The GTS Chronicles - Getting Two/True Sportscars - Delivery Adventure - 2020-2023

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Saturday, August 5th, 2023 - Farewell to the Alps

The Malojapass, The Julierpass, then bye-bye to CH

We made it a point to awake nice and early on the morning of Saturday, August the 5th. Today was the day when we were going to visit one of our favorite roads in the Alps - the twists and turns of the Malojapass. We had discovered this road on the 2018 BMW M2 European Delivery trip, and we vowed to come back again someday. Hopefully on a day with less traffic and more chances to really experience the road's greatness.

Morning in Campodolcino

We had thought that being close by and getting up nice and early would mean that we would be able to beat the rush of mid-day August weekend tourist traffic. Hence the early get-up time. We chose to skip the hotel breakfast and packed up and headed out at around 7:30am. Compared to most other morning starts on the GTS Chronicles Euro Delivery adventure, this was pretty early.

After taking a few final photos of the beautiful scenery around our Ca' de Val B & B, and of the town of Campodolcino, we headed off, direction down-valley (south). I had Mr. Hatko drive my car along this stretch, wanting to give him a little feel for the Cayman's general disposition. He approached the driving fairly cautiously, and was quite tentative with the shifter and the brakes. He clearly had not developed his "car-legs" yet. There were a few good hairpins on the highway that led into the lower reaches of the Val di Spluga, and at each one I gently prodded Chris to push just a touch harder. The car wouldn't bite and he was nowhere near any sort of grip limit.

Church, S. Giovanni Battista

Chiesa d S. Giovanni Battista

We soon reached the lower end of the Val di Spluga, where it opened out into a much wider, flat bottomed valley - the Valchiavenna valley. Here was also home to the fairly sizeable city of Chiavenna. South of here, the wide, flat bottomed valley led all the way to the alpine lakes district of Italy, including the famous Lake Como. But we were not headed that way. We turned east and started up a different valley - the Bregaglia valley.

Gloomy Skies

Malojapass Open

Traffic not looking so good

Back in Campodolcino, the day had dawned dry, with banks of cloud and a few breaks of blue. Now, however, driving up the Bregaglia Valley towards the Malojapass, things had taken a distinct turn for the worse. We could see dark, billowing clouds start to crowd out the remaining bright spots. Then, a few drops of rain on the windshield. And it wasn't long before those few drops had turned into a solid, driving rain. Not great. Not great at all for twisty road driving.

Weather not looking so good

Compounding the rain was the traffic. I was pretty surprised to see so much of it, seeing as we it was only 8:30a.m. on a Saturday morning - and on top of that on a day with rather inclement weather. Where were all these people going? It would seem that my idea of getting up early to avoid the traffic had been for naught.

There wasn't much fun to be had with the long lines of cars and the driving rain. The pavement of the highway (which was excellent, by the way - smooth and wide and with nice bright lines) was now thoroughly soaked, meaning grip levels were low.

Approaching the good stuff

Soon we came to the start of "the really good stuff", which we could now see as an amazing set of tiered walls climbing up the steep terrain ahead of us, each one higher than the next. This was the side-on view of the first set of intense switchbacks leading up to the top of Malojapass.

Let me stop here for a quick moment and explain why Luke and I have such a thing for the Malojapass twisties. We find them good - extremely good - because they possess basically the perfect combination of attributes that allow a sportscar driver to not only experience tight turns; it allows such a driver to push harder in comfort and safety, for the road-bed of the Malojapass twisties are extremely well-paved, banked, and lined, *and* (and this is a big one), the curves are very spacious WHILE at the same time being really tight. This is one of those rare roads that is really twisty and also designed for long, bulky vehicles, and as a result, they had to engineer it to give enough space for those kinds of vehicles - hence the generous width at the curves and hairpins. What that also means is that for small, tidy sportscars, there's tons of space, tons of pavement to work with. If you understeer or oversteer a bit, you have metres and metres of pavement on either side of you.

And then to top it off, there's an aesthetic aspect to this road: the way the curves and straights and hairpins all kind of artfully blend into each other, well ... it's a sight to behold, both from the driver's seat and from the side of the road.

This is why we think the Malojapass is one of the best twisties - if not the best twisty - we've ever been on. Perhaps the only downside is that it is prone to being busy. Like it was today!

