Archief - Gumball Rally 3000 (2007)
Het archief is een bevroren moment uit een vorige versie van dit forum, met andere regels en andere bazen. Deze posts weerspiegelen op geen enkele manier onze huidige ideeën, waarden of wereldbeelden en zijn op sommige plaatsen gecensureerd wegens ontoelaatbaar. Veel zijn in een andere tijdsgeest gemaakt, al dan niet ironisch - zoals in het ironische subforum Off-Topic - en zouden op dit moment niet meer gepost (mogen) worden. Toch bieden we dit archief nog graag aan als informatiedatabank en naslagwerk. Lees er hier meer over of start een gesprek met anderen.
eniac
Legacy Member
Ik heb een jaar ofzo geleden hier al eens zwaar gediscussieerd over de Gumball. Ik herinner me nog één van de argumenten pro: "er zijn toch nog geen doden gevallen?". Bij deze dan.
Ik kan het niet laten om mijn dégout uit te drukken voor dit hele gedoe. Kijk, als ze het nu eens zouden doen zonder constant levens op het spel te zetten, dan zou ik zeggen: "hell yeah, prachtig". Maar op deze manier? De regels aan je laars lappen, als je gestraft wordt even in het vuistje lachen en met de glimlach een paar briefjes van 100 euro afgeven, voorbijsteken over de pechstrook, onverantwoord hard rijden en met levens spelen. Kortom: zich God wanen met hun supercars. Degoutant gewoon.
En goed, ze zijn niet allemaal zo, maar het feit dat er zijn is al genoeg. Twee doden, mensen die nooit geweten hebben wat er gebeurde en die er ook niet voor gekozen hebben. Triest.
Ik kan het niet laten om mijn dégout uit te drukken voor dit hele gedoe. Kijk, als ze het nu eens zouden doen zonder constant levens op het spel te zetten, dan zou ik zeggen: "hell yeah, prachtig". Maar op deze manier? De regels aan je laars lappen, als je gestraft wordt even in het vuistje lachen en met de glimlach een paar briefjes van 100 euro afgeven, voorbijsteken over de pechstrook, onverantwoord hard rijden en met levens spelen. Kortom: zich God wanen met hun supercars. Degoutant gewoon.
En goed, ze zijn niet allemaal zo, maar het feit dat er zijn is al genoeg. Twee doden, mensen die nooit geweten hebben wat er gebeurde en die er ook niet voor gekozen hebben. Triest.
serial
Legacy Member
nTFs zei:
Sinds wanneer hebben Gumballers dan een voorbeeldfunctie?
Ik keur niet goed wat sommigen doen maar uw argumenten houden echt geen steek...
Flikken en Politici hebben een voorbeeldfunctie, mensen die wat samen rijden in dure bakken niet.
Ksta echt versteld van de argumenten waarmee ge blijft afkomen...
eniac
Legacy Member
serial zei:
Of ze die nu willen of niet en of jij dat nu ontkent of niet, ze hebben ze gewoon.
Vanaf kleine jongens met de glimlach staan te kijken naar de meneren in mooie snelle wagens die het geld op de rug hebben groeien hebben die mensen een voorbeeldfunctie. En zeker als ze zich groeperen en in kudde door verschillende landen rijden.
serial
Legacy Member
eniac zei:
ben ik niet 100% mee akkoord.
officieel is het mss anders, maar gumball staat gewoon voor snelheid en hier en daar een regel overtreden. Denk dat iedereen daar wel kan inkomen?
Net daarom vind ik dat ze hun eventuele voorbeeldfunctie ontlopen omdat iedereen weet dat het niet mag.
De kleine jongens die met de glimlach staan te kijken weten niet eens wat de snelheidslimieten zijn en kunnen nog minder inschatten of een gumballer nu veel te snel rijdt of niet.
Ze mogen enkunnen ook nog niet in de wagen rijden dus denk ik niet dat er veel kans is dat ze de gumballers zullen imiteren. Later leren ze de verkeersregels en tegen dan zijn ze al volwassen genoeg om zelf uit te maken wat goed en slecht is.
