But the rain restricted practice to just the F1 track and most were on rain tires. To get the blood pumping, I was first sent out in the GT-R for a fun rain drift. Bone stock and weighing in at nearly 4,000 pounds, you wouldn't expect the GT-R to be a great drift car, but in the wet with the rear-biased ATTESSA all-wheel-drive system throwing torque to every wheel, the GT-R managed to pull off slides at angles unrecoverable by any rear-wheel-drive drift car. [You can see the in-car video on www.sportcompactcarweb.com.]
When the standing water finally subsided, VLN practice opened up from the main F1 track to also include the Nordschleife and finally the ride that any gearhead dreams of. By German standards, this A3 was nothing special. Just a gutted and caged racer with Lexan windows, full fire suppression, race brakes, some mild engine and of course suspension upgrades. Against the sea of BMWs and monster Porsches, my ride should have been the snail on the track, but even in Germany, just like here, there are racers and gentlemen racers (aka rich people).
Jrgen Wohlfarth, my driver and the crazier brother of the KW founders, wasn't a gentleman racer and clearly didn't care for warm-up laps or slicks on wet pavement. Driving fast is clearly genetic. With nearly 50 cars on the first out lap, our little Audi that could was already tearing through the traffic before the tight left chicane that marked the transition onto the Nordschleife. The first thing to remember your first time out is to try not to memorize the turns or even predict where the turns are leading. No amount of Grand Turismo simulations are good enough for that, and even if you think you've memorized the turn in points down to the tree or on-track graffiti, you soon realize that all you see on the real track are trees and graffiti. The sheer elevation change, dynamic camber, and compressive suspension forces are also things the simulations can never recreate. Only the brave and insane memorize this track enough to manage passing through the blind corners. Wolhfarth had it memorized. Sharing this track with two other drivers for 24 hours on end can do that to a man. [Our one-lap wonder video is also posted online.]
Day Two:
It's race day and the track is cleared of poachers looking for a free ride. But even in Germany, there had to be some jackass who managed to dump fuel and coolant all over the track. Throw in a lot of rain and you have a combination that makes it impossible for even off-road safety vehicles to get enough traction to navigate the Nordschleife. The race was canceled and the day at the Nrburgring was cut short. Luckily, there was another track just an hour's drive away in the GT-R where Max Mosley and some of his rich cronies like to race on weekends, called Hockenheim. This weekend wasn't an F1 weekend though. It was just the opposite. Just as we pulled into the empty facility, the familiar screech of tires and engines bouncing off the rev limiters echoed off the K walls. The amateur drift monkeys, complete with flashing lights and wide-bodied aero gear, were out for some weekend practice. But you won't find Silvias or 350Zs here. The few cars that were out were all BMWs, which had a hard time drifting since they were engineered to do everything except maintain a drift angle. It wasn't much of a site, but still nice to see drifting alive in Europe and with a different flavor. Then, from around the corner, came the screech and smoke of monstrous brakes and alien clatter of a diesel engine jack braking. Sliding sideways with the momentum of an ocean liner came the only racing machine I never thought I'd see in real life, a European semi-tractor executing the same drifts as machines a third of its weight. On Hockenheim of all places!