To mark Ralf Waldmann’s birthday: his best columns on SPEEDWEEK.com

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to meet Ralf Waldmann in person until 2011, when he was working as a mechanic for Markus Reiterberger in the Superstock 1000 Cup. We spent a lot of time together in 2013, when Waldi was working for Max Neukirchner and the MR Ducati team, run by Steffen Pfüller and Mario Rubatto, in the Superbike World Championship. At the time, I agreed with him that we would publish a column by him on SPEEDWEEK.com at regular intervals, in which he would share an anecdote from his life.

I had the pleasure of writing these anecdotes down. I always endeavoured to reproduce them as naturally and faithfully as Waldi told them. His style was so funny, entertaining and unique that you simply couldn’t help but listen to him intently, his mischievous grin always before your eyes.

Back then, you had to prove yourself to be allowed to compete in the World Championship.

Ralf Waldmann

As a 20-time Grand Prix winner, he knew more about motor racing than most people in the paddock; he experienced all the highs and lows during his career. Nevertheless, he always remained down-to-earth, good-humoured, warm-hearted and honest. An all-round lovely person, one of the best I’ve ever met in my life. His death on 10 March 2018 affected me deeply and still does today.

‘Back in the day, you had to prove yourself to be allowed to compete in the World Championship,’ Waldi always used to say. ‘Nowadays, all you need is the right bank balance. Show me your bank balance and I’ll tell you how good you are. Back in the day, if you weren’t German champion, you wouldn’t get a start in the World Championship. Even getting a start in the European Championship was a problem. If you’d won a European Championship race, you might have been allowed to race in the World Championship. And only once you’d scored a point there were you allowed to race there regularly. I used to beg the OMK to let me race. That meant the selection of drivers was completely different. Anyone who raced in the World Championship was really good. Only the best were allowed to race there.”

I’ve picked out a few of Waldi’s columns that I think are particularly worth reading to mark his 60th birthday. Enjoy this entertaining read.

Assen: “Where does it say that crashing is forbidden?”

“There used to be huge emergency generators at Assen. My dad and I always parked next to one of those in the paddock. The warm exhaust air was perfect for drying the polyester on the fairing whenever I’d had yet another crash on my 80cc or 125cc bike. I always had several square metres of aluminium sheet with me too – the polyester didn’t harden quickly enough for quick repairs. So we’d rivet the aluminium sheet to the inside of the fairing and it was good to go again.” TO THE COLUMN

Monza: “Even without motorbike racing, there was plenty of scrap to be had”

“The Porsche guys always told me you could tell I came from two-wheeled racing because I was riding on two wheels so aggressively through the chicanes that you could see the underbody. We even wanted to stick sponsor stickers on it.” READ THE COLUMN

Imola: “Relentless manoeuvring under braking – that was brilliant”

“If, as a rider, you start worrying about how dangerous a circuit is, that’s the first step towards riding more slowly. You only start thinking about that if you crash a lot – I know that from my own experience. “No brain, no headache,” Kenny Roberts always used to say. There’s some truth in that.” READ THE COLUMN

Nürburgring: “Pop a painkiller and carry on”

“Even in practice, the fixator in my leg was constantly rubbing against the frame and vibrating. It made my teeth tingle – it was brutal. At 14,000 rpm, I started getting pain in my teeth. So I kept my leg out of the way the whole time. Then I told my mechanic Scholli that the pins on the fixator were sticking out too far – that’s rubbish. So he took the bolt cutters and bent the stainless-steel wires back. He then said: ‘Look, they’re nice and short now. Me: ‘Brilliant, let’s get on with it!’ TO THE COLUMN

Isle of Man: “No way! I’m a two-stroke, supercharged!”

“It’s already dawned on me why, in the paddock at Douglas, there’s the sea on one side and the cemetery on the other. If you drive badly, you can go into the sea and drown yourself. And if you drive far too well, you end up in the cemetery. It’s mad.” TO THE COLUMN

Istanbul: “No toilet paper, just a jet of water”

“The traffic is something else. There’s no ‘right before left’ – the strongest has right of way. So I was right at the front in my lorry. When we arrived in Turkey, we raced through the city by bus at 4 am. I swear, we went through a toll booth at 100, where there was barely enough room for a postage stamp on either side. The whole bus was screaming ‘HUUUUAAAAA!’” READ THE COLUMN

Magny-Cours: “People eat a lot of frogs in France”

“In qualifying at Magny-Cours in 2011, Markus Reiterberger wrecked his motorbike; BMW had delivered it spread out across ten buckets of water. It was completely knackered. Markus went off just past the start-finish line, and the bike rolled over several times. We’ve got photos where the thing’s 20 metres up in the air, the fuel tank had come apart. There was nothing left of it. The throttle valve had been ripped out of the engine.” READ THE COLUMN

Jerez: “He shook his head when he saw the wreck”

“In 1988, I drove to Spain in a Renault Traffic with a caravan and 500 litres – let’s say diesel – in jerrycans. We’d got the jerrycans from a building site; they’d once contained floor covering. Dr Nüsken floor covering. At some point, the flooring material dissolved again, and the diesel filter was clogged every 50 kilometres. It took us a full three and a half days to get to Jerez.” READ THE COLUMN

Donington Park: “No ‘next year’ for me – I’m a grandad”

Then I said to myself: ‘Right, Waldmann, it’s either the trophy or the hospital. Down the hill, leaning right over the handlebars, sliding through the chicane on my knees… I was setting a blistering pace. I was ten seconds faster per lap than everyone else, and I went on to win at the start/finish line.” READ THE COLUMN