Maw, voor wie kan de gumball een voorbeeldfunctie hebben?
eniac
Legacy Member
serial zei:
Voor iedereen die vindt dat een dergelijke manier om je te gedragen cool is, en die dat gedrag gaat kopiëren of willen kopiëren van zodra ze kunnen. 15-jarige puber of 40-jarige midlife-crisisser, maakt weinig uit.
Ik herinner me nog het filmpje van enkele domme (Belgische) 30- of 40-ers die samen met "De Kimble" aan het racen waren. "Jawatte, we zijn met de Kimble aant racen!! Waaw man da's hier graaf! Hahaha!" Ja, volwassen mensen kunnen ook extreem dom worden als ze met hun idolen (ik zal het maar zo noemen) worden geconfronteerd.
serial
Legacy Member
eniac zei:
tja je zal overal onnozelaars hebben of dommerikken die hun verantwoordelijkheid niet kunnen nemen of vergeten maar dat wil nog niet zeggen dat de gumball een voorbeeldfunctie heeft door die paar wannabe gumballers.
If anything is het een voorbeeld van hoe het niet moet (dus feitelijk wel voorbeeldfunctie maar niet in de gebruikelijke zin)
kvind het persoonlijk veel erger als een vooraanstaand politicus zegt dat hij vroeger weed gebruikt heeft (cfr. Vande Lanotte)
Cash
Legacy Member
De chauffeur die het dodelijke ongeluk veroorzaakte heeft opnieuw geprobeerd het land te verlaten. Hij was op borgtocht vrij, en bestelde onmiddelijk een privé-jet, maar de Macedonische douane hield hem tegen.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/06/wgum06.xml
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/06/wgum06.xml
$T@CkDuMP
Legacy Member
een paar weken geleden zag ik een vreemdeling met een splinternieuwe X..-... plaat in een vet getjoenede oude BMW 3reeks zonder kijken aanzetten aan de zebra's en dus bijna 2 mensen klak omver rijden...die mensen deden tekens dat hij zot was en meneer deed z'n deur open en begon te roepen alsof hij gelijk had terwijl ik hem duidelijk niet genoeg had zien kijken of het veilig was op aan te zetten (mss was die onder invloed ofzo) Vervolgens rijdt die achter die mensen aan al spelende met de gaspedaal om toch maar ééns te tonen hoeveel lef hij wel heeft...
waarom vertel ik dit? elke dag...elke minuut...ergens ter wereld is er één of andere imbiciele paardenkop die denkt dat hij met zijn ééncellig micro-organisch verstand zich alles kan permiteren...en daar komen dan ook geregeld brokken van...
als wij ELKE keer dat er zoiets moest gebeuren een zware afstraffing maken voor een evenement/organisatie/groep bestuurders/weet ik veel wat...dan lag ons gehele autoverkeer plat en mochten we al lang niet meer met de auto rijden...
bijgevolg vind ik het ridicuul om als gewone burger (ook al vin ik het zeer normaal dat wij ons respect tonen aan de slachtoffer(s)) zo'n spel van te maken, want het resultaat is dat de broeders van liefde nog maar ééns in hun handen kunnen wrijven en zeggen van "kijk, awel,...we moeten nog stricter zijn...nog meer boetes, nog meer restricties" en welk kieken wil daar aan bijdragen?!! als we voortgaan op deze manier komen we op een dag uit in een totalitair big-brother-regime waar de auto's met ons rijden en niet omgekeerd
waarom vertel ik dit? elke dag...elke minuut...ergens ter wereld is er één of andere imbiciele paardenkop die denkt dat hij met zijn ééncellig micro-organisch verstand zich alles kan permiteren...en daar komen dan ook geregeld brokken van...
als wij ELKE keer dat er zoiets moest gebeuren een zware afstraffing maken voor een evenement/organisatie/groep bestuurders/weet ik veel wat...dan lag ons gehele autoverkeer plat en mochten we al lang niet meer met de auto rijden...