Disappointed top-out

Apart from getting in a few little low-speed slides out of the rear (I like driving with the PSM - the stability management - fully off) on some of the hairpins, there was not much in the way of fun on our way up to the Malojapass. It was slow, wet, crowded. We topped out at the pass and parked the cars at the overlook over the slope we had just come up, and commiserated about the traffic and the rain.

So, what to do? We put all this effort into getting here early and still we got stuck in traffic. And there was really no point in going back down into the twisties to film anything with all of this rain. So, move on, and chalk the Malojapass up as a "miss" for this trip, or something else?

Across the road from us, on the opposite side from the lookout, was an upscale-looking Hotel that also had a sign proclaiming 'restaurant'. Given the time of day, that probably meant they were serving breakfast. And ... we had skipped breakfast back in Campodolcino, so ... you know, we were a bit peckish. And maybe, if we were lucky, the rain would head off and the pavement might dry off if we gave it an hour or two. So, we went inside to have a leisurely breakfast. We'd give the Malojapass one more chance.

Rain Breakfast

We entered the hotel (the hotel Majola Klum), and took a turn down the hallway leading into the dining area. The Hotel was basically hosting its usual morning breakfast for the overnight guests, but we asked one of the servers and they said we could join in for a fee (twenty Swiss Francs or some such relatively expensive amount). That was fine, we were on important twisty road business. We found ourselves a little spot off in the corner away from the hotel guests, not wanting to be a disturbance to the larger crowd already there, and then I promptly made a big disturbance by toppling a bunch of jangly table lights over. Nice going, Andrew!

Maloja-Kulm Breakfast

The breakfast was of pretty decent quality, although ultimately it was a variant of a continental breakfast - and in the European style - so no bacon-and-eggs or anything like that. Luke and I got into a debate about "mileage" as I discussed possible routes for the remainder of our trip, which unfortunately reminded me of my disappointment with our Porsche dealership back in North America. You see, Germany has a rule about new cars that are destined for other countries but which are delivered in Germany - like our Canadian-spec 718s. The rule states that they most not remain in Germany longer than six months OR accumulate more than 6,000 kilometers before being shipped to their destination country. And our cars were now in the low 5000s of kilometres and so we were starting to approach that limit. And if one exceeded that limit, then the German government could require that the VAT (Value Added Tax) be paid on the cars, as if they had been purchased for the local German Market. Which would be 19% on top of the price of our already rather pricey cars. In other words, it would cost us a lot.

Now, my experience and understanding with this 6000-kilometre limit had been that it was there as a general guideline to discourage illegal flipping, where a foreigner buys a foreign-spec car for a good price and gets it delivered in Germany and then flips (sells it) to a local for a big profit. It did not seem to be focused on penalizing Euro Delivery buyers who stay a little longer or drive a little farther than the limits. In my experience in 2018 with my BMW M2 European Delivery, I put 7,500 kilometers on the car and no one batted an eye. Not the dealership, not the folks at BMW in Munich, not their Euro delivery specialist. I think the problem here was that our dealership back in Canada had communicated about these limits in a very ... let's call it a very "scary" way. Instead of adopting a "hey we got your back, everything'll be fine, just don't go too overboard" sort of vibe, they conveyed seriousness, wariness, and fear. It didn't help that our dealership forced us to pay them the 19% VAT as a refundable deposit to cover them in case we went AWOL or something, and which point that cost would fall back to the dealer.

Debating Mileage

Of course Luke took all of this to heart, and he was clearly worried there was a real - if admittedly low (my estimation .001%) - possibility we wouldn't get those deposits back if we exceeded the limit. I had even talked to Michael Maternicki at Porsche European Delivery and he had said that he knew of several ED customers who had gone over without incident. And in fact, he had *never* heard of any Euro Delivery customer getting forced to pay VAT because they exceeded the 6,000 kilometre limit.

Luke's Thoughts

[on the matter of 6,000 kilometres...]

