My name's Michael Ferner, I'm 34 and have been a regular poster at The Nostalgia Forum before things went wrong there. I was born and still live in Bitburg, Germany, right in the middle between the Nürburgring and Spa-Francorchamps. Must've been fate...
Racing cars and motorcycles fascinate me as long as I can remember, although strangely I don't like driving or riding at all - I cover barely 1,000 miles a year on the roads! I tried racing karts and it was big fun, until I had to lift my aching body (all 6 ft 7 in of it) out of the kart. It's too expensive, too.
My interest in racing focuses on road-racing bikes and single-seater cars; touring cars and even sports cars look too ordinary for my taste! In fact, it's probably only time restraints that keep me restricted that way, because I'm interested in absolutely every detail of single-seater racing. My main project these days is completing my list of race results from Grand Prix/Formula 1, Formula Libre, AAA/USAC/CART/IRL, Voiturette/Formula 2, Formula Nippon, IndyLights, Formulae Junior/3, Atlantic/Pacific, Opel/Vauxhall, Renault, Nissan, Ford etc. etc. etc. as well as many obscure local Formulae like Easter, Mondial, 750 etc. etc. etc. from 1895 to date.
I'm also interested in individual chassis histories of F1, FLibre, F2 and Champ cars. Although I'm not too fond of championships (I think they destroy racing, see Barrichello/Schumacher at Austria this year etc.), as a spin-off I have compiled many championship tables which bit by bit appear on my website at
http://grand-prix-racing.freeyellow.com.
There you can find the humble beginnings of another big project of mine, which is called GPChart. It's a computer program I developed to monitor the progress of single-seater racing drivers by issuing a ranking week for week. It also provides food for thought about the best drivers of each period, because it tries to include race results of every major single-seater formula over the years, and not only F1. Sadly, it seems it will still take a few years to be completed - actually, it will probably never be complete since once I've got the post-war stuff sorted I'm going to get to grips with pre-WW2 racing.