bijgevolg vind ik het ridicuul om als gewone burger (ook al vin ik het zeer normaal dat wij ons respect tonen aan de slachtoffer(s)) zo'n spel van te maken, want het resultaat is dat de broeders van liefde nog maar ééns in hun handen kunnen wrijven en zeggen van "kijk, awel,...we moeten nog stricter zijn...nog meer boetes, nog meer restricties" en welk kieken wil daar aan bijdragen?!! als we voortgaan op deze manier komen we op een dag uit in een totalitair big-brother-regime waar de auto's met ons rijden en niet omgekeerd
$T@CkDuMP
Legacy Member
jouw onderschrift is duidelijk overgenomen van een internetsite, boek, of weet ik veel wat, om aan te tonen dat je geleerd en intelligent bent...maar zal ik je eens wat vertellen? met jouw kortzinnige reactie toon je het tegengestelde aan! proficiatk995 zei:
*edit* neem het niet persoonlijk, er zitten genoeg soortgenoten in dit topic!
TTT002
Legacy Member
Redelijk veel leeswerk, maar dit is geschreven door een journalist die mee was met de gumball 3000.
There should have been something in place. Morocco, 2004, on the running of the fifth Gumball 3000 should have been a warning. A Ferrari 360 ate it in spectacular fashion. The Reyland Escort Cosworth nearly took out Team Polizei. Jerry "Torquenstein" Reynolds survived what looked to be a death blow of an accident when the ass end of his Viper got loose on a North African road. But Gumball organizers Maximillion Cooper and Julie Brangstrup got off easy. Single-car pileups, as it were; no fatalities, and only Reynolds' bandaged head at the finish line to illustrate that anything had gone wrong.
So when an elderly couple pulled out in front of Nick Morley's Porsche in an old Golf, the ultimate result wasn't a surprise to anyone. I talked to Dan Neil not long before I left and he cautioned me, "Be careful. One of these days, somebody is going to get killed on one of these rallies." The worst case scenario, of course, was that said somebody would happen to be a civilian.
Yes, the Gumball is a rally, not a race, but let's step back a moment. It took me twenty-two hours to get from Tirana, Albania to Bratislava, Slovakia. Around an hour and a half was spent in a police station in Montenegro with Team Polizei and a few completely confused real police officers. Another couple of hours passed in Croatia waiting to hitch a ride in a VW Sharan support van after the Dubrovnik checkpoint. If you've laid out around 40k in entry fees, had your car shipped from points unknown to London, been shut down around 50 miles from a checkpoint on the first day of the rally, been held in a Turkish airport bar while your car is diverted to Athens, you're going to be anxious to hit the fucking road.
Part of the problem was with the ALK CoPilot nav system handed out by the organizers. Instead of being held responsible for setting their own routes via their own GPS units or by good old-fashioned paper maps, the CoPilot -- a system designed to work with mobile phones -- was obscenely unreliable and required a great deal of attention to work with any semblance of accuracy. Nevertheless, Cooper defended the CoPilot's accuracy at the driver's meeting in Albania. Later that day, the CoPilot directed Team Polizei and numerous other drivers to a blocked-off tunnel. Who should come up the road but Maximillion himself? Roy leaned out the passenger side window and commented, "So there's no problem with the CoPilots, Max?" Admittedly, in short order, the under-construction tunnel was unblocked for our convoy, but problems with the units were legion during the rally, and time lost (a Kuwaiti team in a Murcielago en route to Albania ended up routed to within 300 km of Turkey before they realized that everything was wrong and sped back) led to fatigue and fast driving in situations where it may not have been prudent.
