Sand at Scheivlak

by Anti-Mythological Speed, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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I load at Horst at a quarter to four. Twenty-six pallets of peppers, red, yellow and orange, for a distribution centre outside Duisburg; then empty back to Venlo for tomatoes, then Duisburg again. The trailer is set to seven degrees. I check it twice, once on the dock and once on the first straight piece of the A73, because the unit sometimes says seven when it is nine, and at nine the peppers come back.

I have done this since 2004. Before that I did flowers.

The rig is in the garage at home in Tegelen, where the car used to go. Aluminium profile, forty by eighty, bolted together on a Saturday in 2023. A seat out of a crashed Civic from a breaker's in Blerick. A wheel base, three screens, and pedals with a load cell on the brake, which means the brake measures how hard you push and not how far. I set it to ninety kilos in March because a man on a forum said that was what a GT4 car wanted. My daughter Lotte did the wiring. She was eleven then. She is fourteen now and does the data.

I race on Tuesday and Thursday nights in an online league, GT4 class, after the second Duisburg run and a shower and a plate of whatever Marieke has left in the oven. Forty-minute races. Thirty-two cars. I am usually first. When I am not first it is because I made a mistake at the start or somebody hit me, and Lotte puts the lap on the big screen and we look where it went.

In August she sent my laps to a team. She did not tell me. She told me afterwards, at the table, with her mouth full.

"Brouwer Motorsport," she said. "They run two GT4 cars. They want to see you at Zandvoort."

"Why did you send them?"

"Because you're quicker than their second driver. I checked. He races in the league too, under another name. You beat him eleven times."

Marieke said, "Wim, let her finish eating."

I asked when. Lotte said the twenty-second of September, a Tuesday. I said I had the Duisburg run on a Tuesday. She said she knew. She had already looked at the rota. She had already asked Ferry at the depot if he would swap. Ferry had said yes, if I did his Saturday.

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The circuit at Zandvoort sits in the dunes, and the dunes move. From the high parts of the circuit you can see the sea if you look, which you should not do.

I was there at seven. The paddock was half empty. Brouwer Motorsport had a white awning, two transporters and a coffee machine plugged into an extension lead that ran across the tarmac to a socket in the wall. Henk Brouwer shook my hand. He is sixty or so, with a hard hand and a fleece with a sponsor on it. Behind him was a young woman with a camera on a stick. That was Noor. She did the team's videos. She also did the videos for the company that makes my wheel base, which was paying for the day.

"So you're the truck driver," Noor said.

"I drive a lorry. Refrigerated."

"Can I film you putting on the overalls?"

"If you want."

The overalls were Daan's spare set. Daan is the first driver. He is twenty-six, he has done Formula 4 and two seasons of GT4, and he was not happy that I was there, which I understood. He was polite. He gave me his spare helmet too, and his spare HANS, which is the collar that holds your head to the seat when you hit something. The helmet was tight at the temples. I said it was fine. It was not fine, but it was a helmet.

The engineer was called Sem. He had a laptop with a crack across one corner and he talked very fast.

"It's a road car with the interesting bits taken out," he said. "Slick tyres. ABS, traction control, you can change them on the wheel. Sim's going to have taught you the line. It won't have taught you the brake."

"I have a load cell."

"How many kilos?"

"Ninety."

"Hm," Sem said. He did not say anything else about it.

---

Run one was eight laps.

The first three were to learn the car and I learned it. The seat was hotter than mine. The steering was lighter in the slow corners and heavier on the banking than the sim says. The gearbox changed when you pulled the paddle, the same as at home, but you felt it in your back as well.

Sem was right about the brake. At the end of the main straight, into Tarzan, the first time, I pushed the way I push at home, and the car did not stop the way it stops at home. I went in deep, wide, onto the kerb and onto the green paint beyond the kerb. I did not touch the gravel. On the next lap I pushed harder. On the lap after that I pushed so hard my thigh shook.

Ninety kilos is not enough. That is what I learned on run one.

I came in with a best lap two point one seconds off Daan's. Sem put my trace on top of Daan's on the laptop. Two lines, red and blue, speed against distance. Mine was under his everywhere there was a brake.

"Everywhere else," Sem said, and pointed with a pen, "you're on him. Look. Hunserug. Here. You're on him."

"I want to see the brake pressure."

He showed me. Daan's line went up straight, like a wall, and then fell away slowly as the corner came. Mine went up in two steps, like stairs.

"You're asking," Sem said. "Don't ask. Tell it."

Noor was filming the laptop over my shoulder. "What's going through your head right now?"

"The second step," I said.

---

Run two was eight laps. I braked like a wall. I was point seven off.

Daan came and looked at the traces after that one. He stood at Sem's elbow with his arms crossed and did not say anything for a while. Then he put his finger on the screen at the Arie Luyendijk banking, the last corner, and said: "You're lifting there."

"A little."

"Don't lift. It sticks. It feels like it won't, but it sticks."

"Okay."

It was good of him to say. He did not have to say it.

At lunch the team had broodjes in a box, cheese and ham, and a crate of water. I ate two. Noor sat opposite me with the camera on the table.

"Wim. Can I ask a few things. Proper interview."

"Yes."

"When you were a kid. Did you dream of this?"

"I wanted to drive a lorry. My uncle had one. A DAF, white. He took me to Rotterdam once."

"But racing."

"I watched it on television. Everybody did."

"And now you're here, at Zandvoort, in a real race car. How does that feel?"

I thought about it, because she wanted an answer and it was a fair question.

"The seat is hot," I said. "The brake is heavier than at home. The banking is the same as at home. I would like to go quicker in the last corner."

She put the camera down. "Could you maybe say something about what it means? To you. Truck driver, forty-four, sim racer, gets the chance. People like that kind of thing."

