, explain I’m from the UK and am looking to buy a 350Z (both half-truths – I’m from Scotland and saving up), but am not sure if my 147cm wife’s feet will reach the pedals. Much polite laughter from the guy behind the counter ensues, and he admits he doesn’t know the answer – but suspects seeing over the steering wheel will be a bigger problem. Then comes the most convoluted keyring-buying process ever, involving the extraction of a massive ring binder detailing the price of every Nismo product from cylinder heads to coffee cup coasters, five minutes of rifling through the Snap-On tool chests, and finally the fishing out of a small oily polyurethane bag containing a hunk of embossed leather. It’s a souvenir of my trip to HQ that can hang on my PSP – because, let’s face it, that’s as close as I’m going to get to driving a Nissan fast any time soon.

Back outside I take another look at the side-street the Nismo building backs on to, curious to see if there’s anything I missed first time round. The white R32 is still there, as is the souped-up Micra, but what I didn’t see before are the paintings on the doors of the garage units to my right. On each door is the outline of a different Nissan Le Mans car, from the R89C through to the production class cars of more recent times. My eagerness to take a closer look is tempered by the glances from employees walking back and forth between units, who after decades and decades are probably wise to the antics of gaijin wandering around the perimeter trying to look innocently lost.

R390

It’s at this point that the purpose of the famous vending machine I read about becomes apparent. I’d done a quick Google of the Nismo HQ before making my way out here – just, you know, to find out if there was anything worth seeing and if visitors were allowed in – and kept seeing references to a vending machine on various message boards and listservs. I only skimmed the posts at the time, but the gist of them seemed to be that you should wander down to this vending machine, buy something, and then make your way back round to the front of the building. Now I see why. The time it takes me to fumble about for change in my wallet, choose a beverage from the thirty or so on offer, wait for it to be dispensed, collect my change and open my can is all time that gives me a few seconds in-between tasks to take in what’s going on backstage at Nismo. The back warehouse across the road from me is where the real tuning and testing goes down. The subtly modified motors lurking in the dark corners of the two-storey parking lot are all employees’ cars. The HGV park just in front of the gates is where the race team trucks live. And only two metres behind me, only a steel garage door away, are Nismo’s most ferocious race cars. No sooner has this all sunk in than it’s time to move on and head back to the station.

You won’t find any showboating should you choose to head out to Nismo Central. There is nothing to make Joe Public feel he or she should be in awe of what goes on inside. It’s a living, working environment, a space where you really have to know what you’re looking for to see anything out of the ordinary. Above all, it’s a place where visitors are tolerated, not welcomed, and it’s all the more memorable for it.

Ford Granada

Having not seen a Ford Granada for about fifteen years, I nearly got knocked off my bike by one the other day after it came pasting through an orange-going-red light. My first thought was not ‘you b**tard, you coulda killed me!’, as it maybe should have been, but ‘bollocks, why don’t I have my camera to hand, I want a picture of a Granada for my blog!’

The fact that I put taking pictures of rare cars above consideration for my personal safety is perhaps an indication that I should Get Help. Nonetheless, just a touch over twenty-four hours later, I stumbled across a parked Granada and got my picture as a result. I should also make it completely clear that the Granada pictured here is NOT the one that nearly mowed me down. It’s just a shame that it looks like a Ford Sierra that’s been blown up with a bicycle pump.

This version doesn’t, in all fairness, do the spirit of a Granada justice – and not just because it’s an estate rather than a saloon or hatch. It’s not grimy enough, not run-down enough, not seedy enough. It needs to have dirt clinging to the panels, Ginsters crumbs ingrained in the seats and cigarette ash sealed into the roof lining to be a proper Granada. When I was growing up, the Granada was the type of motor that scrap metal dealers or coach owners had, a vehicle with lots of room, lots of kit and plenty of cheap spare Ford parts. Bad guys often used them in ITV dramas. It was that kind of car.

This one, by contrast, appears to have been very well looked after. It’s in cracking condition, and is one of the slightly rarer estate versions. I bet the same person has owned it since it was brand new, and I am thoroughly impressed with the amount of effort and energy they have put into keeping such an unorthodox vehicle running. Despite my slightly tainted views of Ford Granadas (formed by the kinds of nutters that used to drive about the Highlands in them), I do like them. Just not enough to be run over by one.

n.b. just after posting this my conscience pricked and I thought I should add that: if you ever happen to stumble across this blog by accident and find yourself saying ‘hey! That’s my car!’, then just drop me a message at ljmabon @ aol . com (removing the obvious spaces) and I’ll happily remove it.