Interestingly, I don't believe that Nick Morley was engaging in wanton speed-freakery in Macedonia. I was in the support van called to the scene; according to the CoPilot people, we were the closest support van to the accident. Reports were mixed. Serious inuries. Wait. Gumballers walked away. Oh wait, a death. Rumors started flying. We debated de-stickering the Sharan and hiding Gumball-related articles of clothing. We worried that we'd get into Macedonia and not be able to get out. We sent the van behind us forward as bait, telling them to wait for us at the border while we ate at a rural gas station. We hoped they'd be unable to resist testing the border in their urge to spank us in the unofficial Crewball 3000. Somehow, the knowledge that we weren't going to be left to fester in a Macedonian prison outweighed losing a stage to the other Sharan. I immediately developed a stress-related cold that I've yet to shake.
We passed the accident site somewhere in the night, having missed it as the result of some wrong turn, we suppose. Kemal Sadikoglu of the Turkish Taxi team pulled into the Albanian border checkpoint a half-hour after we did and claimed that they'd held Nick Morley's brother Oliver up once the authorities called out that shit had changed when word came down that Vladimir Cepulyoski had died of a heart attack after Morley and Matthew McConville's TechArt Porsche had T-boned their Volkswagen. Although the information I've been able to glean is muddy, the #19 M6 piloted by a Russian couple pulled up and Morley and McConville hopped in, only to be yanked out at a border checkpoint, while the Russians were allowed to continue.
The next day, Roy, Ross and I were detained for an hour and a half by Montenegrin cops due to the use of the Polizei M5's use of lights and sirens in traffic. They pulled the Russians in simply because they were in a stickered BMW that happened to be stuck in traffic while they were taking us to the police station. I can't tell whether the Russians were dumb or just stereotypically Russian, but I'm guessing that you don't get to own an M6 in Russia by being dumb, although playing ignorant and foreign is an advantage in plenty of Gumball situations. It got us the hell out of Montenegro, after all. I honestly can't say one way or another that the Russians knew what they were involved in. Their English was too bad; yet I don't know if it was on-purpose bad.
What I do know is this. The Macedonian roads on the proscribed route would be hell on cars like that TechArt Porsche. Our diesel Sharan was as fast as just about anything on those byways. And if, as the CoPilot people suggested, we were on the route that ultimately claimed the lives of the Cepulyoskis, I'm willing to believe Cooper's claim that Morley was in the neighborhood of the speed limit. The aforementioned Kuwaiti Murcie had been purchased brand-new for the rally; its crew had been directed up and down a dirt road for over an hour before we showed up. The car was fucked-up, dirty and making unfortunate noises. Macedonia is no place for a purebred supercar, and a TechArt Neun-Elf is essentially that. And beyond that, a Mk II Golf is no match for a modern Porsche in terms of safety systems. It's not particularly surprising that an elderly couple in such a machine would succumb to their injuries, however sad and tragic the circumstances may be. Nevertheless, the oncoming vehicle they pulled out in front of could just have as easily been a truck, and the world media never would have heard about it.
Yet it was a sticker-covered sports car driven by two wealthy Britons. It's news. Because those two Britons were scared shitless of a Macedonian jail, even if it was the elderly couple who pulled out of them when the Porsche had the right-of-way, it's not hard to understand why Morley and McConville ended up running. In such an accident in the United States or the UK, one generally knows what to expect. People have posited that the guys deserve to die in prison for running. On the other hand, I'd ask our readers, if they thought they had a chance to get out when everything turned to shit and they faced rotting in a second-world jail, if they might not attempt to get away as well. I'm not calling their runner the right decision, but I'm not damning them for it either, given that from what I've been able to piece together, it apparently wasn't their first instinct.
We got into Tirana at 4am. I walked into the hotel and found Herr Roy at the hotel bar. It had been a brutal day for everyone. I slept on a hardwood floor with a bathrobe for a mattress and woke up three hours later. Max proclaimed at the drivers' meeting that there a ton of rumors flying around Gumball and urged us not to talk to the press; to let the Gumball PR machine handle things.
Not long afterward, at 7am EDT on Thursday, May 3rd, Team Polizei's support guru J.F. Musial called the Macedonian embassy in London and confirmed that Cepulyoski was dead. That's noon in London. 1 or 2pm in Eastern Europe. If some 21-year-old college student in Hoboken, New Jersey could verify that the accident had resulted in a fatality via government channels, one would think that the rally organizer would certainly know well beforehand. Yet the morning briefing in Tirana was essentially a plea to keep a "first rule of Gumball, don't talk about Gumball" code of omerta in place with not even a slight whiff of death's maddening stank.
