DRIVING the NÜRBURGRING April 20-21, 2013
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DRIVING THE NÜRBURGRING April 20-21, 2013 ’ve been in Cologne, Germany, for a week now. The training course I’ve been teaching was scheduled in such a way that it left the weekend free. At lunch last Friday, my clients asked me what I had planned for the weekend. I said I really didn’t have anything at all planned. Then, as an afterthought I added, “But if it wasn’t I so far away, I’d rent a car and go drive on the Nürburgring.” (The Formula 1 track where the German Grand Prix is run every other year). One of my clients said, “It’s not far away at all. Maybe a 90 minute drive.” And at that instant, a new door opened! I had thought that the Nürburgring was down in the Black Forest somewhere. That would have been a 4-5 hour drive each way. But the town of Nürburg and “the ‘Ring,” as everyone calls it, were actually in the Eifel re- gion of Germany, an area of low hills and thick forests. This was close enough to be practical! Friday afternoon, while my clients were working on an intensive learning exercise I’d given them, I went to the Internet to find out how to do this. First I found a company, RSR Nürburg, that rented race cars to drive on the track and provided instruction. Their process and offerings were far more extensive than I’d thought they’d be, and they were very expensive. But they had one option that was realistic for me: their “One Lap Sensation.” It was one lap in a Renault Clio, gas and lap ticket included, and an instructor to sit in the seat beside me to guide me through the race course. It was going to be 125 Euros for all of that (about US$ 160). That sounded pretty good to me. So I found a hotel for Saturday night near the track and I scheduled a track time for 2:00pm on Sunday. I rented a car and drove down to Nürburg on Saturday afternoon. Nürburg is an otherwise sleepy little rural German town that came to represent a single industry: automobile racing. And though it still has a small-town flavor, the racing community, culture, and infrastructure dominates every aspect of life in Nürburg. BMW has a test facility there. All the component makers (shocks, tires, suspen- sions, etc.) do, too. After checking into my hotel, which was about 200 meters from the main grandstand, I set out to explore the town. First, I located the headquarters of RSR Nürburg, a small unassuming garage behind some old farmhouses and a bed-and-breakfast inn. Besides its sign, what distinguished RSR Nürburg was the huge collection of exotic cars parked in the fenced yard beside the garage: Mercedes, BMW M3s, Lotus Exige 240s, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and a Maserati, and a collection of Renaults, just to name a few. I then returned to my hotel and walked over to the main grandstand, an obviously new building about a quarter mile long and 250 feet high. This, I thought, would be the track that I’d be driving on The “new” 3.5 km Nürburgring Sunday. But there was a weekend-long race going on, so how were they going to get me in there? It was then that I discovered that I was not going to be driving on the current Grand Prix track, but on the “old” one. The original Nürburgring was a 24.5 kilometer road course that wound through the German countryside, through forests and villages, with a hundred turns of varying sharpness. The new race course is around 3.5 kilometers, and it stays fairly close to the new grandstand, even if not all of that track is visible. The history of why there is a “new” course and an “old” course is interesting. From the Nürburgring’s inception in 1927 and for 50 years thereafter, the only course was the old course—the 3.5 km of today plus the other 21 km. In 1984, The “old” 21 km Nordschleife the new course, which was the southwestern part of the old one was “snipped off” of the other 21 km through the Eifel forest. In 1960, the Scottish Formula 1 racer Jackie Stewart drove the Nür- burgring for the first time. When he finished, he pronounced it “a green hell.” In true marketing tradition (“If you can’t fix it, feature it.”), the race’s overseers translated it into German as grüne hölle, created a logo for it, and now you see it everywhere around Nürburg. In fact, the hotel where I stayed was the Hotel Lindner Grüne Hölle. In 1975, the then-Formula one champion, Niki Lauda of Austria, complained bitterly and publicly that the course was too dangerous for the F1 cars as they had evolved over the years. He was silently (and not so silently) supported by other drivers, but the commission in charge of the Nürburgring ignored Lauda’s complaints. A year later, on the Nür- burgring, Lauda, defending his world driving championship crashed and was severely burned in the accident. Complicating the inherent danger of the course was the fact that rescue vehi- cles could not get to the crash location quickly, as they can in a shorter closed course near grandstands and garages. Lauda would have died, except that two other drivers stopped, pulled off the track, and ran to extract him from the burning car. It was another 15 minutes before the crash wagon arrived. The following year, the Nürburgring commission grudgingly agreed that Lauda was right, that the old 1927 course was probably too dangerous. They resolved to cut off the southwestern-most 3.5 km segment, and limit the original course, now reduced to 21 km, to lesser races and public opportunities to drive on the famed Ring. So now there are two parts to the Nürburgring—the 3.5 km contemporary racing course, and the other 21 km, now desig- nated Nordschleife (German for northern loop). Picture in your mind a twisting go-kart track with mostly blind curves. Then scale it up so that it’s about three lanes wide and consumes square miles of countryside with its 21 kilometers of paved track. Then, instead of go-karts, put Ferraris, Lamborghinis, McLarens, BMWs and Lotuses on the track, each trying to outdo the other at speeds ranging from 40 miles per hour in the curves to over 100 miles per hour on the (infrequent) short straightaways. It is this northern loop around which a cottage industry grew up, charging amateurs for the opportunity to drive the famous Nürburgring. Now there are half a dozen such companies. The Nürburgring commission is still responsible for managing the Nordschleife course, they maintain it, provide marshals and other personnel to con- trol access, an make money from it. But it is very well and very tightly controlled. So, when you go to “drive the Ring,” as I did on Sunday, April 21, you’re driving the old grüne hölle course that the legends of F1, such as Stir- ling Moss, Juan Manuel Fangio, Jimmy Clark, Graham Hill, Phil Hill, Jackie Stewart, Lauda and Mario Andretti all drove. It’s a little humbling to think about that. This particular weekend there was a three-day series of races scheduled. Mostly amateurs or low-level profes- sionals competed in Gran Turismo (GT) cars on the new Ring. After returning to the hotel from RSR Nürburg, I walked over to the new grandstand and through a huge indoor arcade that had both vendor tables and more elabo- rate store fronts, as well as a VIP lounge. There was also a 20’ by 40’ flat screen television playing a loop of the same videos about current and future races, including a truck race (tractor-trailer type) on the new Ring. On Sunday morning, as I ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant, I saw a video looping on a big flat-screen TV on the wall. It was clip after clip of amateurs (people like me) coming around specific curves in the Nordschleife, losing control, and either running off the track into the bushes, hitting a barrier and trashing their car (and the barrier), and flipping the car over on the track, sometimes rolling more than once. The most significant thing about this video was that all of these cars were privately-owned vehicles. Yes, you can drive your privately owned vehicle on the Nürburgring, and many people do. But if your car isn’t race-modified (racing sus- pension, proper tires, racing transmission, etc.), you’re taking your life in your hands. It was a sobering video, considering I was about to try something similar. Fortunately, the car I would be driving was race-modified. RSR Nürburg I arrived at RSR Nürburg at around 12:30 pm for a 2:00pm entry onto the track. The guy in charge was a young man, late 20s or early 30s, named Jonathan Chan—from New Zealand. Spoke like a kiwi, didn’t look oriental, and was as friendly as you could ever want. He gave me a guided tour of the whole facility, including their outdoor parking lot and their indoor storage area (where they kept some of the priciest cars). He encouraged me to take pictures anywhere I wanted to, which I did. Then he showed me the car I would be driving that day: A front- wheel drive white Renault Clio, a small unassuming two-door coupe.