Gregory Tadé operates on a very similar basis. For the uninitiated, Tadé is a French striker with the body of Didier Drogba and the ball control of Jean-Alain Boumsong. That probably still doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know anything about football, right enough, in which case just try to imagine a man with the physical presence of Tyson Fury, the speed of Usain Bolt and the coordination of Tommy Cooper. That probably covers it.

The guys that propel teams to success aren't always the most skillful, as Gregory Tadé proves

Tadé played for Raith Rovers – my team – for the last two seasons, before leaving to join Inverness Caledonian Thistle in the Premier League over the summer. He was at the Rovers at a time when the team reached the semi-finals of the Scottish Cup and came close to winning promotion to the top flight, losing out only to better-funded (allegedly) clubs. Since Gregory left for the Highlands, the Rovers have tanked. I believe these two incidents are more related than one may think.

On paper, a six-foot something, built-like-a-brick-outhouse powerhouse of a man seems like something any sports team would benefit from. In the case of Gregory Tadé, however, that did not always prove to be true. The first time I saw him in a Raith shirt was in a friendly against Norwich City, when he started a sprint from the halfway line in order to latch on to a through ball, outpaced three defenders who now play in the English Premiership, opened up a good six yards of space, closed the angle to the stranded goalkeeper, and lined up for a shot at goal. With the ball at his feet, he went to shoot, missed the ball completely and slipped and fell on his backside.

Many similar corkers ensued over the next two seasons, including blasting into row K of the stand from the lofty distance of three yards, shooting at an open goal yet having the ball end up further away from the nets than before he touched it, and (painfully and accidentally) kicking the Stirling goalie’s head instead of the nearby ball. Even the now-legendary goal at Pittodrie that saw the Rovers dump Aberdeen out of the cup was a mis-kick, one that would have ended up going out of the ground had Tadé connected with it more than 6cm from the goal-line.

In short, Gregory Tadé was (and by all accounts, still is) a hopeless, hopeless footballer. And yet he was a huge asset to the Raith team. Take, for example, the New Year’s game against Dunfermline Athletic, when he burst through two stocky defenders to volley home the winning goal. Or a wet and windy away game at Dingwall, where he ran and ran and ran to the extent that when he was substituted – exhausted – after 75 minutes, the Ross County left-back who was preparing to take a throw-in put the ball down to applaud as the Frenchman left the pitch. Tadé’s pace and strength caused havoc with opposition defences, nobody – least of all the man himself – being able to figure out where he was going to go next or what he might try to do.

As much as anything else, Gregory got the fans going. Every run that ended up with the centre-forward on his backside, every air shot from six yards, every miss in front of an empty net was followed by a resounding chorus of encouragement from the home stand, the fans chanting Tadé’s name over and over or substituting his surname for the ‘way-o’s in the mid-90s Outhere Brothers hit. The boy even managed to receive a standing ovation when he came out to warm up for the Scottish Cup semi-final.

At the very top levels of football, speed and strength alone are not enough, quite simply because every player at that level possesses such attributes. But in the lower echelons of the game, one can always make a nuisance of oneself if one is quick enough. Raith Rovers are really struggling this year, and I reckon one of the reasons for this (among many others) is the lack of someone that can, and just as crucially is also prepared to, run and run.

I realised this at the dismal Queen of the South game a few weeks back as I watched players trotting casually after the ball and cantering towards the goals. Pace and effort don’t just make life difficult for the opposition, they also raise the fans – everyone likes to see a player putting in a lung-bursting run for a hopeless ball or running the goalie all the way for the wayward pass that’s trickling to the line. And when the fans are on-side and on-song, the rest of the team’s game tends to lift as well. Basic psychology that one doesn’t need a series of experiments involving dogs, bells and meat to figure out.

Although there are a fair few teams in football receiving wads of cash from rich benefactors, there are plenty more – like Raith Rovers – who are missing out and are having to make cutbacks to survive. And whilst Gregory Tadé (perhaps amazingly) has shown he has the skill to play at a higher level, the effect of his departure on Raith’s performance gives an insight into what it was that helped my team to punch well above their weight for the last two seasons.