While we eat (yet another) excellent breakfast, we have some 'total distance' discussions. I am pretty panicky at first as I think Andrew is indicating we would be travelling some huge increase in distance over the 6000 km limit we were told we had to stay under in order to avoid paying the European VAT (value added tax). I know Andrew considers it extremely low risk that we would have to pay that at all if we exceeded the limit, but since we are talking about $24,000 I am essentially NO risk. I do NOT want to go over and I press my point pretty firmly. I can tell Andrew is a bit frustrated by me and my desire to adhere to that. If it came to it, I would have to consider us separating and meeting up at the drop-off point, in order to keep my car under that limit. It wouldn't be the best for the GTS Chronicles but it is a risk I literally cannot afford to take. Andrew senses that and to his credit he is gracious about it and sets about calculating the distances we have left.

To be frank, I was a little peeved by the whole mileage limit thing, because some of my remaining route options would indeed have us going over 6,000 kilometres (part of this was a side-effect of the extra unexpected kilometres we incurred going back for the lost camera bag a few days' prior). But as the conversation drew on, it became apparent to me that pushing for a greater-than-6000km distance was going to cause a lot of tension - maybe even a rebellion - if I pushed it, so I relented. By my calculations, as long as we kept things fairly direct between the remaining planned event stops of our trip, we'd bring our total mileage in at under 6,000 kilometres.

Thanks a lot, Porsche Centre London! I know, I know, gotta cover your butts, right? ... everything comes before customer satisfaction, right?

Clearing up

Flag at Malojapass

By 10 a.m., we had finished our breakfast and headed back outside. And ... wouldn't you know it, the rain had indeed passed, and there was even some sun poking down through the clouds. The roads hadn't fully dried out, but this was promising. We were encouraged that we might get a dry-pavement crack at the Malojapass twisties yet!

In order to pass some time to let the pavement dry further, we decided to walk down to the upper part of the twisties to get a few static shots, and to give crewmember Hatko a little training session on what kinds of shots we were looking for. We were encouraged to see that the pavement was drying up nicely.

Then we decided to get the drone out to get some impressive aerial shots of the twisties (I had wanted to do that anyway, so it fit in well with having to have a delay). We went off into a small clearing a ways from the road and other people and we launched the GTS Chronicles Aerial Camera Platform into the air. The twisties certainly look impressive from the air!

The Malojapass Twisties

Getting aerial view

Aerial Platform Work

The Malojapass

By 11 a.m., the pavement had dried up enough to support some nice grippy cornering. We drove back down in convoy to a mid-point along the twisties and then let Chris Hatko out at a pullout. We equipped him with a radio so we could co-ordinate our runs and so I could relay any photography instructions. Luke and I then descended to the bottom of the tight twisties to get ready for a charging ascent.

It took a while before we headed off on our first run up. Why did it take a while, might you say? Well, have a look at the photo titled "Congestion", and you'll understand why. The road was crawling with cars and motorcycles (strangely, though, very few cyclists). It was a nearly non-ending stream, and it took a long time for a gap to appear.

Congestion is putting it mildly

Finally, a gap opened up. We radioed to Hatko, and he crackled back his readiness. Up Luke and I went, glad to finally be able to dip strongly into the throttles. Our GTSes easily handled the tight turns, and we powered out of them forcefully in first gear. We approached the hairpin where Hatko was waiting to film us, and then ... a flotilla of cars put-putted into view right at the hairpin, obscuring the view. cut, cut, CUT!

Luke's Thoughts

[on getting to run the Malojapass in the dry...]

The rain has eased off now and the sun is actually drying a part of the road, so a little bit of good luck on our side - I'll take it! Andrew gets some amazing drone footage and then we start some up and down runs to capture different angles and elements. Amazing stuff. The low-end pull of the 718 is very handy for hauling a— out of a tight hairpin, and the sound as the revs climb is glorious. Once again, behind the wheel of my impressive Teutonic piece of engineering, I'm in seventh heaven - automotive Nirvana!

Back down to the bottom again. Wait again for another gap. Signals on the radio. And then up once again. This time, we slowed before reaching the hairpin and radioed to Hatko for confirmation of a gap. And finally, we managed to just squeeze in a nice run around the turn before another pulse of traffic started to approach from above.

We repeated this setup in a few other prime locations along the twisties. Each time we had to do a few runs before we were able to get some clear shots, but eventually we managed to. And as a bonus, we did get to run a number of these excellent turns over and over, which was in itself kind of fun, as we were able to get into the groove on them. But oh, what this road would be like if we could have one clear run up and down! I'm sure that will come to me in my dreams. Long live the Malojapass!

