Nürburgring Nordschleife Fast Facts
• Built in the 1920s around the village and medieval
Part 5: Nürburgring Nordschleife
We had finally arrived. The Nürburgring! Giddy as a bunch of school girls at a Justin Timberlake concert, we parked in the main Nordschleife paddock and "pit lane" area where each tourist lap starts and finishes about halfway down the almost 4km main straight. Porsche GT3s were thicker than Honda Accords in a mall parking lot. BMW M3s of every vintage were just as plentiful. There was no shortage of European exotics, either, from Ferraris to Lamborghinis to a Porsche Carrera GT, plus a surprising number of Hondas, a few Nissan 350Zs, and even one or two EVOs and STIs. There were also some odd-ball machines in action, from a KTM X-bow to a Wiesmann GT MF5 to some seriously old vintage race cars from the UK. And although you can't take a standard rental car on the Ring, there were plenty of Ring-specific rentals in the paddock from companies like RSRNurburg.com and rent-racecar.de. In fact, "Lotus Dave" and the guys from RSRNurburg.com, who have an impressive collection of rental cars from FWD hot hatches like the Renault Clio Sport all the way up to RWD monsters like the Porsche GT3, let us store our gear at their shop in Nürburg and showed us the best spots for food and photography.
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One of the more scenic corners on the ring. That's right, you have to contend with motorcy
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Accidents occur every half hour at the ring. This guy's BMW wont be the only repair bill h
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Taking the famous banked concrete turns.
Although the Ring was supposed to be open for touristenfahrten, or "tourist lapping," from 5:30 to 7:30 pm the night we arrived, it was closed for an accident cleanup. This is an all-too-common event during tourist lapping at the Ring, where talent and road run out and overzealous drivers find themselves sitting in a bent car against the Armco barrier that lines the track. We were determined not to be one of those guys, particularly since we'd be driving Jon's modified STI and Mitsubishi's loaner EVO. Crashing either of these wasn't an option, so after a good night's sleep at a local B&B we headed back to the paddock for the 8 am opening so we could get some clean laps in before the tourists started bouncing off the Armco again.
Jon's done more than 100 laps of the Nordschleife in his STI, so he knows his way around pretty well. Following him in the EVO, it was impossible not to hoot and holler like a bunch of frat boys at a strip club as we dropped down into the famous banked concrete Caracciola-Karussell for the first time. Sure, we'd all blasted through this carousel while playing Forza2 plenty of times, but this was different. This was real, and the feeling was electric.
Without Jon leading the way in his angry-sounding STI, hissing and popping and shooting flames out its tailpipe, we would have been completely lost. With 33 left turns and 40 right turns over a 22.8km lap that rises and falls almost 1,000 feet, it's not a circuit you learn in a lap or two. The tighter and more technical parts of the track are easier to remember because each is quite distinctive, but the high-speed "straight" sections that include countless small bends and blind crests are very difficult to distinguish from one another and are therefore quite intimidating. It's really pretty easy to get lost out there, so rather than thinking about lap times or the racing line, the main objective during our first few laps of the Ring was to stay off the Armco and begin to get a feel for the place.
But with only a single day of lapping to work with and with each lap costing €19 (we bought several four-lap cards that cost €75 each), we had neither money nor time to spare. So rather than spending the whole day learning the track before taking Jon's STI for a few laps, we decided we'd better get our testing done before the expected track closures started.