Just to recap for those of you who don’t go out of your way – and you would have no right to be expected to – to follow ‘minority’ motor sports such as rally driving. (I use the term ‘minority’ here, perhaps incorrectly, to refer to a kind of motor sport where information about what’s going in is not readily available to Joe Public. So everything other than F1, MotoGP and ‘blue ribband’ events like Le Mans, then). Sébastien Loeb and his co-driver Daniel Elena have just won their eighth straight World Rally Championship title, by virtue of their only remaining title rival retiring from the final round of the season. This is a staggering, staggering feat.

As much as I admire and respect Loeb, and he really did win this one fair and square, I can’t help but feel a bit sorry for the guy that lost out. Mikko Hirvonen. The Finn has run Loeb close to a World Driver’s Title before, back in 2009 when it went down to the last round in Wales and Hirvonen lost out due to an number of issues including, bizarrely, a loose bonnet. This time out he was actually leading the Frenchman until he spun off the road and collected some foliage. Among the foliage was a branch that punctured his Ford’s radiator, eventually causing the engine to be irreparably damaged.

It didn’t take long before photos of a clearly gutted Mikko started to circulate on the internet. The passionate half of my brian started to feel really sorry for the guy, whereas the rational half suggested he perhaps didn’t deserve it. He had to go so fast to keep up with Séb that he went off and damaged the car. Yes, but Loeb has crashed this year too. He was only in the title hunt because his teammate moved over four times for him to give him extra points and better finishes. True, but Citroen have been getting up to all kinds of jiggery-pokery as well. If one looks at the season as a whole, then there’s really no doubt that Loeb has been the more deserving driver. But a tiny, tiny part of me just wishes Hirvonen and co-driver Jarmo Lethinen had sneaked it just this once, just to be able to add their names to the roll of world champions. The record books, however, have no soft spots for triers.

The magnitude of Loeb’s success gets greater year on year, and yet I reckon over 80% of The General Public have no idea who he is. This speaks volumes about the virtually non-existent public profile of rallying, which is a crying shame at a time when the record books are being re-written in the way Woods did for golf and Messi is doing for football. Increasing public awareness is bloody difficult, because why should the public have any right to be expected to care about any kind of sport, let alone one involving muddy cars? If I knew the answer to this question I wouldn’t be doing the job I am, but I will suggest one place the WRC can start. I mentioned above that Hirvonen’s teammate had moved over for him on several occasions to give the Ford pilot a leg-up in the latter part of the season – and, to be fair, Citroen have used similar tactics in recent years too. Such team orders are a surefire way to turn off the casual viewer. You can argue it’s a ‘team’ game until the cows come home and harp on ad nauseum about how this always used to happen back in the gold old days, but punters who have come to watch a day’s sport want exactly that – sport.

The same applies to the nonsense (thankfully stopping for next year) of slowing down so as not to be the ‘road-sweeper’ at the front for the next day. Again, tactics are part of motorsport, that I do not deny, but there’s a time and a place for them. Imagine Nani, faced with an open goal, passing the ball to Wayne Rooney from three yards out to ensure he gets the Golden Boot. Or Manchester City sandbagging to a 1-0 win so they only place second and avoid Barcelona in the next stage of the Champions League. Both clever and tactical ‘team’ decisions, but things that jar fundamentally with what The Public want to see. Sadly, the longer such things are allowed to go on on the WRC, the lower its profile will sink.

I really do hope the profile of the World Rally Championship rebounds, if only to draw attention to what a phenomenal athlete Sébastien Loeb is. Things are looking up, though – this year has seen a depth and quality of competition not seen for a good wee while, we have new constructor teams and a change in the running order rules for 2012. And with F1 seemingly off to Sky for next year, there’s a chance for an enterprising promoter to shrink-wrap rally driving into a palatable, two-hour Sunday afternoon slot. Now that’s a challenge…

1. The Finger

Ask anyone from the casual F1 fan upwards, and there’s a 99% chance they’ll tell you the thing that pisses them off most about the races is Vettel’s bloody finger. When the Red Bull stops in parc fermé in front of the number 1 board and the driver clambers out of the car, only a matter of seconds will pass before the helmet is removed and the supremely talented German pilot screws his face up, thrusting an index finger towards the crowds and cameras at an acute angle. The horrible inevitability of this is akin to a rather rapid form of Chinese drip torture, the viewers at home sitting on the edges of their seats and pleading with Seb to just extend his digit and get it over and done with for another weekend.