Not ready yet

Fun on the Malojapass

Finally, the sublime

It was time to move on from the Malojapass. We had gotten most of the footage and shots I had envisioned, and we had enjoyed enough of the road (although in a very piecemeal manner) to be satisfied.

We drove back up to the top of the Malojapass again. This time, we did not turn around and come back down, but instead continued east. The Malojapass is a bit unusual in that there is no eastern "side", instead, it is pretty flat going eastward. Essentially the land to the east was a very long hanging valley - a valley that actually gradually continued to rise the further east you went. There are a number of scenic lakes in this elevated flat-bottomed valley, and a number of quaint little towns.

Swiss fillup

We headed up the wide, flat-bottomed valley for about ten or fifteen kilometres, to the town of Silvaplana. We stopped here for a gas fillup and to quickly discuss the next phase of our day.

As I have already mentioned, after our mileage discussion back at breakfast, we'd agreed that we were going to take the most distance-effective route north. In fact, our objective now was to head north out of the Alps entirely, for the next major destination of The GTS Chronicles Euro Delivery Adventure was going to be the spending of a few days at the hallowed Nurburgring / Nordschleife race circuit in Northwestern Germany. So, we had to start making progress northwards.

The shortest way north to Germany meant crossing a nearby high alpine pass - the Julierpass. Seeing as it would be the last time The GTS Chronicles would be in high alpine terrain, I advocated for a final session of mountain-car photography. I especially wanted to spend at least a bit of time capturing footage with an external mounting of my remotely-controlled camera gimbal. The time constraints of the trip had meant that I had not yet gotten the chance to use it, and I wanted to get a least something captured from that setup while in big-mountain scenery.

Valley of the Julierpass

The Julierpass is not one of the twistier passes of the Alps. In fact, the drive up from Silvaplana was actually rather tame, with only mild bends and lots of straight stretches. It was very scenic, however, and also - happily - did not seem to be totally crammed with traffic like the Malojapass had been. That augured well for our planned photo/video session.

We kept our eyes peeled for a suitable stretch of road. We didn't really want anything super twisty, as that would probably only complicate the operation of the gimbal. I did not have a ton of experience using it on the exterior of the car, and I wanted to keep things simple.

Just below the height of land of the pass, we came across a nice long straight and smooth stretch of highway with excellent sightlines both up and down-valley, and with a couple of good pullouts situated about a kilometre apart. This was perfect, since we could ping-pong back and forth between the two pullouts, and we had good long-distance visibility of any oncoming traffic. We pulled into one of the pullouts and got out our mounting gear.

Suitable stretch

Tracking setup

If you read the "pre-trip" part of this story, you'll know that we spent a fair bit of time learning how to craft a suitably solid and safe platform for an externally-mounted gimbal. Such a setup needs to have multiple redundancies and also provide enough rigidity to minimize excessive vibration. There are a lot of little parts that have to come together with care: suction cups, ball joints, cheese plates, articulation joints. And then there was the gimbal setup, which I practiced with quite a lot, but I still hadn't got to the point where I could set it up quickly without much thought. All that to say, it took us a lot of time on the side of the road to construct the gimbal platform, and then configure the gimbal itself.

We started off with a "high" (higher-er, anyway) position on the passenger side of the Cayman. Luke's Boxster would be the test subject.

Finally, we were able to start our runs. I sat in the passenger seat and Hatko drove my Cayman. It was a touch tricky, but eventually I was able to smoothly control the gimbal's view and was able to get some nice tracking shots of the Boxster. I didn't quite have the gimbal configured correctly, for in any kind of turning, the gimbal would try to maintain its original orientation - which was not at all what one would typically want in car mount scenarios. I neglected to put the gimbal into the right mode, where its pan direction is fixed and never varies (unless I command it electronically). I also noticed that there were some intermittent unwanted vibrations getting transmitted to the camera. Likely there is some damping I need to add to these mount setups.

Tracking setup

Gimbal Wireup

Ready for action

High Position Track shot

Then we then spent some time reconfiguring the mount into a "low position". This lower position yielded a lot of nice movie-like shots. There was definitely potential here for some amazing high-quality footage. We did a few runs with this in place and I think the shots we got of Luke's Boxster are pretty pro-looking!