"I know they do."

"So?"

"It's a test day," I said. "I'm point seven off."

She laughed, which I had not expected, and picked the camera up again and filmed the broodjes.

---

In the afternoon the wind came round to the west.

You could feel it when you stood up. Sand moved across the paddock in thin lines, low down, about the height of a shoe, and ticked against the side of the transporter. Henk looked at the flags. Sem looked at the weather on his telephone. The marshals in their orange were standing at the posts with their backs to the sea.

Daan went out first. On his third lap the radio went loud for a second, then quiet. Sem said, "Daan?" and Daan said, "Scheivlak. I'm fine. I'm fine. There's sand."

Scheivlak is fast and goes downhill, right-handed, into a dip you cannot see the bottom of until you are in it. If you get it right you hardly breathe off the throttle. Daan had come over the crest at the speed he used in the morning and found the inside of the corner yellow. The car had turned round twice and stopped on the grass, facing the wrong way, with its engine running. The marshals waved the yellow flags. He drove back to the pits slowly with two flat spots on the front tyres, which made the whole car shake at any speed above sixty.

Henk talked to Sem. Sem talked to Henk. Noor filmed Daan getting out. Daan took off his helmet and shook his head and said nothing and went to sit in the transporter.

"We'll call it," Henk said to me. "I'm sorry. There's sand all through the second sector. It's no good for a comparison."

"I'd like one more run," I said.

"It's dangerous out there."

"Then I'll go slower where the sand is."

Henk looked at me for a moment. Then he looked at Sem, and Sem shrugged, and Henk said, "Five laps. Out-lap slow. Look at everything."

Sem changed the front tyres. Daan's used ones were leaning against the awning with the flat spots shining.

---

On the out-lap I looked at everything.

The wind was laying the sand in streaks across the circuit. Where the track ran with the wind the streaks were thin and lay on the racing line, and you could put a wheel on either side of them. Where it turned across the wind it was worse. At the top of the Hugenholtz the inside kerb was half covered, so you went in half a metre wide and gave up the kerb and lost nothing much. On the run down to Scheivlak the whole inside was pale, from the apex to the bottom of the dip, the colour of the beach. On the outside, a metre and a half from the white line, it was black. It was the black that mattered.

That is not the line. On the sim the line goes through the pale part. But the sim has no sand, and this afternoon the grip was a metre and a half out.

I took Scheivlak on the outside, on the black, with the car more upright than in the morning and the throttle a bit less than flat, and came out of it with the outside wheels a hand's width from the grass. Then on the next lap a little more throttle. Then a little more.

The banking at the end I did not lift. Daan was right. It stuck.

When I came in Sem was not saying anything. He turned the laptop round. My best of the five was point three off Daan's best from the morning, on a clean track. Through Scheivlak the red line lay almost on the blue. In the afternoon, in the sand, I had lost less than a tenth there to his morning lap without it, because I had been on the outside, where the corner is longer but opens earlier, and I was on the throttle sooner.

Daan had come out of the transporter. He looked at the screen, and then at me.

"Outside?" he said.

"There was grip there."

He nodded. He looked at the screen again for longer.

Noor had the camera very close to my face. "Wim. Scheivlak. After what happened to Daan. What were you thinking, going into that corner?"

"That there was sand," I said.

She waited for more. There was not any more, so she lowered the camera.

---

Henk walked me to the car park at six. The light was low and orange, and all along the fence there was sand in little drifts against the posts.

"There's a race at Assen at the end of October," he said. "Our second car. The man in it now pays to be in it, and his money has finished for this year. The wheel people would cover yours, if Noor gets her videos. You'd need a licence. There's a course. Two days."

"Which day is the race?"

"Sunday the twenty-fifth. Practice and qualifying on the Saturday."

"What time does it finish on the Sunday?"

He looked at me. "Two hours, start at one. Three o'clock, quarter past. Why?"

"I load at a quarter to four on Monday morning. Assen to Tegelen is two and a half hours if the A28 is clear."

"You'd be home by seven."

"Then yes," I said. "And I need a helmet that fits. This one is tight here." I showed him where.

Henk laughed. Then he stopped laughing and wrote it down, on the back of his hand, in biro: helm.

At home Lotte was waiting in the garage with the lights off and the screens on. She had my laps already. Sem had sent them to her. I did not know how she had got his address. She had both traces up, mine and Daan's, and she had zoomed in on the second sector.

"Outside," she said.

"There was sand on the inside."

"I know. I can see." She ran it again. She did not look round. "Dad, that's really good."

"It was a bit wide at the exit."

"It was really good," she said again, and then she wanted to know everything about the brake.

---

On Monday I loaded at Horst at a quarter to four. Twenty-six pallets, peppers, red, yellow and orange. Seven degrees on the dock. I checked it again on the A73 and it said seven.

At ten past five, at the lights in Venlo, my telephone lit up on the dashboard. Lotte. She should have been asleep. She had sent a link and three words: they used it.

I watched it at the next red light. It was forty seconds long. There was the paddock, and the sand going across it, and Daan's car facing the wrong way on the grass, and the red line and the blue line, and then my face very large inside the borrowed helmet. That there was sand, I said. Then the company's logo, and music.

The light changed. I put the telephone face down on the seat.

There is a roundabout at the end of the industrial estate, before the motorway, which I have taken twice a day for twenty-two years. In September there is dew on it at that hour, and the dew lies on the inside, where the drains are, because the road is cambered towards them. I took it on the outside, the way I always do, at twenty-eight, and the trailer followed me round, and the peppers stayed where they were.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā simulācrō Anti-Mythological Speed Simulacrum per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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Anti-Mythological Speed Simulacrum, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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