All great sports personalities have their trademark celebrations. From Denis Law’s arm going up in the air in a no-nonsense fashion as he runs back to the centre circle, to Jürgen Klinsmann’s dive and through to Michael Schumacher’s emphatic leaps, a good celebratory move shows everyone who’s number one. But for some odd reason The Finger is just downright irritating, and it seems Vettel’s in too deep with it to back out now. A period away from the top step of the podium would give us all a rest from The Finger and allow the German to retire the celebration quietly;

2. Big Bad Wolf

If you ever watch the post-race forum on the BBC coverage, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. For the rest of you, I shall explain. Big Bad Wolf is a piece of music the Red Bull team play when ‘they’ (i.e. Vettel) win a race, irritating celebrations extending beyond the driver to the team as a whole. The tune in question -
produced by an outfit known as ‘Duck Sauce’ – is blasted out of speakers in the team garage at full volume, helping the mechanics to get the party started whilst they go about the long and vital process of getting the team’s kit packed up and ready for transportation to the next circuit. It is a dance track that consists of a kickdrum beating at moderate tempo, with the imitation sound of a werewolf howling dubbed over it. It is as awful as it sounds.

Much like The Finger, the trouble with Big Bad Wolf is that it is forced upon everyone and beamed out to millions of homes around the globe. It’s irritating enough hearing it at home in the background as the pundits on telly do their best to drown it out, so one can only dread to think how much it would get on one’s nut were one actually working in the paddock. The only analogue I can think of is a time about ten years ago when Raith Rovers were at home to Livingston, and the away team elected to bring a troupe of pipe band drummers to the game with them. Said drummers proceeded to hit their percussion instruments for the entirety of the first half, until a steward sensibly confiscated their beaters. With the drums gone, the Rovers went on to score two and win comfortably.

It would perhaps be wishful thinking to hope that the absence of Big Bad Wolf would bring about the demise of Red Bull in the same way, but when the pauses in Jake Humphrey’s speech are filled with the distant howl of an over-familiar wolf cry from the other end of the paddock, you know it’s time to give the tune a rest;

3. Whooping

Once upon a time, there was a character from the world of racing whom I was rather fond of. This character was quick, good-natured and extremely talented. Unfortunately, he also had a habit of whooping excitedly every time he won a race. This became wearing to such an extent that I and my fellow racers ceased to like this fellow, and switched our allegiance to those with more modest declarations of victory.

The character in question was Toad from Mario Kart. I do not need to elaborate as to which figure from F1 this mirrors. All I will say is that at least Toad’s repertoire stuck to ‘wa-hoo’ and ‘I’m the best’, leaving out key components of the extended celebration-speech-by-
numbers such as ‘ring-ding-ding-ding’ and ‘that’s what I’m talking about’. Enthusiasm is great, but when it consists of the same tones and the same set phrases over and over it does become a little wearing;

4. Proof of Vettel’s greatness

Sebastian Vettel is a great driver. That’s not a subject for debate, you’d be hard pushed to find someone to disagree with that. But what’s perhaps not so clear is the extent of his greatness. See, Vettel is very young, and has been in cars that have been getting better and better since he started driving. He is now at an age where he seems to have matured to the extent that the rookie errors have all been ironed out, and he’s turned into a thoroughly polished driver. What I’d like to see now is a situation where he isn’t in clearly the best car and really has to fight for wins, points and championships rather than streaking off into the distance most of the time. For that would be a real test of his character. I remember watching Michael Schumacher in fast but flimsy Ferraris fighting for fourth and fifth places as the car (sometimes literally) fell apart around him, only to emerge as champion at the end of the year against superior or equal machinery. I’m pretty sure Seb could handle the pressure now, but I’d like to confirm my suspicion. This tenacity also leads me onto the last thing I’d like to see back, namely;

5. Mark Webber

After two hard years where he’s been in the title fight right until the latter part of the season, Mark Webber’s had a relatively subdued year in 2011. It’s hard to see what has happened to him, other than that the car has got faster and Vettel has become more consistent. Putting two and two together, it may be the case that the team have been focusing more on honing the car to the German’s style and tastes to the detriment of the Australian driver’s outright speed. Should this be the case, and should the chips go down any time soon, I’d like to hope that the car can come back to Webber so we can see more of the gritty determination that helped him to push the man that now looks like he could break all the records all the way. As we say in rallying in Scotland, God loves a trier, and there are few harder triers out there than Mark Webber.