Low-mount setup

Low position closeup

Low position closeup, rearward

Low Position Track shot

Luke and Boxster GTS at Julierpass

Luke's Thoughts

[on gimbal work at the Julierpass...]

my grin is wide as we set up the gimbal on the side of the Cayman for some car-to-car footage. This will look extremely 'pro'. This is where having our reference photos from our gear set up session with Steve back in Ottawa pays us dividends. Makes mounting cameras onto cars rock-solidly much easier than trying to figure it out in the moment.

In all, we spent a good two to three hours on this one little stretch of the Julierpass, configuring, testing, running, reconfiguring. And even then, we only got to try a limited number of the ideas I had in mind. Too bad we had left this sort of thing too late into the trip, and had devoted too little time to it. It highlights the fact that to do this kind of recording of a grand adventure such as ours, you really need either a competent, experienced team of A/V people (i.e. not us), or you need a lot of extra time.

In any case, it was time to wrap up our session at the Julierpass, and start heading north. I had managed to secure a nice little apartment suite for the night in a small Austrian town very close to the Swiss and German borders. It was situated right along our route back up into Germany.

The drive north out of the Alps was pleasant. The Swiss highways were excellent, although perhaps a bit busy. The scenery and the twistiness quotient both diminished as we progressed. Arriving back down in the mountain city of Chur, we hopped on to a divided expressway autobahn, which brought us all the way to the northern border of Switzerland. We exited the highway just south of Lake Constance and immediately crossed over the Rhine and into Austria. From there, it was only a few minutes into the sleepy little town of Dornbirn, situated on the flats of the Rhine below the forested hills of the Allgau Alps. We located our overnight accommodations in a quiet neighborhood.

Lai da Marmorera

Sublime Cruising

It was not entirely clear what the parking situation was. I had established through messaging (prior to our arrival) that there was one provided parking spot, but after some unclear messaging about the availability of a second parking place via a neighbour and maybe for a 10 euro fee, we decided that perhaps clarification from the proprietor was in order. He soon showed up at the apartment and turned out to be quite a quirky guy. He spoke in German with what seemed like a strong local accent. His english was minimal and our German was also pretty minimal (let alone the understanding of the dialect), so there were a lot of hand-signals and half-english/half-german words flying around. We did establish names (his was Robert), and eventually we resolved that it was possible for both the Cayman and the Boxster to be parked side-by-side in a good spot near the stairs to the apartment. I'm not sure what the "parking with the neighbours for 10 Euros" bit went, but this was better. The apartment itself was excellent - clean and spacious and with two separate bedrooms. More than sufficient for our needs.

Dimai House Dornbirn

By the time we got fully settled in, parking organized, house rules understood, it was well into evening, and dusk had set in over the town and nearby mountains. We were hungry, but we really didn't feel like having the scraps of our picnic snacks for dinner, so we set out (on foot) to find some hearty fare. Crew-chief Hatko located what he thought would be a place with good local character - a place called the Schnitzelbar. It was a sort of resto-bar type setup: large open high-ceiling'ed seating area, fast-foot style ordering counter, and food that came out on trays. But plentiful and hearty it was! I think Hatko was pleased with the place. It was the kind of homey bargain-basement authentic establishment that fits in with his preferred 'non-pretentious' food aesthetic.

Searching for Schnitzel

Dinner at Schnitzelbar

Excited about Salad

Bellies full and appetites satiated, we strolled back in the dark to our apartment. Tomorrow was Nurburgring day!

Luke's Thoughts

[on Austrian Salad...]

By early evening we make it to Dornbirn in Austria, so only about 500 kms to go tomorrow to Nurburg, woot woot! I chow down on a BIG SALAD for dinner and it feels great after snacking on bread and cheese during the day. I need the greens, yum!

(to read more of Luke's thoughts from this day, check out his blog post)

Interactive trackmap with photo points - August 05 - click map to view

Interactive trackmap with photo points - August 05 - click to view

August 5 - Drive Data

Start Time: 7:09a.m.

End Time: 11:54p.m.

Duration: 16h45m

Distance: 236.03 km (146.67 mi)

Average Speed: 14.1 km/hr (8.8 mph)

Start Elevation: 5947ft (1813m) *

Max Elevation: 7516ft (2291m) *

Min Elevation: 1336ft (407m) *

End Elevation: 1497ft (456m) *