Just past Dubrovnik, Team Polizei tendered their resignation from the rally. On the road to Split, in a Sharan with a number of green Gumball volunteers in their early twenties headed by Kitty Cooper, Max's younger sister (who, by the way is a total sweetheart) we ran into a number of Gumballers on the side of a suburban road. We chucked the people-carrier halfway up a driveway and hoofed it back to the huddled crew. Cooper's flat-black vinyl-wrapped XJ220 sat two driveways behind us. For the first time I'd seen, Max wasn't wearing his sunglasses. He seemed a small, tired confused man. He laid out to the crew what I'd set down an hour earlier from my experience in the support van the day before. He asked me to remove the posts from "that website." Kitty played dumb. But she knew. She'd known.
Of course she'd known, as one of Maximillion's own. The other crew boys, who'd signed up as volunteers as a way to collect foreign poontang and see exotic cars were shocked and pissed that they hadn't been informed. They were crew," in their minds. The drivers were trying to piece together what'd gone down from reports from those who'd happened on the scene, the news media reports and word from drivers close to the Morleys. Kemal recalled Oliver's face going sheet-white when the authorities said that Vladimir was dead and that Nick and Matthew needed to stick around. Bear in mind that Oliver Morley is an irrepressible individual who generally arouses the ire of anyone he decides he doesn't like.
At the morning-after press conference in Tirana, Max announced that we were indeed going to Germany; that there would be a police escort to Berlin and to get back to the UK, every team would be provided with safe-passage papers for every German state on the route. For most drivers, that fell apart somewhere in Croatia. The word had gotten to the mainstream media. Although the polizei roadblock outside Hahn was apparently the work of one overzealous policeman, it was obvious at that point that the whole mess would be spun in his favor, despite the last few days of work the Gumball staff had put into getting everything re-sorted. Sadly, though, more effort had gone into that than informing the drivers and crews of the accident, its aftermath and Morley and McConville's attempt to escape Macedonia.
A tad more Steinbeck: "Christ, I wish they hadn't killed off all the grizzly bears. In eighteen-eighty, my grandfather killed one up near Pleyto weighed eighteen-hundred pounds." But what if? What if the grizzlies set themselves up to be killed by doing the only thing they knew how to do? And if Gumball 3000 is the eighteen-hundred-pound grizzly of open-road rallies, it stands to reason that Max and Julie -- only knowing how to be Max and Julie because they'd gotten by on being Max and Julie for years -- didn't blink in the face of the small man with the rifle, because how could he possibly hurt them? How did it all come undone? Simple. They'd nearly bled out before they realized that the wound was serious. Thanks for listening.
There should have been something in place. Morocco, 2004, on the running of the fifth Gumball 3000 should have been a warning. A Ferrari 360 ate it in spectacular fashion. The Reyland Escort Cosworth nearly took out Team Polizei. Jerry "Torquenstein" Reynolds survived what looked to be a death blow of an accident when the ass end of his Viper got loose on a North African road. But Gumball organizers Maximillion Cooper and Julie Brangstrup got off easy. Single-car pileups, as it were; no fatalities, and only Reynolds' bandaged head at the finish line to illustrate that anything had gone wrong.
So when an elderly couple pulled out in front of Nick Morley's Porsche in an old Golf, the ultimate result wasn't a surprise to anyone. I talked to Dan Neil not long before I left and he cautioned me, "Be careful. One of these days, somebody is going to get killed on one of these rallies." The worst case scenario, of course, was that said somebody would happen to be a civilian.
Yes, the Gumball is a rally, not a race, but let's step back a moment. It took me twenty-two hours to get from Tirana, Albania to Bratislava, Slovakia. Around an hour and a half was spent in a police station in Montenegro with Team Polizei and a few completely confused real police officers. Another couple of hours passed in Croatia waiting to hitch a ride in a VW Sharan support van after the Dubrovnik checkpoint. If you've laid out around 40k in entry fees, had your car shipped from points unknown to London, been shut down around 50 miles from a checkpoint on the first day of the rally, been held in a Turkish airport bar while your car is diverted to Athens, you're going to be anxious to hit the fucking road.
Part of the problem was with the ALK CoPilot nav system handed out by the organizers. Instead of being held responsible for setting their own routes via their own GPS units or by good old-fashioned paper maps, the CoPilot -- a system designed to work with mobile phones -- was obscenely unreliable and required a great deal of attention to work with any semblance of accuracy. Nevertheless, Cooper defended the CoPilot's accuracy at the driver's meeting in Albania. Later that day, the CoPilot directed Team Polizei and numerous other drivers to a blocked-off tunnel. Who should come up the road but Maximillion himself? Roy leaned out the passenger side window and commented, "So there's no problem with the CoPilots, Max?" Admittedly, in short order, the under-construction tunnel was unblocked for our convoy, but problems with the units were legion during the rally, and time lost (a Kuwaiti team in a Murcielago en route to Albania ended up routed to within 300 km of Turkey before they realized that everything was wrong and sped back) led to fatigue and fast driving in situations where it may not have been prudent.
Interestingly, I don't believe that Nick Morley was engaging in wanton speed-freakery in Macedonia. I was in the support van called to the scene; according to the CoPilot people, we were the closest support van to the accident. Reports were mixed. Serious inuries. Wait. Gumballers walked away. Oh wait, a death. Rumors started flying. We debated de-stickering the Sharan and hiding Gumball-related articles of clothing. We worried that we'd get into Macedonia and not be able to get out. We sent the van behind us forward as bait, telling them to wait for us at the border while we ate at a rural gas station. We hoped they'd be unable to resist testing the border in their urge to spank us in the unofficial Crewball 3000. Somehow, the knowledge that we weren't going to be left to fester in a Macedonian prison outweighed losing a stage to the other Sharan. I immediately developed a stress-related cold that I've yet to shake.
We passed the accident site somewhere in the night, having missed it as the result of some wrong turn, we suppose. Kemal Sadikoglu of the Turkish Taxi team pulled into the Albanian border checkpoint a half-hour after we did and claimed that they'd held Nick Morley's brother Oliver up once the authorities called out that shit had changed when word came down that Vladimir Cepulyoski had died of a heart attack after Morley and Matthew McConville's TechArt Porsche had T-boned their Volkswagen. Although the information I've been able to glean is muddy, the #19 M6 piloted by a Russian couple pulled up and Morley and McConville hopped in, only to be yanked out at a border checkpoint, while the Russians were allowed to continue.
The next day, Roy, Ross and I were detained for an hour and a half by Montenegrin cops due to the use of the Polizei M5's use of lights and sirens in traffic. They pulled the Russians in simply because they were in a stickered BMW that happened to be stuck in traffic while they were taking us to the police station. I can't tell whether the Russians were dumb or just stereotypically Russian, but I'm guessing that you don't get to own an M6 in Russia by being dumb, although playing ignorant and foreign is an advantage in plenty of Gumball situations. It got us the hell out of Montenegro, after all. I honestly can't say one way or another that the Russians knew what they were involved in. Their English was too bad; yet I don't know if it was on-purpose bad.
What I do know is this. The Macedonian roads on the proscribed route would be hell on cars like that TechArt Porsche. Our diesel Sharan was as fast as just about anything on those byways. And if, as the CoPilot people suggested, we were on the route that ultimately claimed the lives of the Cepulyoskis, I'm willing to believe Cooper's claim that Morley was in the neighborhood of the speed limit. The aforementioned Kuwaiti Murcie had been purchased brand-new for the rally; its crew had been directed up and down a dirt road for over an hour before we showed up. The car was fucked-up, dirty and making unfortunate noises. Macedonia is no place for a purebred supercar, and a TechArt Neun-Elf is essentially that. And beyond that, a Mk II Golf is no match for a modern Porsche in terms of safety systems. It's not particularly surprising that an elderly couple in such a machine would succumb to their injuries, however sad and tragic the circumstances may be. Nevertheless, the oncoming vehicle they pulled out in front of could just have as easily been a truck, and the world media never would have heard about it.
Yet it was a sticker-covered sports car driven by two wealthy Britons. It's news. Because those two Britons were scared shitless of a Macedonian jail, even if it was the elderly couple who pulled out of them when the Porsche had the right-of-way, it's not hard to understand why Morley and McConville ended up running. In such an accident in the United States or the UK, one generally knows what to expect. People have posited that the guys deserve to die in prison for running. On the other hand, I'd ask our readers, if they thought they had a chance to get out when everything turned to shit and they faced rotting in a second-world jail, if they might not attempt to get away as well. I'm not calling their runner the right decision, but I'm not damning them for it either, given that from what I've been able to piece together, it apparently wasn't their first instinct.
We got into Tirana at 4am. I walked into the hotel and found Herr Roy at the hotel bar. It had been a brutal day for everyone. I slept on a hardwood floor with a bathrobe for a mattress and woke up three hours later. Max proclaimed at the drivers' meeting that there a ton of rumors flying around Gumball and urged us not to talk to the press; to let the Gumball PR machine handle things.
Not long afterward, at 7am EDT on Thursday, May 3rd, Team Polizei's support guru J.F. Musial called the Macedonian embassy in London and confirmed that Cepulyoski was dead. That's noon in London. 1 or 2pm in Eastern Europe. If some 21-year-old college student in Hoboken, New Jersey could verify that the accident had resulted in a fatality via government channels, one would think that the rally organizer would certainly know well beforehand. Yet the morning briefing in Tirana was essentially a plea to keep a "first rule of Gumball, don't talk about Gumball" code of omerta in place with not even a slight whiff of death's maddening stank.
Just past Dubrovnik, Team Polizei tendered their resignation from the rally. On the road to Split, in a Sharan with a number of green Gumball volunteers in their early twenties headed by Kitty Cooper, Max's younger sister (who, by the way is a total sweetheart) we ran into a number of Gumballers on the side of a suburban road. We chucked the people-carrier halfway up a driveway and hoofed it back to the huddled crew. Cooper's flat-black vinyl-wrapped XJ220 sat two driveways behind us. For the first time I'd seen, Max wasn't wearing his sunglasses. He seemed a small, tired confused man. He laid out to the crew what I'd set down an hour earlier from my experience in the support van the day before. He asked me to remove the posts from "that website." Kitty played dumb. But she knew. She'd known.
Of course she'd known, as one of Maximillion's own. The other crew boys, who'd signed up as volunteers as a way to collect foreign poontang and see exotic cars were shocked and pissed that they hadn't been informed. They were crew," in their minds. The drivers were trying to piece together what'd gone down from reports from those who'd happened on the scene, the news media reports and word from drivers close to the Morleys. Kemal recalled Oliver's face going sheet-white when the authorities said that Vladimir was dead and that Nick and Matthew needed to stick around. Bear in mind that Oliver Morley is an irrepressible individual who generally arouses the ire of anyone he decides he doesn't like.
At the morning-after press conference in Tirana, Max announced that we were indeed going to Germany; that there would be a police escort to Berlin and to get back to the UK, every team would be provided with safe-passage papers for every German state on the route. For most drivers, that fell apart somewhere in Croatia. The word had gotten to the mainstream media. Although the polizei roadblock outside Hahn was apparently the work of one overzealous policeman, it was obvious at that point that the whole mess would be spun in his favor, despite the last few days of work the Gumball staff had put into getting everything re-sorted. Sadly, though, more effort had gone into that than informing the drivers and crews of the accident, its aftermath and Morley and McConville's attempt to escape Macedonia.
A tad more Steinbeck: "Christ, I wish they hadn't killed off all the grizzly bears. In eighteen-eighty, my grandfather killed one up near Pleyto weighed eighteen-hundred pounds." But what if? What if the grizzlies set themselves up to be killed by doing the only thing they knew how to do? And if Gumball 3000 is the eighteen-hundred-pound grizzly of open-road rallies, it stands to reason that Max and Julie -- only knowing how to be Max and Julie because they'd gotten by on being Max and Julie for years -- didn't blink in the face of the small man with the rifle, because how could he possibly hurt them? How did it all come undone? Simple. They'd nearly bled out before they realized that the wound was serious. Thanks for listening.
Tw33tst3r
Legacy Member
ksnap nie dat iemand de gumball nog kan verdedigen...
ze lappen zoveel mogelijk verkeersregels aan hun laars en lachen er nog es mee ook
het feit dat dat door kan/mag gaan is een slag in het gezicht vr iedereen die ooit iemand verloren heeft bij een verkeersongeval
ziekelijk dat nog iemand zo'n gedrag verdedigd... ik wil niet meer verkeersregels maar het wordt GVD wel eens tijd dat ze iedereen even streng aanpakken, of denkt gij dat wij de shit kunnen pullen dat die mannen doen?
yeah right ^^
mss eens een oproep doen aan 1 of andere vzw die opkomt vr verkeersslachtoffers om de volgende keer dat de gumball nog passeert ze te bekogelen met alles wat in de buurt ligt...
en dan nog mensen dat het begrijpelijk vinden dat die 2 wankers wilden vluchtten....
juist ja dat is begrijpelijk want als er 1 ding is wat gumballers gemeen hebben dan is het talent om verantwoordelijkheid weg te wuiven met geld...
moest ik ooit een familielid of vriend verliezen door zo ne wanker dan hoop ik vr hem dat em nie gaat lopen want in de bak is de enigste plek wr em veilig gaat zijn denk ik zo, kben er al genoeg verloren in het verkeer dus hier lezen hoe men zo een krapuul op de weg verdedigt doet mij gwn walgen
ze lappen zoveel mogelijk verkeersregels aan hun laars en lachen er nog es mee ook
het feit dat dat door kan/mag gaan is een slag in het gezicht vr iedereen die ooit iemand verloren heeft bij een verkeersongeval
ziekelijk dat nog iemand zo'n gedrag verdedigd... ik wil niet meer verkeersregels maar het wordt GVD wel eens tijd dat ze iedereen even streng aanpakken, of denkt gij dat wij de shit kunnen pullen dat die mannen doen?
yeah right ^^
mss eens een oproep doen aan 1 of andere vzw die opkomt vr verkeersslachtoffers om de volgende keer dat de gumball nog passeert ze te bekogelen met alles wat in de buurt ligt...
en dan nog mensen dat het begrijpelijk vinden dat die 2 wankers wilden vluchtten....
juist ja dat is begrijpelijk want als er 1 ding is wat gumballers gemeen hebben dan is het talent om verantwoordelijkheid weg te wuiven met geld...
moest ik ooit een familielid of vriend verliezen door zo ne wanker dan hoop ik vr hem dat em nie gaat lopen want in de bak is de enigste plek wr em veilig gaat zijn denk ik zo, kben er al genoeg verloren in het verkeer dus hier lezen hoe men zo een krapuul op de weg verdedigt doet mij gwn walgen
bludgeoned
Legacy Member
Hij heeft nochtans overschot van gelijk.$T@CkDuMP zei:jouw onderschrift is duidelijk overgenomen van een internetsite, boek, of weet ik veel wat, om aan te tonen dat je geleerd en intelligent bent...maar zal ik je eens wat vertellen? met jouw kortzinnige reactie toon je het tegengestelde aan! proficiat
*edit* neem het niet persoonlijk, er zitten genoeg soortgenoten in dit topic!
En iemand zijn sig betrekken in een discussie is nochtans ook erg kort door de bocht en kortzinnig.
Zijn sig is een citaat btw :ironic:
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